Isabel Wilkerson           (photo: Joe Henson)

As black Americans, we think we know the stories — aunts, uncles and grandparents who fled the Deep South generations ago in search of something better. Going “up the road,” they called it.

Well, not so fast, says best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson, whose inaugural book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” offers a fresh and personal look at what she called the Great Migration. The real stories of African American migrants — the racist systems they fled, the rigged economies that robbed them of fair wages and the promise of a better, more just existence in some distant city — those stories, she says, are far more compelling than most people, even African Americans, realize.

Wilkerson, who studied journalism at Howard University and won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while working as Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times, is coming to Charlotte Thursday to discuss her award-winning book, which recently came out in paperback.

Qcitymetro caught up with Wilkerson this week for a Q&A. Her answers below were edited for brevity and clarity.

1. As African Americans, it’s easy to assume that we know this story. Will anything in your book surprise us?

I think that has been one of the most surprising aspects of working on the book. I, like other African Americans, had the same assumptions. I thought there would be an interesting story to tell, but I had no idea of the depth of experiences…what people endured. We have a cursory, distant exposure of something we take for granted, but the people generally did not talk about it. So if they did not talk about it, how could we possibly know what they went though? People did not talk about the depth and heartache that they experienced growing up in that system. One of the things I hear when I go out and talk to people about the book…people who have read the book from all backgrounds…all come up to me and say “I had no idea.” That’s the common response. Many white readers will say, “What are African Americans saying?” And many African Americans will say, “What are white readers saying?” They are all saying the same thing — “I had no idea.”

2. Did writing the book change you in any way?

It changed me in the way it might change anyone else who reads it… Plumbing the depths of what happened in this country…and then translating that for a wider audience forced me to in some ways live through what they experienced. It forced me to absorb all the emotions they had to have felt... Clearly that has changed me. I actually find it inspiring. Some people will read it and they will see that there are some difficult passages, because there are some difficult things that people experienced. It’s all a part of American history. But I find it very inspiring. I feel it gives you strength. That should be inspiring to any American, to know that American citizens bore up under a relentless caste system that assaulted them at every turn...and yet they survived and managed to make it out on the other side… I was not shedding tears while working on it. I was very motivated and determined to find out what happened through every resource I could find… It became a quest for understanding.

3. Today we see a much smaller migration — African Americans moving to suburbs. Even in your hometown of Washington, D.C. — aka "Chocolate City" — African Americans may soon lose their majority status as more move to surrounding counties. Do you see a correlation between that and what happened with our ancestors?

I think it’s a continuum…The Great Migration was the first time in American history that large numbers of African Americans — people who had been held down in this caste system and before that slavery from the moment they arrived on these shores — it was the first time they showed that they had options and were willing to take them. It was the first time in American history that the lowest-caste people in large numbers had opportunities to be able to live out what might be perceived to be their version of the American Dream…being able to send their children to school for 12 years, nine months of the year, to be able to be paid wages for their hard work. The current trends in migration are a continuum of that search for a place in the American Dream. In other words, people are seeking whatever is the best way that they can see for their families to have the American Dream that their parents or grandparents always sought all along…. Now we have freedoms we couldn’t have imagined a century ago. A result of that is people are free to live wherever they choose to live. If they want to live in a city in the South, they can do that. If they want to live in a suburb in the North, they can do that. I believe it’s one of the great legacies of the Great Migration. Many of those people didn’t live to see it, but their children and grandchildren are living it.

4. You are recognized as a truly great writer and storyteller. Where does your writing come from?

I think it comes from hearing the language of my mother — and my parents overall — but my mother in particular. She was from the South. She was from Georgia, and she has a way of speaking. She has a way of putting together the world that she sees in a way that’s kind of imaginative and fanciful and Southern at the same time. I think I get a lot of that from her. I absorbed a lot of her ways of looking at the world. My father, on the other hand, was an engineer, a civil engineer, and he believed in structure and order and form. So I think that having this fanciful mother and a very orderly father created the combination of me and what you see on the page.

5. What’s next for you?

The book just came out in paperback, so what I’m doing right now is promoting this book. It still has a lot of life in it. Literally, what’s next for me is coming to Charlotte, which is a continuum of what I’m working on. I have some ideas of what I might want to do next when it comes to writing, but right now I’m focused on making sure this book reaches as many people as it can. I spent 15 years on this book. I wrote it to be read. This is not a check-off on my list of things I wanted to get done. This is something that has great meaning to me, and I want as many people to read it as are willing to do so.

IF YOU WANT TO GO
Date: Thursday, Dec. 1.
Time: 7 p.m.
Place: McGlohon Theater, Spirit Square (345 North College St.)
Cost: $12
More info/Tickets: http://www.carolinatix.org/default.asp?tix=59&objId=2902

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