Isabel Wilkerson 의 "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Isabel wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The

Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)

 

미국 6백만 흑인들의, 남에서 북으로의, 대이주 이야기다.

각각 미시시피 주에서 시카고로, 플로리다 주에서 뉴욕으로, 루이지아나 주에서

로스안젤레스로 이주한 Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling,

그리고 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster 를 중심 인물로 펼쳐지는, 본문만

540쪽에 걸친 이야기가 책을 내려놓기 어려울 만큼 재미있게 읽힌다.

읽기를 미루었던 책인데, 방송언론인 Katie Couric 가 '걸작'이라고 쓴

걸 읽으면서 생각이 나서, 삼사 일에 다 읽은 것 같다. 걸작이다. 

 

저널리즘 부문의 퓰리처상 수상자인 Isabel Wilkerson 은 연구와 집필에 15년이

걸린 이 책으로 비소설 부문 National Book Critics Circle Award 를 받았다.

그녀는 에모리, 프린스턴, 노스웨스턴, 그리고보스턴 대학에서도 가르쳤다.

 

 

Isabel Wilkerson. 그녀도 Great Migration 가정의 딸이다.

 

 

책의 제사題詞:

 

I was leaving the South

To fling myself into the unknown....

I was taking a part of the South ...

To see if it could grow differently, ...

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom.

-- Rechard Wright

 

"George learned soon enough that the caste system was

a complicated thing that had a way of bringing out

the worst in just about all concerned." (p. 63)

 

"Many black parents who left the South got the one thing they

wanted just by leaving. Their children would have chance to grow

up free of Jim Crow and to be their fuller selves." (p. 535)

 

"A central argument of this book has been that the Great

Migration was an unrecognized immigration within this country.

The participants bore the marks of immigration behavior." (p. 536)

 

"[T]he century between Reconstruction and the end of the Great

Migration perhaps may be seen as a necessary stage of upheaval.

It was a transition from an era when one race owned another; to

an era when the dominant class gave up ownership but kept

control ... at all cost, using violence even; to the eventual

acceptance of the servant caste into the main stream." (p. 538)

 

 

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