I know many of you are familiar with the prolific author, Isabel Wilkerson, who, ten or eleven years ago, had a book published called The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I’m so excited about that on many levels because the Great Migration, you recall, is a time in American history between 1915 or so, until approximately 1970 or so when Black Americans left their birthplaces in America’s South to move to cities–larger cities in the west, the Midwest, and the Northeast, especially for the sake of jobs they desperately needed.
And jobs were more available there, so many of them moved from their homes to these other cities. And in the research for her book, Isabelle Wilkerson follows the stories of three individuals. And in the telling of her story, we see the unfolding of what was actually happening beneath it all–i.e., real life. (Beautiful concept for a book!)
It is a wondrously-written book. It is an excellent account of actual, real history that happened to actual real people. And, what excites me beyond the unfolding of her story, which, by now, you know is extremely important to me, is that we get to hear what it was that gave them angst. We get to know that we’re not alone. When we fear what’s ahead, what’s around the next bend in the road, or what may never come, and the age-old question: Was this a good idea?
We’re not alone in that, and so we learn so much from the unfolding of others’ stories. But what also really appeals to me about her book is the very title, The Warmth of Other Suns, because she borrowed that title from an author whose name was Richard Wright, and a poem that he wrote. It appears in his book called Black Boy, that was published back in 1945, so it’s a very, very old book. But I would love to read for you the excerpt of the poem that includes the title that Isabel Wilkerson eventually chose for her book.
“I was leaving the South, [he says] to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains. If it could bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and perhaps, bloom.
That’s beautiful, isn’t it?
I want you to know that Richard Wright himself was a person who was a big part of the Great Migration, having been born and raised in the Southern United States, moved to Chicago in the 1920s. So he’s writing from his own angst, from his own experience, from his own wonder, from his own fear, perhaps, so that we can get a feel for what was going on in his mind at the time.
That he wrote this in the process of the Great Migration, what I wanted to bring to your attention here–and this is so personal for me because this book was on the bookshelf you’ve heard me talk about before–the bookshelf that was in the dining room of the house I grew up in, and it was, therefore, part 0f my childhood narrative to understand the feeling. of people who had lives exactly like my grandparents.
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I remember that in second grade, my grandparents lived in Brooklyn as we did, but in fourth grade, they lived in Bamburg, South Carolina. And then in sixth grade, they were back in Brooklyn. There was a lot of this back and forth moving for them, and I remember hearing it was because they were from the South, despite the difficulty they had there, they had a certain kind of love for the South that was hard to move away from, and to experience life on different soil, and, if you will, respond to the warmth of other suns.
But I’m here to tell you today, not only am I connected for the masterful way that Richard Wright and Isabel Wilkerson wrote her materials, but because it is such a very important reminder to me personally, of how God encourages that same thing for us. He will sometimes send us away from what is familiar, for whatever reason–maybe for a job, for ministry, for family, or something else–to a place that is very unfamiliar–to a place where the people and the way of life seem unrecognizable to us.
Maybe he’s going to send you to the mission field in a foreign country. Who knows? Maybe it’s just to another neighborhood that you’ve never lived in before, causing you to have to learn a few things. One way or the other, you and we will have to learn to get used to the warmth of other suns.
There is but one capital S-O-N Son. But there are many S-U-N suns that we will have as part of our lives, and wherever we are, under whichever sun we may find ourselves, we will follow the Lord.
