How does situational complexity in The Warmth of Other Suns manifest both positively and negatively?

According to The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, the migration of African Americans from the South was both necessary and intimidating. This tension is the crux of the problem she documents, through the lives of three families, in this book. The "situational complexity" you ask about, at least in part, is the tension between their ambitions, hopes, and dreams and what soon became their reality.

From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this they were not unlike who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.

Six million African Americans worked their way from the South to the North. While they escaped one set of problems, they encountered many new ones.

The North was facing a labor shortage and African Americans from the South were a source of cheap labor. It seems like that would have been a perfect match; however, finding work was not easy and the jobs they found (baggage handler, nurse’s aide, factory worker) often relegated them to life in the ghetto.

They struggled with such mundane issues as not being able to understand the local dialect and such awful realities as drugs, teenage pregnancy, and the other dangers of living in poverty. Racism and prejudice, of course, were still prevalent in the North, and the hopes and dreams of these families (representative of all who migrated) were certainly not realized, at least not for generations.

One of the three families she writes about, Robert Foster, was able to achieve success relatively quickly, but it was exceptionally hard for him and he was continually haunted by the need to prove himself and justify his success to others. Sp, even when one of the three families in this story achieved his dream,  he was unable to escape his sense of inferiority which he learned and lived in the South.

Not everything about their migration was terrible, however, and those who chose to move set a new path and direction for the generations that followed. Some of the first to come were even able, eventually, to go back; this freedom to live wherever and be whatever they wanted was a crowning achievement for those who were once living without any hope of real freedom.

The most important aspect of this story is the courage it took them to leave.

Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. 

Like everyone who longs for freedom but does not have it, they had to take action. The phenomenon known as the Great Migration was not a planned and organized event. It was simply people who wanted more, deciding to seek out opportunities to get it.

They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.

What is the situational complexity in Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns?

The situational complexity in Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Northern Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, lies in its parallel histories of three particular African-American individuals who made the life-changing decision to leave the racist American South for greener pastures in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and the West Coast.  Wilkerson’s decision to focus on three individuals, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, as representative of the intellectual, economic and cultural diversity inherent in a migration that is usually defined as having occurred between 1910 and 1930, but which Wilkerson views as having extended through the 1960s, and which involved around six million people, provides a sense of the enormous scale and complexity of arguably the most dramatic demographic shift in the country’s history (post-17th Century). 

The end of the Civil War and the process of reconstruction did not eliminate the hatred and virulent racism endemic to the American South.  At best, in many instances, it simply buried it under a thin veneer of respectability.  For decades following the end of the Civil War, blacks continued to be treated essentially as slaves.  Although the legal conditions had changed, the culture had not, and over time more and more blacks sought refuge and the chances for a better life in different regions of the United States.  As Wilkerson states in her history, “They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”   The migration, however, was structured differently than many assumed.  Rather than any sense of randomness or specific destination, the migration flows were more a product of the railways available to blacks from different regions, for example, those leaving Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi had as their option the train to the Midwest, while those in Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia lived on the route to the Northeast and Washington, D.C.  The availability of railroads, therefore, was the most important determinant of where migrants ended up.

Another element of Wilkerson’s history that could be considered to represent “situational complexity”  could involve the fundamental reality of life in the regions to which blacks migrated.  While the racism endemic in the Northeast and in other regions was not as violent and virulent as that in the South, it existed all the same.  That is why her observation -- “It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me” – strikes so deep.  The Great Northern Migration fundamentally changed the demographics of the United States, but the concentration of those blacks in urban ghettos served as a stark reminder of the distance African-Americans still had to travel – metaphorically if not literally – to experience the American dream in the same manner as the Europeans who arrived ahead of them.

How is the situational complexity in The Warmth of Other Suns both positive and negative?

The complexity in Wilkerson's text can be described as both positive and negative.  Wilkerson is keen enough to construct an aura of complexity around The Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns.  Part of this situational complexity exists in depicting the challenges that the Great Migration presented to Southern Blacks who went up North.  In its broadest sense, the Great Migration involved people moving from one American region to another.  Many undertake this type of movement every day.  Yet, the challenges that many African- Americans confronted in making such a move almost made it as if it were migrating to another nation entirely.  This is part of the complexity that African- Americans from the South faced.  Small and large issues confronted them, making their narrative a complex one.  From not being able to understand the dialect difference between "Penn Station, Newark" and its New York counterpart to the reality of life in the North, one where "the specter of racial caste was omnipresent," Wilkerson depicts a complex narrative where much in way of sadness and pain exists.  The move to the North was not the traditional movement to "the land of milk and honey."  Rather, Wilkerson's work shows how complex the issues of race, class, and gender were for African- Americans throughout the Great Migration.

Yet, this complexity extends to how there are redemptive and positive elements within Wilkerson's work.  Part of this resides in the personal narratives the she depicts.  Wilkerson makes the argument that while there were challenges within the Great Migration, there was a fundamentally redemptive element within it.  Many children were able “to grow up free of Jim Crow and to be their fuller selves” because of the Great Migration.  Within the pain and suffering of the migration existed this fundamentally redemptive premise.  At the same time, Wilkerson makes clear that African- Americans who made the move embraced an aspect of what it means to be American by embarking on a "hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”  This is a fundamentally positive aspect within the complexity of the Great Migration.  Wilkerson depicts the narratives of people such as Ida Mae Gladney, who migrated to Chicago and whom Wilkerson accompanies back to Mississippi.  When they come across a cotton field, Gladney suggests to Wilkerson  that both women pick cotton.  Wilkerson notes that, “It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to... It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.”  It is this level of choice and autonomy that was a positive part of the complex legacy in the Great Migration.  Gladney and many others demonstrate that they can live in both realms, seeking to find "the warmth of other suns" and "perhaps, to bloom."

What is the situational complexity in "The Warmth of Other Suns"?

Wilkerson's account is rife with complexity.  Little in it is not complex.  On one hand, the entire condition of the Great Migration is complex.  Consider the poem from Richard Wright that serves as inspiration for the title of Wilkerson's work:  

 . .I was taking a part of the South

To transplant in alien soil...

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom.

Within these lines are a complex condition of being.  African- Americans left the South, the only terrain many of them knew since they and/ or their ancestors were brought to America.  The migration to the North was one in which the South had imprinted itself on them only to find that the North was fundamentally different.  The idea of Southern Blacks moving to the North was also complex given the discrimination they faced in the North as different than what was seen in the South.  The idea of an "alien soil" only enhances complexity because for people of color who found their background intertwined with slavey, "alien soil" is met with more "alien soul." Complexity is thus found in the mere title of the work.

Certainly, the parallel between the Great Migration and American immigration is another layer of complexity within the text.  Traditional immigration to America and the harrowing conditions in which people from other nations migrated to America was a depiction in which the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the dreams of "streets paved with gold" dotted the landscape.  For so long, this was seen as intrinsic to the identity of America. However, while the Great Migration sought to essentially do the same thing, the reality is that it never quite seemed to be viewed in the same light. African- Americans who migrated from the South were viewed with a sense of mistrust and apprehension:  "The migrants were cast as poor illiterates...who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.”  It was as if Nativists were lining up against Southern African- Americans who made the trek up North.  However, the complexity here is that these were Americans moving to another part of America, as opposed to foreigners coming into America. They were American citizens, with guaranteed rights as much as anyone in the North.  Yet, they were perceived as outsiders in some of the harshest light.  It is here in which Wilkerson is able to illuminate another element of complexity.  When Wright suggests that the move was in the hopes to "bloom," it underscores the complexity of the Great Migration, a point in American History and African- American identity where the full promises and possibilities of what it means to be an American were both present and absent in a complex simultaneity.