The Penn Stater Magazine

An Attention to Detail Almost Beyond Belief

October 12, 2011 at 12:12 pm Lori Shontz 1 comment

For the past several weeks, I’ve been reading Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s book on the Great Migration, about how and why millions of African-Americans left the South (and Jim Crow) to move north. It’s a beautiful, engrossing book, with the kind of detail that leaves me—as both a writer and a reader—breathless.

I figured that Wilkerson spent a ton of time with her subjects. I knew she did a nearly unbelievable amount of background research: She interviewed 1,200 people to find the three protagonists for the book, which she worked on for 15 years.

But until I heard Wilkerson speak Tuesday night at the Foster-Foreman Conference of Distinguished Writers, I didn’t fully appreciate the level to which she goes to report. Here’s the story that’s going to stick with me:

One of the book’s protagonists, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor, fulfilled his dream of moving to California from a tiny town in Louisiana, where as a black doctor, he wasn’t allowed to see patients in the town’s (white) hospital. That forced him to keep the basics for a portable operating room in his car to use in his patients’ houses; he set up in rooms that were little more than shacks. He, like the other 6 million African-Americans who made a similar journey, wanted something better. So he left.

Foster made the drive in a Buick Roadmaster. “He said it rode like a dream,” Wilkerson said. “So I rented a Buick.”

She didn’t just rent a Buick to see what it looked like. (Although she did visit every locale her protagonists mentioned, taking photographs of everything so she could describe the places accurately.) She packed her luggage and her parents (who were also part of the Great Migration) into the car and drove to California to recreate Foster’s trip as best she could decades later. That’s 2,000 miles. Part of it across a desert.

At one point, she was falling asleep at the wheel. Her parents didn’t appreciate this, and they begged her to stop and stay at a hotel. But Foster hadn’t stopped—he couldn’t have stopped, because there were so few hotels that were open to blacks—so Wilkerson didn’t stop.

Finally, her parents put their collective foot down. “If you won’t stop,” they told her, “then you can let us out.”

I’m almost to that section of the book, and I’m sure that when I’m reading it, I will feel like I’m in the car with Foster. Which is exactly what Wilkerson intended, and exactly how I felt earlier in the book, when she described how another protagonist, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, picked cotton, and how the third protagonist, George Swanson Starling, attempted to empower scared citrus pickers in Florida to ask for more money for their labor.

As she told the Buick story last night, I actually started to wonder how she’d managed to finish the book in only 15 years, given her extreme attention to detail. “A single sentence,” Wilkerson said, “can take a week.”

Lori Shontz, senior editor

Entry filed under: Campus events, College of Communications. Tags: detail, Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, Great Migration, interview, Isabel Wilkerson, reporting, Warmth of Other Suns.