"The Warmth of Other Suns" [.]

[fiefoe]

'All told, perhaps the most singificant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself.. the Migration, in some ways, was its own point.' Because of that, the last 1/3 of the book slackens a bit.

• The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants.
• (Jesse Owens) was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.
• They began throwing end-of-the-month parties, 'where they drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced wit the lights off."
• The Migration made giddy landlords of some of the old-timers.. it became a status symbol to have the wherewithal to take in roomers.
• Now, despite his hard work, (Harry T.) Moore was no longer the head of the Florida NAACP.
• Both (Robert Pershing and Ray Charles) were more ambitious, controlling, and meticulous than the gaudy, juke-joint side of them might suggest.. neither could truly put behind them the hurts each had endured in the South or overcome the excesses of those fixations.
• ... raised in the South, with the pride and insecurities that came with it
• Round the corner and down the stairs, he could hear.. a party being born. He reminded himself why had had spent the better part of a year and really all of his life planning for this moment.
• Hampton Hawes is playing piano with his head reared back. Everybody has a glass of something in one hand and a cigarette in the other like jewelry.
• Some of the guests he never saw again. Some died. Some lost touch. It was a wrap, and everyone was marvelous. .. He took comfort in any sign of the night's immortality.

__ It seemed far way at first, and then it drew closer, mad fists beating the bare face of the cabin.
__ It was a brick building that stood with the color and trim efficiency of a manila folder.
__ Once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold, a curious plant called the night-blooming cereus would decide to undrape its petals.. It was said, among the colored people in the small-town South who followed such things and made a ritual of its arrival, that if you looked hard enough, you could see the face of the baby Jesus in the folds of the bloom.
__ Harlem by the 1940s.. was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be.

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