The Warmth of Other Suns & The New Negro

“The Other Side of Jordan”, a short story in The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the story of an African American woman named Ida Mae. Ida Mae had recently migrated to Chicago from Mississippi in 1938. The story discusses Ida Mae’s experience voting for the first time in the Presidential election of 1940. Prior to the election, representatives from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign heavily courted African American voters in the heavily Democratic city of Chicago, located in the important swing state of Illinois. A portion of these African American voters, like Ida Mae, were recent migrants from the South and had never experienced voting before the election of 1940. The story describes Ida Mae’s surprise at the campaigners’ interest in her. She was used to the norms of Mississippi (and the greater South) that systematically denied African Americans access to voting rights. Ida Mae did not talk about, let alone actually attempt to vote in an election back home in Mississippi. She knew that she would be turned away through a humiliating poll tax or literacy test. Furthermore, lynching and violent retribution were so much a part of the culture of her home state that she did not even consider voting as an option. At this point in the story, I began to think that Ida Mae had internalized her oppression. Conditions that people today would consider reprehensible and horrifying were routine aspects of her life. Understandably so, she knew the boundaries that were assigned to her and seemed to accept them for the time being.

In order to gain more of a first-person perspective, I supplemented “The Other Side of Jordan” with “I Too”, a poem by Langston Hughes taken out of The New Negro. This poem is extremely insightful while remaining general enough to apply to a number of situations. Hughes starts the poem by depicting an African American as “the darker brother”, an outcast in a household. This person is sent to the kitchen “when company comes”. The “darker brother” is treated poorly, just as Ida Mae was her entire life in Mississippi. However, the character in the poem “eats well” and gains his strength. He builds himself up to the point where he is able to overcome his oppressors. Instead, his oppressors will “see how beautiful” he is “and be ashamed”. Ida Mae got stronger, migrating to Chicago for a better life. In the Presidential election of 1940, Ida Mae’s oppressors, the Democratic Party, seemed to recognize her intrinsic beauty and importance. In recognizing this beauty, the Democratic Party wanted her vote and helped to facilitate an informed vote. However, I read the poem carefully in conjunction with the short story. I cannot in good faith conclude that the Democratic Party recognized the beauty of African Americans. Rather, they seemed to use them simply for their vote. The nationally-based Party used this vote without pushing a coherent and powerful civil rights agenda, leaving African Americans in the South (as well as the North) in immediate danger of violence and oppression.