"The night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before—not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time you sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter."
Read an excerpt from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. See her live at the Writers Institute, Tuesday, November 15.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937
The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson Tuesday
Isabel Wilkerson will talk about her work on November 15 (Tuesday)
NOTE: Due to a scheduling conflict, Isabel Wilkerson’s afternoon seminar has been cancelled. She will be appearing at 8 p.m. in Page Hall, only.]
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), a sweeping history of the movement of Blacks from the former slave states to the cities of the industrial North during the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore called it, “[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book.” It received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In 1994, Wilkerson became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for her 1993 coverage of floods in the Midwest. More.