Roots and Routes: My Family's Journey Through Cotton, Migration, and Culture
My mother, Theresa Lashley with my late Granny, Christine Moore Willie, and my late Auntie, Betty-Ann.
Listen to the Audio:
My grandmother's hands were soft and wrinkled—a softness earned through years of picking prickly cotton and preparing countless meals. Collard greens, shucking corn, kneading dough, baking cakes, dancing, singing, running, hiding, escaping...
At the time, I didn't grasp the mystery within her hands—a mystery woven from experiences I knew nothing about but always yearned to understand.
Sometimes, I feel like I encounter ghosts—between lines written in books, the aftermath of a thoughtful documentary, or a soulful rendition of a Negro spiritual.
Like an illusion, there are moments when I believe I'm hearing things. The trials they endured, the places they wept, the scars they fled—though horrific, possess an unexplainable, hidden sacredness.
A cultural identity lies buried in the soil—a rich history concealed beneath the horrors of the Black lived experience in the South.
As many of you know, BLK South is the name of the nonprofit Kendall and I plan to start in 2025. And it’s name, “BLK South” serves as an anthem, declaring the sacredness of the South. It is a deliberate effort to remember, discover, learn, and contribute to the Black story that began in the Americas, specifically in the South.
The South is sacred, and my ancestors who took part in the Great Migration seem to call me back. They beckon me to sit and listen to the retelling of their stories, faint whispers audible only to those willing to listen.
These stories reclaim forgotten histories, asserting that the South was sacred, albeit horrific. Yet, it carries a cultural identity that can only be reclaimed by revisiting its soil.
I have a distinct memory that nobody can refute because of how vividly I recall it. Years ago, my mother told me she read "The Warmth of Other Suns" and loved it because it delved into the Great Migration—an experience shared by my granny and many ancestors as they fled the horrors of Mississippi and sought refuge in Chicago, yearning for the warmth of other suns.
What amazes me is that my mother now denies ever reading the book or making that statement. This is unexplainable but I promise you I am only reading the book because of what I specifically remember my mother telling me.
As Black folks say, “I’m standing on bidness!” Can’t nobody tell me it didn’t happen!
And so it remains unexplainable—a recollection of a reality that supposedly never occurred but serves as the sole motivation for my decision to read the book in this present moment. Perhaps it was a dream or another timeline or dimension (chuckle), but regardless of the "how," here we are.
What adds another layer of significance to my reading is that my family hails from Yalabusha County, Mississippi—descendants of cotton pickers, slaves, and sharecroppers.
Isabel Wilkerson, the esteemed author, spent 15 years compiling this book. She conducted over 1500 interviews with individuals who migrated from the South to the North and West. From these 1500 interviews, she chose three specific people to chronologically narrate their stories. Remarkably, one of the three is the story of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, born in Yalabusha County, Mississippi, working as a cotton picker and sharecropper…just like my Granny.
As I read this book, it feels like I'm living their lives. This is not just a story; it is my history.
The book is shaping and molding me during a season where we’re establishing a nonprofit centered around reverse migration. There is no reverse migration without talking about WHY there was a Great Migration in the first place.
I am continually learning more about my family's history and striving to reclaim the cultural identity rooted in the soil of the South.
In the next few moments, I want to share a summary of impactful excerpts from this book and then explore how Jesus also invites us to envision the warmth of other suns.
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney as a young woman.
A summary of excerpts from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson:
“THEY FLED as if under a spell or a high fever. “They left as though they were fleeing some curse,” wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott. “They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying.”
From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make.
There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this, they were not unlike anyone who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.
It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out.
“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.”
“They would cross into alien lands with fast, new ways of speaking and carrying oneself and with hard-to-figure rules and laws. The New World held out higher wages but staggering rents that the people had to calculate like a foreign currency. The places they went were big, frightening, and already crowded—New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and smaller, equally foreign cities—Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary. Each turned into a “receiving station and port of refuge,” wrote the poet Carl Sandburg, then a Chicago newspaper reporter documenting the unfolding migration there.”
“The story of the Great Migration is among the most dramatic and compelling in all chapters of American history,”....
Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburban-ization—all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.
So, too, rose the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blues that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day.
So, too, came the people who might not have existed, or become who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration.
“Over time, the story of the Great Migration has suffered distortions that have miscast an entire population. From the moment the emigrants set foot in the North and West, they were blamed for the troubles of the cities they fled to. They were said to have brought family dysfunction with them, to more likely be out-of-work, unwed parents, and on welfare, than the people already there.”
“The actions of the people in this book (one being Ida Mae) were both universal and distinctly American. Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.
They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable—what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scots-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them.
What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.
They left.”
Ida Mae, my Granny Christine Willie, Ida Mae, and novelist, Richard Wright…rode the train to the receiving station of Chicago…to feel, as he put it, “the warmth of other suns.”
IN REGARDS TO COTTON PICKING
Other excerpts from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae said…
“...She was not going to be of much help in the field. She had never been able to pick a hundred pounds. One hundred was the magic number. It was the benchmark for payment when day pickers took to the field, fifty cents for a hundred pounds of cotton in the 1920s, the gold standard of cotton picking.
It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust. It was “one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor ever known,” wrote the historian Donald Holley. It took some seventy bolls to make a single pound of cotton, which meant Ida Mae would have to pick seven thousand bolls to reach a hundred pounds. It meant reaching past the branches into the cotton flower and pulling a soft lock of cotton the size of a walnut out of its pod, doing this seven thousand times and turning around and doing the same thing the next day and the day after that.
“The hands got cramped from the repetitive motion of picking, the fingers fairly locked in place and callused from the pricks of the barbed, five-pointed cockleburs that cupped each precious boll. The work was not so much hazardous as it was mind-numbing and endless, requiring them to pick from the moment the sun peeked over the tree line to the moment it fell behind the horizon and they could no longer see. After ten or twelve hours, the pickers could barely stand up straight for all the stooping.”
My Great Uncle, Jimmy Moore, affectionately known as Uncle Boosie who escaped the horrors of Mississippi after enslavement through sharecropping and migrated to Chicago in 1971.
I reached out to my Great Uncle, Jimmy Moore (Boosie), who is 84 and still living, to hear about his experience picking cotton. After reading Ida Mae’s account of cotton picking, my curiosity deepened, wondering how many pounds of cotton my Great Uncle had to pick.
First and foremost, he described sharecropping as a form of slavery, emphasizing the arduous labor involved. He reflected on those challenging days, stating, "you don’t know nothin’ about that now."
He went on to share, “Oh, I picked 200, 250, sometimes 300 pounds of cotton. Sunny boy – oh yeah, he picked 300 lbs. Every day. But me, I picked between 200-300 lbs. of cotton.”
In that moment, I felt a surge of both rage and courage. This newfound reality assured me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my very existence is a miracle.
My ancestors not only survived the Atlantic crossing to become part of the slave trade but also endured sharecropping, cotton picking, the era of Jim Crow, various forms of violence, shootings, and lynchings. They braved the horrors of Mississippi in the Jim Crow South, persevered through the Great Migration, and moved to Chicago to embark on a new life with uncertain paths. My parents later navigated the Civile Rights Movement and raising four children in city and suburbs of Chicago before eventually relocating to Phoenix, Arizona.
Resilience, vibrancy, and life course through my veins.
This revelation reaffirms that we can overcome anything. If we've made it this far, there's an innate belief that we have a purpose here on earth, and there is indeed something we must do.
The Scripture passage in the liturgical calendar for this week is Mark 4:12-17, 23-25 which says…
Jesus Begins to Preach
12 When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. 13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— 14 to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:
15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
16 the people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned.”
17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Jesus Heals the Sick
23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24 News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. 25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.
As I'm engrossed in reading this book, I can't help but feel that this is where Jesus casts a vision for another place, another way of life – a way to invite listeners and followers to yearn for the warmth of other suns. To engage in a movement that fosters flourishing for all of creation. To embrace a liberating kind of love.
Can you sense, even before reaching the destination, the warmth of other suns? Can you let the warmth you imagine, but don’t yet feel, guide you to discover and create spaces where it is possible?
