Last November Margaret Arnold handed me the book jacket of her copy of The Warmth of Other Suns; The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and told me she would shortly be giving the book to our library.  She clearly was very moved by it and commented that she wished that all Americans would come to appreciate what a great many black American families went through not very many years ago to escape the oppression in the Southern states.  Margaret said she would get the book to me as soon as one or two other friends finished it and returned it to her.  Eventually I did get it – just last month.  Now that I have read it, I can appreciate what she was talking about.
 
Sociologist author Isabel Wilkerson describes a migration out of the South that began in a big way during World War I as war jobs sprang up in the North and continued for over 50 years.  Typically, those who left the South came from rural areas and settled in inner city neighborhoods.  They escaped nearly unbearable situations only to face new situations that were again full of racism as well as new kinds of inner city problems.  The story is told through the eyes of three aging individuals who left the South many years earlier in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s with their spouses, and small children in some cases, who now over the last dozen years have told their stories to Wilkerson in lengthy interviews.  These three life-stories make up a major portion of the book, but Wilkerson’s description of the migration as a whole adds much and makes the book a spectacularly rich documentary volume. 

I was moved deeply by many of the anecdotes that make up the whole picture, by the common struggle that these individuals and many of their peers in the story went through repeatedly throughout most of their lives.  Apart from the fact that the book is about my own country, I think the primary reason I was moved so deeply is that the author has created such a vivid, multilayered picture of individual lives near the bottom end of a pervasively segregated society.  All three individuals made their decisions about moving north or west on their own but were nevertheless caught in a wave of migration that involved millions.  Somehow, millions sensed that they had to make such an extreme change in their lives, now or never, all at about the same time.
 
A second book this month, from Reverend Margaret Boles, is Common Prayer; a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (2010), by Shane Claiborne et al.  I know Margaret will have things to say about this collection of mostly prayers and some hymns, but let me share a little of how I see the book.  I see it as an invitation for us to worship in new ways, in small groups that you may have so far only vaguely thought of pulling together, or only vaguely considered redefining as a worshipping group of fellow-believers.  Our own families might very well fit into this description.  There are over 500 pages of prayers— for morning, evening, different seasons and holy days, taken from a wide range of Christian faith communities.  Something to think about, yes?

Rudy Dyck, Librarian