"The Warmth of Other Suns"

[fiefoe]

I hadn't expected Isabel Wilkerson's accounting of "the epic story of America's Great Migration" to be so very intimate and personal, which makes the characters in "The White Tiger" feel like the abstractions that they are.

• He walked into the schoolroom, hobbling on crutches, in a suit and with a stern face. He rotated the grades as if the room were a railroad switch yard, calling the second- and third-graders to the front when it was their turn.
• She saw the change in him, how he was wearing grown folks' clothes, walking taller, straighter, suddenly aware of how he looked in the mirror. It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth... "You must be smelling yourself."
• In the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest run - people with house notes versus people who paid rent... Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.
• "It was my personal pride to wait till a rainy day and polish my black-and white shoes," he said, "and wear them when the rain had stopped and jump over puddles and not get a spot of anything on them." <> Those dirt roads were the reason he never learned to skate, and he could never forget that.. "We couldn't buy sidewalks."
• Pershing was 13. He would now end up seeing the world as a beleaguered and under-appreciated Foster, a member of a resented clan in a small, clannish subculture inside a segregated pressure cooker of a life.
• She wouldn't have to pick cotton anymore or feel the spike of frost on the wet grass going barefoot to the outhouse in the morning.
• The land was in a state of being cotton or becoming cotton, brown and rutted for planting, green shoots willed into rows of coddled bushes until the land was white out to the tree line.
• 100 was the magic number. It was the benchmark for payment when day pickers took to the field, fifty cents for a pound of cotton in the 1920s.. It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust... It took some 70 bolls to make a single pound of cotton.
• In one North Carolina courthouse, there was a white Bible and a black Bible to swear to tell the truth on.
• The arbitrary nature of grown people's wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system.
• "that slavery .. is his natural and normal condition." This new governement, Alexander Hamilton Stephens decclared, "is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
• Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.