Part 5, Chapter 26–Epilogue Summary and Analysis
Chapter 26: In the Places They Left
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, 1970
After the civil rights movement, segregation was still the norm in certain Southern schools. No matter that school segregation had been prohibited by law in 1954, many whites and even some Blacks continued to resist integration until 1970.
Eustis, Florida, 1970
In the newly integrated high school of Eustis, Black parents protested the administration’s allegedly discriminatory attitude towards resolving fights between white and Black boys. Emboldened by the gains of the civil rights movement, the Blacks who had stayed in the South were now speaking out against discrimination.
Monroe, 1970
By 1970, Robert Foster had called his sister, Gold, to California, his brother Leland was in the Midwest, and his nephew Madison was enrolled in the University of Michigan. Robert felt Monroe had not given his parents, Black pioneers in their own way, their due, so going home was a melancholy experience for him.
Chapter 27: Losses
Los Angeles, December 1974
Four years after Robert’s grand party, Alice died of cancer. Robert felt crushing failure again: he had been unable to save Alice, like he had been unable to save his mother and his brother, Madison.
Chicago, February 1975
Ida Mae was away in Milwaukee, helping her beloved sister Irene after an eye surgery, when George died from a heart attack, his third.
New York, 1978
Heartbroken at Gerard’s worsening drug addiction, Inez had been suffering for a long while. In 1978, she died of breast cancer.
Los Angeles, 1978
At sixty, Robert, whose social life seemed diminished after Alice’s loss, turned his attention to gambling. He was not chasing money in the casinos of Las Vegas but rather “triumph and self-esteem.”
Chapter 28: More North and West Than South
Chicago, 1978
Sweet Ida Mae was a fixture in her Chicago neighborhood, radiating warmth. She and her extended family lived a quiet, inward-facing life in their compound. In 1977, her family was chosen to represent the best of South Side Thanksgiving by the department store Jewel. The family was photographed and featured in full-page ads for Jewel, with Ida Mae at the center of it all.
New York, 1978
The rift between George and his children grew. Gerard travelled south to live in Miami, taking the opposite path to his father. Sonya went even further south—to Eustis, of all places—which she found more friendly than the urban landscape of Harlem.
Los Angeles, 1978
Robert Foster had retired from private practice and joined a government hospital serving veterans. Robert’s experience at the VA hospital was to be bitter. He was accused of inappropriate conduct by a white woman patient, a fate he had avoided in Louisiana and Kentucky. Though his reputation never really suffered, Robert retired from the VA hospital.
Chapter 29: Redemption
Chicago, 1996
At eighty-three, Ida Mae is a churchgoing pensioner who loves doing crossword puzzles. She is saddened by the growing crime among the “lost grandchildren of the Great Migration” in her neighborhood. She learns to thrive in the neighborhood, despite all the changes.
New York, 1996
George’s daughter, Sonya, died in a car accident in Eustis. Though George is a grandfather and a great-grandfather, he feels a sense of loneliness. He is a deacon in the local church, and the pastor drops by often for a chat.
Los Angeles, 1996
The biggest testaments to Robert’s Californian success are not his mansion and his material possessions, but the love of all the Black patients he has treated all over southern California.
Eustis, 1996
George comes down to Eustis every couple of years for the biennial reunion of...
(This entire section contains 1389 words.)
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the Curtwright Colored High School. On these visits, he catches up with old friends like Curtis, one of the men who resisted the white planters alongside George all those years ago.
Los Angeles, 1996
Robert Foster has secured an invitation for Wilkerson at the bimonthly meeting of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles. Wilkerson asks the guests questions about the Great Migration, but they do not see it as a historical event, despite having been in the thick of it.
Chapter 30: And, Perhaps, to Bloom
Chicago, 1997
Ida Mae is the last of her brothers and sisters alive.
New York, 1997
Now that George is frail and old, he sometimes thinks of going back south, like some of his friends. However, he remains in New York, because the South would be a stranger to him.
Los Angeles, 1996
Robert can now admit Los Angeles is not the oasis he had made it out to be, but he has gotten over even that disappointment. He says that he could not have had a better life in the South.
Chapter 31: The Winter of Their Lives
New York, 1997
George Starling is exhausted by Harlem. He also loves it in equal measure. He has become a fixture in his neighborhood, with the young people around watching out for “Mr. G.” Like Ida Mae, he watches the young people in his neighborhood fall into drug abuse and crime, but he does not judge them.
Los Angeles, 1997
Robert dies of cancer on August 6, 1997. His funeral is attended by hundreds of his friends, family, and former patients.
Chicago, 1997
In 1997, Ida Mae attends a Town Hall meeting, which is led by a lecture from a thirty-six-year-old state legislator named Barack Obama. At that time, she would not believe the young man would go on to become the first Black President of the United States.
New York, Spring 1998
George suffers a bad fall and has to be admitted into rehab, where he slips in and out of a coma. Thankfully, he is not conscious enough to be told that his son, Gerard, has died from a seizure on his way back from Florida after visiting George at rehab. George passes away on September 3, 1998.
Chapter 32: The Emancipation of Ida Mae
In 2002, Ida Mae is nearing ninety. She has outlived her husband, her two older daughters, and her sisters. She treats every day as a blessing, eager to see what the new millennium brings.
Epilogue
Although the Great Migration separated many families, it also changed American democracy for the better, making American culture richer and more diverse. The Great Migration helped other people of color from different countries assimilate in America as well.
The traditional view of historians has been to view the Great Migration as the phenomenon that worsened conditions in American cities, but statistics tell a different story. Southern Black migrants were driven, ambitious people who bolstered the local economy wherever they went. It was the socioeconomic bias of the cities which brought some of them down, rather than the other way round.
The Great Migration forced the South to change as well. In its wake, lynchings in the South fell steadily from 1929 onwards. Southern whites began to value the contribution of Blacks to their economy. Most importantly, the Great Migration helped the children of Southern Blacks achieve destinies that would have been impossible in the South.
Analysis
One of the most striking aspects of this section is that it evaluates the relative success of each of the three protagonists. Ida Mae, the poorest and least educated, seems to have tuned out the happiest. Robert Pershing Foster had the most material success. George Starling, on the other hand, seems to have had the least success of the three, satisfied neither in his professional nor his personal life. However, Wilkerson makes the important point that, at one level, George was successful simply by not getting lynched. His very survival—due to his flight from Florida—is a testament to his success. George’s success can also be measured by his capacity for self-realization, his repudiation of self-defeating “spite,” and his refusal in his later years to “pre-judge” anyone. Similarly, Robert makes peace with his own restless nature and his penchant for disappointment. He wisely accepts the fact that California is not the oasis of his dreams—and that all such oases are illusory.
Thus, Wilkerson makes a larger point about the Great Migration. Its success cannot be weighed in the context of simple pros and cons or through a convoluted analysis of the success of leaving versus the possible success of staying. The Great Migration was a success simply because it marked the break from an abusive, violent past. It was a success because it was “an affirmation of the power of the individual decision.” It was a success because it gave agency to the powerless.
