Through their eyes we see the horrors of Jim Crow, from the ever-present threat of lynchings and other violence to laws written and unwritten meant to keep Black Americans in a position subordinate to whites. Wilkerson also follows Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper on a cotton plantation in Mississippi who emigrated to Chicago in the 1930s, and George Starling, a citrus-farm worker who fled Florida for New York City, who were among millions of Black Americans to leave the South for cities up North and out West between World War I and the 1970s during what is now called the Great Migration. Would it be enriching? Or melancholy? Probably both, which was my reaction to this essential and fascinating book. Did they know, for instance, about his long drive in the 1950s through the Southwest where motel after motel refused to give him a room for the night because of the color of his skin? Did they know about how despite his medical degree and Army service he wasn’t allowed to practice medicine at certain hospitals or on certain patients? I tried to think about what it would feel like to meet a parent or grandparent for the first time in a book.

I wondered if this book might have been the first time his children, and grandchildren, had ever heard his stories. He wanted to shield them from that, and not taint their California prosperity with memories of segregation and oppression. Foster hardly ever told his children about his early years in segregated Louisiana and his escape from it. But it struck me when Wilkerson wrote how Dr. In L.A., he achieved wealth and esteem, becoming Ray Charles’s physician and a sharply dressed habitué of Las Vegas casinos and California horse tracks. Army during the Korean War, married into a prominent academic family from Atlanta, then drove cross-country to set up a private practice in Los Angeles. Foster grew up in rural Monroe, La., attended Morehouse College, went to medical school, served as a doctor in the U.S. This reminded me of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, one of the three Black Americans who emigrated from the Jim Crow South in the mid-20th century to seek a better life elsewhere in the United States whom Wilkerson interviewed extensively for this book. But if we understand the world our fathers came from and the families our fathers came from, it is less frustrating.

Sometimes the advice and concerns that fathers express are puzzling and make no sense. If you understand your father better, you understand yourself better. In preparing to write about Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction work about the Great Migration, I stumbled across this article about fathers and what we know about their lives. I hope all the dads out there are having a great day.

Review the warmth of other suns