The Warmth of Other Suns

It's not unusual for me to remember a vacation or a place I've visited by the book I was reading at the time. Like when we took our kids to some heinous all inclusive resort in Turks and Caicos where Mo ravaged the minibar EVERY DAY we were there and the rest of us starved to death at the all you can eat buffet. The only thing that got me through that vacation was reading Katherine Graham'a magisterial memoir. I distinctly remember sitting in a cabana on the beach in Naples, Florida one weekend by myself reading a biography of Lord Byron, juicier than any romance novel. Or years ago during a solo trip to Miami plopped down on the beach surrounded by topless young women and preening gay couples while I worked my way again through Moby Dick, the great American novel. And how many fat Victorian novels, preferably by Dickens, have kept me company on long plane rides to Asia.

Well this is the book that I will always associate with my current excursion to Florida: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. For two days in Miami by the pool by day and in bed at night I have not been able to put it down. It's the story of the great migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow south to the cities of the north during the last century. It's told largely through the first person accounts of three people but is interlaced with lots of often appalling historical information and many more stories that make the historical record all the more real and compelling. I have just a chapter left to read and I can't wait to come home from dinner to finish it. I love the main characters as if they were protagonists in some epic novel. I know I will always remember them.