In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. “Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.” Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Others simply had no desire to relive what they had already left. Some lived in tight-lipped and cheerful denial. Some spoke of specific and certain evils. “Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.

From the warmth of other suns