The Things They Left Behind

In doing a close reading of both Wilkerson's  The Warmth of Other Suns and Locke's The New Negro, I found some connections in Countee Cullen's poem Heritage to The Things They Left Behind in Wilkerson's text. Heritage is about the differences in culture and lifestyle one encounters when leaving the homeland (which in this case is Africa) and the struggle to acclimate while still maintaining nostalgia. There is one stanza in particular that I feel exemplifies the feelings and contentions of Wilkerson's text:

Quench my pride and cool my blood
Lest I perish in their flood
Lest a hidden ember set
Timber that I thought was wet
Burning like the dryest flax
Melting like the merest wax
Lest the grave restore its dead.
Stubborn heart and rebel head.
Have you not yet realized
You and I are civilized?


In The Things They Left Behind, Wilkerson discusses heritage and southern cultural identity that many black southerners kept even after they had chosen to migrate north. She explains, "The South was still deep within those who left, and the sight of some insignificant thing would take them back and remind them of what they once were...As best they could, the people brought the Old Country with them - a taste for hominy grits and pole beans cooking in salt pork, the "sure enoughs" and "I reckons" and the superstitions of new moons and itchy palms that had seeped into their very being."
Even though Cullen's piece deals with a separation from the native homeland as Africa, I feel that there is a definite connection in terms of the emotions being played out in the poem and the short story. When Cullen writes "Quench my pride and cool my blood/lest I persish in their flood",  I think that it is something that a lot of southern transplants could identify with. Leaving the South, they left behind everything that was familiar and normal to them. Even though they were anxious to leave behind the repression of Jim Crow, I'm sure there were parts of the South and southern culture that they identified with and were sad to leave behind. Just as African natives leaving Africa hold a tight bond with the homeland, Wilkerson is saying that Southern blacks feel a tight bond to the South, even though they made the decision to leave. In Langston Hughes poem, A Kinder Mistress,  he explains that even though he loves the beauty and charm of the South, he must leave and go to the North where he can be free. I think that a lot of migrants made the decision to leave for similar reasons. They left the South but it left an imprint on their identities such that they took a small piece of it with them when they left.