Repairing Our House
Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of two best-selling works of nonfiction, discusses her motivation for writing and reporting on the often painful history of America
I n her journalism and long-form writing, Isabel Wilkerson has spent the better part of the last three decades chronicling the lives and histories of invisible and marginalized people in America by examining both the origins of our divisions and our common bonds.
Her formidable research practice and expansive literary and narrative power culminated in The Warmth of Other Suns, a masterwork of narrative nonfiction that came out in 2010.
Wilkerson recently joined Zibby Owens on her podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books to discuss her latest nonfiction book, Caste, which was partly inspired by her research for The Warmth of Other Suns. She also lends a historical perspective to the social issues that America currently faces, while emphasizing how we can fix these problems by (borrowing her poignant analogy) repairing and restoring the old house we call America.
Read an excerpt below and follow the link to listen to the entire interview.
ZO: Tell me about the research and the thousands of interviews that went into Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns. Also, what do you think makes a great interview? How do you extract information from other people?
IW: Those are great questions. First off, narrative nonfiction combines what ideally would be the best of both worlds, meaning that you have to do a tremendous amount of research in order to find and excavate truths that are verifiable, which can in turn help explain some phenomenon. Then you translate that into a narrative using many of the tools that novelists use. You’re learning something, but hopefully it builds suspense. It’s a page-turner. It tells a story. You get involved in the people. To do that takes a long time. The Warmth of Other Suns took fifteen years. If the book was a human being, it would be in high school and dating. That’s how long it took me to work on that book. For Caste, I got a little bit better. It took about eight years of germinating and distilling and thinking. In the course of that, it means that one project leads into the other. Caste grew out of The Warmth of Other Suns, which is where I started using the word “caste” to describe the hierarchies built into our country going back to colonial times. I used that word because it was the most comprehensive, accurate way to describe the world that a lot of us don’t even know about.
It’s a world in which the hierarchy of the American South, for much of our country’s history, was so tightly delineated. It was this ranking of human value that went on until, essentially, until the 1960s legislation, which didn’t take effect until the 1970s. This was a world where it was against the law for black people and white people to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. There was a white bible and an altogether separate black bible to swear on in courts. The word of God was segregated in that era. It could mean your very life if you breached any of the protocols and laws of that system. That’s what I was describing in The Warmth of Other Suns. That was the term I started to use, caste. It was more evocative. It was more comprehensive. It was language that anthropologists who had studied the Jim Crow South actually used as well. The second book grew out of the first.
ZO: How do you extract yourself from the intensity of the subject matter and deal with those emotions, aside from obviously turning it into a best-selling narrative nonfiction book? Emotionally, how do you toggle back and forth?
IW: It’s probably one’s individual constitution that makes the person more likely to be able to think long-term about something. I often focus on people with whom I already have developed or feel there is some kind of connection. There is some chemistry that makes me feel that I want to spend time with them and they want to spend time with me. I can’t help but end up feeling absorbed in their lives. I’m an empath. That’s just who I am.
All of the people that I write about on some level become part of me. I don’t view that as draining as much as enriching because I get to know these amazing, incredible people. If I didn’t have chemistry and a love for them, then it would be harder for the reader to experience it. If I feel this love and connection to them, then the reader will as well.
The Warmth of Other Suns has been out for ten years. It was on the best-seller list when it first came out. It’s back on the best-seller list again ten years later. It’s incredible. I think that’s because people can feel the connection, the love, the empathy. They can see themselves in the people. I say that narrative nonfiction is the closest that you get to be another person.
We know that empathy can be elicited when we read novels. Narrative nonfiction allows you to feel that same empathy for people who were real, who actually existed. What allows me to get through it is my sense of connection, compassion, love, and admiration for the people that I’m writing about. But they’re not perfect. You get to see them in their full humanity. It actually is a disservice to people to overly romanticize. I think that a full humanity means the range of emotions and experiences, and so that’s what comes through, and it gets me through the really difficult aspects.
I embark upon these projects because I want to share them with readers. I’m thinking about the reader the whole time. Thinking about the reader and knowing that ultimately whatever it is that I’m having to experience will reach someone else, that’s what inspires me. I love the definition that Tolstoy gives for art. He says that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another. That’s a beautiful, concise description of art, the most beautiful that I’ve heard.
ZO: I was just wondering, having gone through this complete analysis of our society as it stands today, how hopeful are you?
IW: I wouldn’t have written these books if I wasn’t optimistic. It takes a lot of faith and optimism to embark on something that will take years to complete with no guarantee of how it’s going to turn out, no guarantee of what the world will be like by the time it comes out. Will people even be interested by the time you finally finish this thing you started? It takes a lot of faith and optimism to even start down that path. I wouldn’t have written them if I wasn’t optimistic. One of the central purposes of these books is to help illuminate aspects of our country’s history so that we can find ways to transcend artificial barriers and boundaries that have been erected.
I use an analogy about our country being like an old house that we’ve all inherited. None of us alive built it, but it’s our responsibility now that we inhabit it. The purpose is to find a way to recognize what we have inherited, and to make the required improvements and repairs. That’s where my optimism comes from.
There was a sense of alarm and outrage after the death of George Floyd last summer that was absolutely warranted and that many people, not just in our country, but around the world, felt and responded to. There was a sense that it is totally unacceptable, especially in our country, given our creed and what we stand for. I think that’s where I get a lot of hopefulness, the fact that people did respond.
