world like a major power. like the united states which has at least 1200, 2,000 maybe 5,000 bombs. we tend to think we're the good guys. that make it is okay. it's a basic imbalance in the world that we maintain large nuclear arsenal but say other countries can't. that was the kind of issue that i discussed in talking about how we get to zero. >> the book, "the twilight of the bombs: recent ch >> from the texas book festival in austin at discussion with michele norris, author of "the grace of silence: a memoir." and isabel wilkerson. the epic story of america's great migration.

>> project, painful family secrets from her father's shooting by the birmingham police less than two weeks after his discharge from service in world war ii to her grandmother's peddling pancake mix as an itinerant aunt. and to explore things unsaid by her family when she was going up. michele was chosen as journalist

of 2009 as the association of black journalists and is cowinner columbia award for the york project in the race 2008 vote. she's the host of national public radio's all things considered and has appeared on "meet the press," charlie rose and the chris matthew show and has written for among other publications "the washington post," the "chicago tribune" and the "los angeles times." the warmth of other sons, the epic story of america's great migration is pulitzer prize winner is isabel wilkerson's book. it talks about the migration of african-american the from the south to the west to 1970 through the stories of three people and their families. drawing on archival materials and conducting more than 1,200 interviews, the warmth of other sons traces the lives of ida may, george starling and robert foster and their decision to leave for the hopes of a better life in chicago, harlem and los angeles.

their stories parallel the experiences of immigrants to came to america. wilkerson won the was in 1994 making her the first black woman to win a pulitzer prize and the first african-american to win for individual reporting. she's currently professor of journalism and narrative nonfiction. and i'm going to start by asking some questions. the first question i wanted to ask was, how each of you came to work on your projects? how you discovered your topics? >> i probably had been working on this book for as long as i've been alive because i grew up as a daughter of people who were part of the great migration, as is michele. and the majority of african-americans that you might ever meet in the north and the midwest and the west and i grew up around people who had

migrated from georgia, the carolinas, to washington, d.c. i grew up with the music, the language, the folk ways and no one ever talked about it as being the great migration. no one said i am someone who came up in the great migration and yet it was everywhere. and i later as a journalist in interviewing people all over the country became more aware of how huge it was 'cause wherever you went, whether it was in los angeles or in chicago or detroit, there were always references to the south. everywhere you went. and all came together for me and i wondered why was there no "grapes of wrath" for this huge migration and that's what i set out to do. not being a novelist i wrote it as a nonfiction so it took 16 years of interviewing. -- 15 years. [laughter] >> if this book were a human

being it would be in high school and dating. [laughter] >> that's how long it took. and i had the chance to meet out of that 1200 three amazing protagonists whose stories tell the three major streams of this migration. i'm part of the east coast

>> a very good question. that was one of the reasons i set out to do the book because my parents never talked about it. as with michele.

this generation was in some ways a misunderstood segment of the greatest generation. they bore up under incredible up odds. they were in many ways locked in a caste system and i describe the great migration system as a defection from a caste system which was untenable and could not last and ultimately ended violently through the civil rights movement but ultimately these people needed to be -- i felt their stories needed to be heard and told. and they were not talking. one reason the story was not told, they were not talking. they were not talking for many reasons. one is it was just too painful. another is when they left, they left for good and they did not look back. some people changed their names. one of the characters in the book actually no longer wanted to be known by the name he'd grown up with. some melted in the new world and didn't look back and they started anew. they turned the page and they

whatever happened before had not happened. and their children were raised in a whole new environment without knowledge of what was on before them. one of the main questions i want to know, how did i get here? how is it that the majority of african-americans in the north, the midwest and the west actually can trace their roots to some very specific part of the south? you know, it's no accident that michele's father was from alabama and ended up in the midwest. there's a direct -- he ended up there. and i find it so inspiring that this is not a haphazarding unfurling of the soul. they were making a decision of their lives to leave the only place that they had ever known for a place they had never seen not knowing what the future held. and many african-americans, as is the case for many americans, wouldn't even exist because i wouldn't have existed and michele would not have -- would have been very different. i mean, my parents to get to the answer to your question, sorry.

you get us started. my mother migrated from rome, georgia, to washington, d.c. my father migrated in a different decade from southern virginia to washington, d.c. they were from families where the people -- their parents had had some education. they themselves had education but they could not use it in the caste in which they were growing up and they decided to go to a place where they thought they could. they happened to meet there. they got married. had there been no great migration. i would not have been me. the idea of a political i-si -- asylum with a migration that occurred within our own country and within the borders of our whole country there was an immigrant experience of people

not like coming across the atlantic in steerage and it's my goal to show how much we have in common, how we have so much more common than we've been led to believe. they were under incredible odds just to make the decision to leave and my goal was to try to understand what were they up against, and how did they make the decision to leave? and that the reader would be able to put him or herself in the mindset of these individuals and be able to say to themselves, what would i have done if i was living in a caste system in which it was against the law for a black person and a white person to simply play checkers together. that is astounding that someone actually set that down as a law and that in court houses across the country there is actually a black bible and a white bible to swear to tell the truth on. and this is astounding and that's not that long ago. how many black people, how many white people were deprived the

opportunity to get to know people they actually would have had so much in common with. so many experiences and were deprived of all races because of the caste system. >> in my family's case, i learned through the reporting of this book exactly why my father and his brothers had left. i had a different experience in that they didn't look back in terms of telling their stories but they remained tethered to birmingham. i went back to birmingham every summer and so in that sense i may have slowly writing this book and collecting stories for this book and my father did me an enormous favor by making sure that i knew his birmingham. i didn't know that it was the place where he was also shot by a white police officer but i spent a lot of time in birmingham and that's what makes his journey so surprising to me in so many ways. i knew that they moved to chicago ultimately. they all settled in chicago. he had five brothers. they were all incredibly handsome.

there's pictures inside and i knew that they had moved to chicago looking for better work. and you will see how handsome they are in these pictures because they used to take pictures. this is a common experience that even though they worked in blue collar jobs, my father and his brothers were either postal workers or teachers. they would go to the portrait studio and they would dress up and they would look like the nicholson brothers or john barrymore and they would send these pictures up here and say we're doing all right up here and people would say they're doing okay. i want to get up north. >> little did i know. >> right. [laughter] >> you know, it was hard work but good work and honorable work and my father was very proud to do that work. what i didn't know, though, is that they were not just running to something. they were very much running from something. in my father's case running for his life.

he had stood up to a police officer when he returned from war, 1946. and he was part of a cohort of black veterans who returned to this country as changed men. they had worn a military uniform. they had participated in the fight for democracy. and when they came back, they wanted a piece of that and this is before the power to the people marches in the city. this is a very simple set of demands, they wanted jobs, they wanted respect and they wanted to vote. and they were enable to do so. -- unable to do so. and they were met by this white wall of resistance and my father, a mild manner postal worker, this is 1936 birmingham, alabama, for a white man to stand up to a police officer was to invite a special kind of trouble. and he wound up being wounded when the police officer's gun discharged and grazed the side of his leg. he had to get out of birmingham after that.

carrying the name at that point became a bit of a risk. there were consequences, though, that i didn't know when they moved north that i only understood in the north. they had opportunities when they moved north. they had jobs and they could use the g.i. bills up north in ways they could not in the deep south but when the six sons moved north even though they came back to visit from time to time, they left behind parents who continued to age, whose homes continued to age. whose health continued to deteriorate. and what i realized from the letters that i discovered and the interviews that i did, that my grandparents who gave birth to these six strong handsome sons were left alone in the later part of their lives because their sons had moved north and felt like they could no longer come back. so, you know, the more you understand this migration, you see the benefits but you see that there were also great costs. >> and michele, your mother is a

fourth generation minnesotan, how did her experience and your father's experience -- how did they -- how did they meet and what did she teach you about life in the north which would have been -- her experience would have been different than being born and raised in minnesota? >> my mother, her family was the only black family in town in the north central part of town. my father and jimmy became good friends and he went home and met my mother and that was it. and loved minnesota and loved -- there was a tolerant community there. and i grew up in a integrated community and thought that was just the way it was in minnesota. there was a level of tolerance. that i didn't see or experience in birmingham. what i realized when these stories started to spill out from my family was that this sort of easy integration that i took for granted was not always

present in even their community. my family was blockbustered so when my father left chicago, that they were the first person to buy a home on their particular block. and the people that i knew -- parents of my friends were very chilly to my parents when they first moved in. most of the families got up and left when we moved into the neighborhood. and i only learned this from my father later on because again she was protecting me. but, you know, the stories that i share with people and talking about this is i realized strong they were and sometimes they used humor to help by to get in a situation that could have crushed them. when everybody moved out and they were trying to sell the houses next to the black family, my mother just decided well, you know, i can sit by and i could cry or i could have a little fun with this. [laughter] >> and what they would do -- what she would do when prospective buyers would come to look at the house directly next

door to ours, she would send my sisters out in the yard to play. [laughter] >> it was very clear they would be moving next to a black family and then if that didn't work she would walk outside herself and she was very pregnant with me. [laughter] >> and so when she tells the story she talks about how they would get inside the house and she would wait inside the right moment and she would say to herself, show time. [laughter] >> your father was very much into keeping the yard nice and clean. and he was a gardener and so there was -- the part of him who was about appearance. and one of the things that struck me about both of your books you talk about appearance and michele you talk about when you went on vacation and your father wanted to make sure that you -- i can't remember how you said it that you were better than the coca-cola image of the american family. >> yeah. >> isabel, you talk about how appearance is very important and talk about some of that in your

books about appearance being important for african-americans of that generation. >> i think that the book -- working on the book helped me to dress better. [laughter] >> because -- >> i've known isabel a really long time and she has always put the rest of us to shame. >> as has michele because of the expectations because of the assumptions made of this generation of people that they -- if they hadn't go to school and they didn't value education and did not work hard to get to your point about working hard and the post office gambles strong, sturdy, reliable, honorable work and my parents doing the same thing. my mother had been a teacher, my father was a civil engineer. he had been at tuskegee airman. this generation of people have been must cast and -- miscast

and misunderstood and the story of a man named dr. robertpersing foster in my book is a story of a surgeon who had been a surgeon in the army during the korean war. he got out of the army and he was determined or found out that he could not practice surgery in his own hometown in louisiana, not too terribly far from here. and he decided that he was going to set out a course that was going to be more perilous than he anticipated through the country of texas and this is a large country unto itself and on through the western states to get to california which was his vision of the american dream. but it was more perilous than he thought. and it turned out that he could not -- after getting past texas, and even past the eastern section of new mexico, he could not find the place that would rent him a motel room. that meant that he had to drive for three of the huge western

states through the mountains, through the desert at night by himself and he wasn't a good driver. his friends say it wasn't a miracle that he made it through the desert but they made it all because he's a terrible story but that's another story. he had to go alone and he had at a certain point wonder whether he made the right decision. but to get to the idea how we present ourselves and how that generation felt is that before he would go in to try to get a room, he was very aware of what he was up against even if he thought he was in the free land of the west. and so he would -- he made a big effort to comb his hair, to make sure he was wearing a tie and brought out his sport coat. and made sure that he was not wrinkled from the ride. he went to this great deal of effort before going in to ask for a room and this was well past the borders of what was considered to be jim crow at that time and he still could not get a room and he recounted the story to me and he said this thing i've gone over 3,000 times

what i might have done and there was really nothing he could have done and i attempted to recreate that journey with my own parents. and i couldn't make it as far as he had. at a certain point we were driving through the desert. it was night. they were going through hairpin turns in the mountains in arizona. i was trying to follow it to the letter. and even now those stretches of land are very spread out. you can go for many dozens of miles without a single settlement. you have no light except your headlights. i wanted to as a nonfiction -- i wanted to be able to be able to create for the reader what does it feel like to have your fingers swell from having grip the wheel for so long? what does it feel like to have your eyes grow so heavy from the lack of sleep that they begin to ache? what was it like for him to have to push through in spite of all of that through the darkness knowing he had been rejected in this new land he had chosen for and brag to all his medium in

monroe, louisiana about it. we made it as far as i'm -- yuma, arizona. i had driven a buick like he had, if you'd seen a buick road masters, you would want it too. we got to the part where i was veering off the sxroed my parents said we must stop the car. they had been through jim crow and they had to go through the experience of not knowing whether you would be able to stop or having to gather up -- pack all the food you might possibly need. all the ice and water you might need if your radiator went out and, you know, make sure you had your spare tire working. all of this effort that they had to go through for a simple drive. and so my parents had been through that so they said to me as i was veering off the road, stop the car, we've been through this before ourselves. and if you won't stop, let us out.

[laughter] >> so we stopped in yuma, arizona and i felt very dismayed. it's very inspiring that i could not really recreate to the letter because there were plenty of places we could say and my parents said, look, we've been there, done that. let's stop. [laughter] >> i remember as i was writing this, that he did this without a cell phone. [laughter] >> i won't leave my house to go down the street without my phone. >> and he was driving through the desert without a cell phone. [laughter] >> you know, when you talk about the appearances, the reason that i spent so much time on it on the book is because as i looked back with wisdom, i started to understand my parents. a little bit more.

i just always thought that they were type a, you know, and that they kept the garden beautifully. that we had to shovel snow before anybody else in the neighborhood shoveled snow. and i just thought that was a work ethic and i realize everything they did in the way they ordered their stuff was a statement. they were sending a statement. our yard is taken care of, thank you very much. they would dress in a certain way because they were -- they were asking for respect. they were sartorial activists in some way, in the way that they dressed and in the way that they demand that we dress. you know, i didn't include this in the book. one of the things that i discovered and i want to mention this because you talk about the burdens on the other side. you know, when women of color would dress to go into town in birmingham, for instance, all the time, you didn't go into town without gloves. you know, you always had gloves on. you always were dressed. you wore the -- the men wore hats. and this is -- i'm not going to tell you how old i am. but well into the period of time

when people weren't really doing that. people of color still did that when they went to the business district in birmingham. and what i found in trying to find the police officers who shot my father, i was able to talk to people of that generation who at that point would have lived on the other side of the color line. and one of the things they talked to me about was having to dress a certain way 'cause all the black folks were always dressed so fine. so they felt like the whole point was to rise above the black folks. so even if they wanted to go into town and just wear like a simple frock, they couldn't. they had to prove that they were one step above. so, you know, there were burdens on both sides. living on the other side and forcing that, trying to decide if you could say hello to someone and if there would be a sanction for that. could you call that person mr. and mrs. because if you did, you were often fussed at on the other side of the color line. there were -- there were prices to be paid for that as well. >> that's why i view it as a caste system.

a caste -- it holds people fixed in a place. and that means that no one can move even outside for the line that is set for them. the caste has set a mold for them. it's artificial for definition and could not last forever. if you have a cast a bone you can't wait to get it off and that's not a natural way for people to live. >> and, you know, it's -- to be honest, it's what you see sometimes in kids today. in a different way. i mean, all the bling, bling is sometimes an effort to say, this is -- i have worth. and i'm expressing my worth in a gigantic chain that has, you know, a big gold encrusted cross. it says i have value. this is who i am. >> michele, one of the interesting chapters is your

chapter on aunt jamy my and what most surprised you about your grandmother who played aunt jemima. >> if you use pancake mix and you use aunt jemima today looks like girlfriend. she looks like she shops at macy's. she has a wet set. she's got pearls. she looks like she's on the church council. what i discovered again in this period from one of my uncles in a casual conversation is that my grandmother had worked for a time as an itinerant aunt jemima. she had traveled throughout the midwest. she had a six-state region in a hoop skirt. add water and stir was sort of new at that time and my mother was so angry that my uncle had talked about this.

she didn't like this period of my grandmother's life. and i couldn't let it go. what i discovered in my grandmother's case is i got lucky. and aunt jemima coming to town and a description of her work and what she said was that she would focus on children in these towns because she knew that this was the first time that they would ever see a person of color and she wanted them to be left with a good impression. she would talk in a certain way to let them know that she was educated and this range very true to me even though i had a hard time remembering an aunt jemima and i remember a polished woman. as a kid she was always tell you did you leave the g at the door, you know, could you please

finish the word it's not i'm not going somewhere. i'm going somewhere. [laughter] >> that range very true to me. by presenting this image of a hard-working woman who proper english and sang church songs was very different the aunt jemima you would have encountered if you picked up a newspaper or magazine of the day because aunt jemima didn't look like aunt jemima now and she spoke with a certain slave language which was supposed to let you know that she was uneducated and fairly happy with her lot. and what i wound up doing in digging for that story was giving my family a gift in filling out the picture 'cause my mom and her siblings and the older folks in the family hated that story. so what i was able to show to them through research was grandma did this in her own way. she took a job that could have been demeaning and lifted herself up with her earnings but lifted her people up by serving

as a kind of representative. now i don't know what kind of hard bargain she made with herself when she had to tie a head scarf, a do-rag on her head. i don't know what that conversation was like but i do know when she talked to newspaper reporters about it, there was not shame in the way she described her work. and that -- you know, after hearing something that was very uncomfortable, that gave me great comfortable. and a good deal of pride. >> you end that chapter we judge aunt jemima and ourselves by the mirror of us of history. what did you mean by that? and while aunt jemima looks differently now, just walk up to a black woman of color and call her aunt jemima. she might look benign. i dare you to do it. [laughter] >> and yet, when i talk to people about it, i did this

little exercise when i was working on the book. no matter what i was researching, i would always ask people at the end of the conversation, what do you think about aunt jemima and they would be like, what? i'll tell you why i'm askingko e question in a moment and do me a favor and tell me what you think. and what i realized is that many people -- black people has really complicated views on this and many white views had complicated views but in a completely different way. i found a woman who runs a restaurant in mississippi, have you ever been there. a gigantic aunt jemima. she's so large that the restaurant is in her hoop skirt and she too has had a makeover. she has white skinned and less bosomy and the lady who runs the restaurant i don't understand why people of color denigrate her. why they don't embrace her and i'm going to hear you out here and she said, well, listen.

in my community some of us were raised by women of color who worked in our families. and many of us had better relationships with our mamies with our mamas and why some people don't honor people that way. isn't she yours first and on the other handy talked to a african-american man in birmingham who said aunt jemima looked like my grandmother and the companies who do their advertisement and take that image and turn it into something ugly and it's something that i love. and so when someone controls your image you don't control who you are. and so i realized that she's so much more than just an icon. you know, it's so much deeper than. >> i love that story you tell at the end of the chapter about the white kid in target. do you want to tell them? [laughter] >> i have young children. and my son's favorite food is pancakes.

and he particularly like aunt jemima pancakes. he likes the syrup bottle. and i was always argue with him can we buy hungry jack. but right now we're making pancakes from scratch because there's only five ingredients anyway and we were at target, and a little caucasian boy asked his mom, who's aunt jemima and she looked at me. [laughter] >> with this sort of expected look on her face. i'm not going there. but, you know, after working on this book, i would have had a conversation with her. i would actually sit there in target and i would say there, aunt jemima is my grandmother and let's talk about this. >> isabel, you interviewed 1200 people, more than 1200 people for your book. i'm curious how you settled on the ida may, robert foster and

george sterling. >> this migration began in in an 15, world war i. and didn't end until 1970 when essentially the conditions that led to the migration ended in the south. and it was no longer -- there was no longer the need for this outpouring of people to leave. so that meant there were three generations of people who participated in this directly. and i needed to get the 6 million of them and i needed to get them as soon as i could. i felt this urgency because they were getting up in years and i wanted to be able to tell the story before it was too late. so that meant that i had to go to all these places. i went to senior center, the aarp meetings and catholic mass and where many people are from louisiana and thus catholic. i went to baptist churches in new york where everybody is from south carolina. i went to these little clubs that exist in all these cities that represent the originating state where the people came from. there's a lake charles,

louisiana, club in los angeles. there's a monroe, louisiana, club in los angeles. there are hundreds as you can imagine of texas clubs in los angeles. and there are similar clubs in chicago and also in detroit and in new york. so i went to all those places to find them. i was doing essentially an audition, kind of a casting call. and i had this case where i went into a senior center in los angeles and i would go in and i would say i'm working on a book about the great migration, generally i had a story that -- a general person to let them know what i was doing. this one place that i went in los angeles, i was on the schedule. you had to get on a schedule for certain days that were better to go than others. if there was bingo, it wasn't a good day. if there was a steak lunch, that was a good day. so i'd gone on a good day but i was on the schedule. and before me on the schedule was a representative from the

los angeles county department of aging. and he passed out brochures to the seniors who had been gathered there and he said we are getting reports of our seniors being taken advantaged of. there are people who are running scams on our seniors. they will ask you all kinds of questions about you. they will ask you where you are from. where you were born. when did you come to los angeles. how many children do you have. what do you do for a living? just about everything i needed to know and more. and he passed this out and then said, next up isabel wilkerson will talk to you. fortunately, either they were not listening because they were focusing on the steak dinner or they found me trustworthy or whatever. i don't know what the reason was but i was able to talk to them and that's what i did for many, many months. it was kind of a casting call. it was like auditioning and then i narrowed it down to these three and the three were people -- i needed to have three

protagonists, people you've never heard of so you could see yourself in these people and what they'd gone through. three people, each of whom would represent one of the three streams of the great migration. one would represent the east coast stream. the other would represent the one in the middle, michele stream. and then the one that is nearer and dearer to people in texas because many people in texas know people in los angeles or other parts of california because there's this constant back and forth. and so i wanted to tell that story. -- that stream. i needed to find three people and i wanted each of them to have left in different decades. to give a sense of the breadth and scope of this migration. i also needed to have people with different classes because there's great differences, stratification even among -- even among people who had been in a caste system. there were castes within castes in the south and i wanted to reflect that. and i wanted great characters people who were very open and

honest about themselves. you could read a page and you would know you were reading about ida mae or you could turn to another page and read about dr. foster which is pretty obvious. he became a gambler. he was a raconteur. he was a character unto himself and so you would know that who you were reading about just by turning the page so people who you could see yourself in and be engaged in. and some will shout in the back of the room why are there no others in the book? my editor and i decided simultaneously there should be none because we wanted the readers to be able to see him or herself in these people. now, the people's photographed because i got the questions so much and the photographs are available on my website and also they surfaced on the internet as more interviews have been done and it's been wonderful. so you can see them now but they're not in the book itself because we didn't want people to be distracted by that.

but i needed three people who would together tell the story of the up until now anonymous, beautiful, amazing and courageous people who made the decision of their lives and affected us in so many ways that we're still trying to figure it out. i mean, so many famous people are products of the great migration. michele is a product of this great migration. toni morrison is a product of her great migration. her parents emigrated from alabama to ohio where she got anything any budding writer was to go into a public library and take out a book. she wouldn't be able to do that and her parents saw that and they migrated to ohio where she had the opportunity to get exposed to that. august wilson, lorraine hans alito berry and richard wright and some of the huge names in literature are all products of this great migration.

and motown wouldn't have happened and barry gordy migrated to detroit and he decided he wanted to go into the music industry. he didn't have the money to go out scouting for talent and so what he did he just looked around him and there was diana ross, she was a child of the migration. her parents had migrated from alabama. alabama was a great source of huge talent. [laughter] >> and she was -- she was there. and so were mary wilson and florence ballard. all were children of the great migration. aretha franklin was also -- her parents came up from the south. so many people created an entire new art form. it's hard to imagine what culture would have been like had there been no motown and when it comes to jazz. jazz wouldn't exist as we know it. miles davis parents migrated from arkansas to illinois. he would never have had the opportunity to spend hours upon hours that would have been necessary to hone his genius and become the mug he was had his

parents had not migrated outlet of the cotton country of arkansas. theonus monk, his parents migrated from north carolina to harlem where he had the opportunity, the luxury -- this never would have been possible in the tobacco country in north carolina to spend hours upon hours to get music lessons. i mean, there would have been no time in the cotton country out in the farm land or a smalltown of north carolina. john coltrane, he migrated at 17 from north carolina to philadelphia where believe it or not, he got his first alto sax. where would jazz be if he had not migrated and part of the great migration and got the opportunity to go to the ornstein school of music in philadelphia. and to practice so much that he actually -- that people in his apartment building in philadelphia complained -- the nerve of complaining because

john coltrane -- the man in 12c -- the man in 12c he's playing at all hours of the night. i bet you anything that all those people who deny up and down to this day that they complained about john coltrane playing his alto sax. he played so much that he had to turn to a minister who gave him the keys of the church where he could play to his heart's content. and one of the unknown things about this migration or unrecognized thing is that each stream is a beautiful translation of the southern state and culture from which it derives. in other words, the migration from texas to louisiana -- those people are very different. the culture is different. i had to learn to eat all kinds of food that i was not even accustomed to because the food and the music and the language and the references were totally different. and the question you would get is, where are your people from? and in los angeles, my people were not from the streams that had created the los angeles migration experience.

my people were from georgia. it did not translate. it was not always go out -- it turned out that miles davis and theonias would fight over john coltrane and he had a special feeling from monk, why? because they came from the same stream. this is a permutation that shows you how different that the african-american experience is even within our own country. when everyone comes from the south but things are totally different. one thing i had to discover and i had not heard of and it truly became a big issue. in chicago i was exposed to -- i was on a bus heading to with some seniors to a river boat casino. it's a big thing for seniors in the world that i was entering. and someone broke out a delicacy that everyone -- there was an uproar on the bus and i was wondering what is this thing? it had been brought up from

mississippi straight -- direct from the source. it was the good stuff. it was hog head cheese. [laughter] >> hog head cheese? >> with pickled eggs. [laughter] >> i had never heard of it before. never heard of it because the migration stream i was in -- we could talk about grits but we weren't exposed to that. what i'm saying is the culture, the people carried the culture with them. they transplanted the south with them where they went and in some ways they were ambassadors for the south and it's a beautiful thing they did. so that the culture, american culture, and urban northern and western cultures in some ways a marriage of the north and the south as it -- as it was altered by the arrival of these people. and we're still living with the effects. the world benefits from the effects of all that. and we are the primary beneficiaries of it because we are the children who had the opportunity to grow up in a freer place at that time. now everything is different

because of the reverse migration but at that moment, that was the thing they needed to do and they did it for their children. >> we have about 15 minutes left. i'm going to ask one more question so if people want to line up and ask michele and isabel questions, please do that now. the question i wanted to ask, you talked about, michele, how your book emerged from the conversations about race. i'm curious how you feel like your book has contributed to the conversations about race that are said and unsaid because you talk a lot about both white people and black people have these conversations sometimes with each other, often not with each other. so how do you feel like your book will contribute to that conversation? >> i feel like it's come full circle. i set out to write a book about the hidden conversation about race. i wound up writing a book about the hidden conversation of my family. and as i travel the country now on a 30-plus city book tour, i find myself swimming in that hidden conversation. people often come to hear about my story and wind up telling me theirs. on my website i have actually a

link called your story where people can actually leave their stories. i wound up writing a story a book about race but in many ways it's not about race. i mean, i captured my racial legacy because of these hidden conversation that is suddenly started spilling out in this period of historical indigestion in my family, things just started coming up. but the thread but the broader tapestry is about a central question. how well do you really know the people who raised you? how much do you really know of their history. in my case, there was this complicated racial legacy that i didn't fully know about. but, you know, whether it's the depression or the dust bowl or the holocaust or polio epidemic, parents are often very careful about what they tell their children. and if they want their children to soar, they don't put rocks in

their pockets on the way out the door. they keep their hardest stories to themselves. i call this the greatest silence but i hope it would spark a conversation and i think it's starting to happen and in some ways i've decided that there's benefit in having those conversations and trying to capture your history. because it's your history. it's your birthright. and even if it's a difficult history, it's yours. it's an incredible gift to be able to take that and pass it on to your children. you might not want to put rocks in their pockets, but it's okay to put pebbles in there because they need to be grounded. they need to know where they came from. and in the end, i hope it has contributed in some small way that people might be interested in their own history. people might pick up the book and learn something, not just about my family, about america, some aspect of this. there was some revelations, your grandma is aunt jemima and your

hair stands on end and your father was shot and i went to bed for a month and i hope when people read the book that they'll put it down and want to talk to someone about it. a family member, a coworker. i hope, you know, that is my -- 'cause i shared with you my grandmother just turned 95. and i'm having a hard time now trying to go back and tell her these stories because she doesn't remember a lot. you have advice for how to get the stories out especially of older people who may not remember. >> isabel has spent so much time talking to older people and i'm sure we'll have advice as well. if you want to talk to older people and they don't want to tell you certain stories, particularly ask them about the era. you might not be able to go in the front door but you can knock on the side doors. if they love the yankees but i'm in the wrong state for that.

if you know they love baseball or they love football, you know, think about -- educate yourself about the 1950s or the 1960s. ask them about that. ask them -- what would you wear when you went out on a saturday night? you know, what kind of music were you listening to? bring them in the era and get them comfortable and maybe those stories will start to come forward. tape it if you can. i mean, i have a hard time talking about this because it makes me very sad. but my father died in 1988. i worked in radio. i swim in audio all day long. my children will never hear my father's voice because i never recorded it. if you can record the people you love, take the opportunity. you don't have to invest a lot of money. your phones have recording devices on them. record them in quality. i would suggest to you is do it over food.

every time i learn something profound about my family it was always at the table. every time i needed to have a difficult conversation with someone that was not related to me, i would usually introduce feud to try to lubricate the conversation. if you have a loved one with lemon meringue pie, get them a piece. if you like the pineapple upside down cake with the piece that's burned on the top, that would give them memories. they don't call it comfort food for nothing. >> i would say that i actually shared a lot of the experiences that michele had with her own parents. my parents -- my mother in particular never talked about her experience in the south. and in the process of doing the research in this book where i'm interviewing over 1200 people for this it, turns out my own mother was not talking. not talking. she was by far the toughest interviewer i ever had.

she didn't want to talk. that's way in the past. that's ancient history. who wants to talk about that. she was not going to talk. there are few references in my book to my own family's experience in the migration. everything you've seen in the book i've seen in the course of research not growing up because my mother did not talk about it. i discovered things about how my uncle had left. he left because he discovered that the man he was working for -- he found -- he found the clan role of the man he was working for. and decided he was leaving rome, georgia for destroyed as soon as possible. and so i had no idea and the way i found out some of this is i read every word of this book to my mother. my father had passed away. he did not live to see the publication of this book. and it was such a heart-wrenching thing because he believed it. i read every book to her and at a certain point i could not read it to her because she kept

interrupting saying all the things that she started to talk -- well, when i was in rome, georgia, or what my mother used to do and so i found that in some ways my hope is that by making it okay, by validating these experiences and giving them dignity because they are dignified and incredible things people have done it will make people more willing to talk about that -- one of the places i went, i was in los angeles doing a reading. a father and his daughter showed up. and they went -- you know, i signed the book and they told me, we're getting ready to go right now to talk. he hadn't talked before and we're going to sit down to talk now because maybe this would be an inspiration to do that. and my goal is the people i've written about are not just african-americans who left one place for another. they in some ways they left for the same reason any of our forebears would have ever left any part of this world to be on the land that we're now on. my goal would be for us to see

that we have so much more in common than we've been led to believe. i love it when people come up and say my great grandparents who came from romania and i love it and that's exactly the goal of all of this. my hope would be it would make everyone to go back and find the oldest person in their family, take the lemon meringue pie, whatever it may take -- i found that it was quite helpful to get them to describe the recipes, have them cooking. have them cook and then it would start to come out. there's a crisis in my book where ida mae from mississippi discovered they are using self-rising meal for corn in mississippi. and she said we've never made things like that in the old country and our friend who was from italy, who was of italian-american descent and she said we go over the exact same thing with the pasta. here we are making it from scratch and assuming we're doing the right thing and they're not doing that and so i love the way of getting people to talk is

often by going where you're not getting resistance. where do they feel comfortable and hoping they'll lead you from there. >> i know we have to go to questions, but two other very quick things. if you're trying to talk to people and bring out stories, the other thing you can do is use your children. because mine were a big help to me. i had young children. and my mother also did not want to talk about any of this. and i couldn't move forward until she actually got and it took a lot and she's incredible and i'm so glad that she did. we learned quite a bit because of that. and one of the ways she edged her way there is that the kids could ask her questions. children are innocent and demanding at the same time and they can get away with asking questions that you never can get away with. and i found that mom would talk to me through my kids. and the last thing i would leave before we go to questions is, if you really do want to capture history, you have a wonderful opportunity to do that the day after thanksgiving. if you're an npr listener you're

familiar with storycorps. he champions a new holiday. it's the day after thanksgiving. the day when a lot of people go to the mall, a lot of us are already with family members, you're eating leftovers and you're watching football. while you're all together, take the opportunity on the national day of listening to listen to the people that you love. chronicle their stories and put them away. >> are there questions people want to ask? [applause] >> i have others. [applause] >> how are you doing?

[laughter] >> there were other migrations that's worth documenting although it's largely visible and that's the phenomenon called passing, a century ago it was routinely estimated 5 to 10,000 black people were turning into whites. a "new york times" critic that was written as white like me. but a question comes from reading an account by the first white person to turn himself black and travel through the south which is not john harold griffin in the land of jim crow and he uses the expression you can't figure behind the man for the economic exploitation of sharecropper that isabel talked about can you figure what behind the man is about. >> it's the concept of passing. african-americans who would pass for white mostly. >> i have discovered about a

dozen stories just in the last two weeks in mainly coming over through the link where people are emailing me stories about family members that they discovered had passed for people who themselves have passed and want to now reach back and find their history. it is a phenomena in this country that is probably greater than the numbers you cited. it probably happened quite often. and it is something that i would love to know more about. in each of these cases it's a sort of tortured decision to try to figure out how to reclaim family members, you know, that reached over to the other side. i would pull out your question, though, a little bit farther and, you know, look around the room. look at african-americans, look at what they look like in this country. i mean, the fact is that, you know, many of us are related to many of you. and no one really wants to talk a lot about that, but that is sort of the american -- another

sort of part of the hidden conversation in america. >> so my question was basically, obviously, your stories are -- [inaudible] >> in the older population, but have you had a chance of people trying to tell these stories to younger people, not necessarily younger african-americans but, you know, the kids who can't stop texting, can't stop looking online because this is definitely something that has a lot of resonance, i think, with people in the community, the idea of migration and looking for better pastures. have you had any experience with talking to people in that age group? >> well, i would respond in two ways. one, our books are fairly new so it takes a while to get the book and to read them and to pass it on. but when it comes to the migration, there are many people in the, quote-unquote, hip hop generation that are part of -- that are descendents of the great migration. snoop doggy dog his name is

calvin broadus his family moved from mississippi to los angeles. sean combs family moved from north carolina to new york. tupac is probably the best known people of the iconic people of his generation that is a descendent of that migration also from north carolina. to new york. so i think that it takes time for people to recognize the connection. and that's the reason why we want to record history because maybe people are not ready for it now but one day they will be and i have a friend who actually bought it for her 5-year-old. she wants me to sign it because she can't read it now but one day she will be able to and i think that's beautiful. ,,,,

>> one out of, it was a lynching summer in itself every three days and -- in the decades before the migration. and your decades of the migration. this is a very real threat people were living under. so it would not impossible for people to be walking in the streets, marching and protesting as a leader would in the '60s. by that time, by the 1960s, african-americans were here and the white people who supported the effort toward freedom had more support for being able to move forward with that. that had an eminence affect on the cell. that many people knew there was a place they could go, there were people coming back showing them how they were freer in an a

with. even if some of it wasn't true. they would -- people in south didn't know that. they put on a show. the final thing they did was they provided leverage for people who were here and my to did a place to go once they put themselves on the line. that's black and white. the people in the north, as immigrants often do when sending money back south to help move this process forward, because they loved the land they left. one of the beautiful quote from someone who's in the early stages, if i had a choice i would not have left. if i could do anything that i wanted, i would not have left the south. but those left openly said, i heard it over and over again, one form or the other, based on how things work, i've made many statements -- mistakes in my life believing the south was not one of them. they were part of a generation that had no other choice.

the south are still living with the effects, i also feel the south can take great pride in what these people did. these people did what they did not because they left but because they left the southern culture. that southern culture was the music, the spiritual, the gospel, the rhythms that john cole train took with him to philadelphia when he got that alto sax. so i think there's a sharing between the two and there's an interchange between the two. >> there was also respect as well. i see that when i go back to birmingham. what you had was a certain kind of bright light. people who could leave, left. people with means left. people were the most ambitious lead. and when i go back to the birmingham to use to know, which was this vibrant black business district, it's decimated them. it's difficult to talk about because when you talk of

integration you talk about progress, moving forward, but under segregation doctors live down the street from each other. they sent their kids to the same school. they lived in this community that might not have been rich but was rich in social capital. and what happened is when people could move, you had this d aspera and it took something from that community. black businesses suffered. institutions like parker high school where my father -- if you're black you lived in birmingham, until the 1950s, he went to parker high, the only high school for negroes. if you want to birmingham, they sold postcards with a high school on it. parker is a shell of itself. when my father went to parker all of the teachers, all of them, every single one of them have masters degrees because they could work anywhere else. until they went into teaching.

that's a bad thing they couldn't go to work anywhere else but imagine the kind of education you would get in that kind of environment. so you knows it was this sort of underside to an aggression that we don't always talk about, that i had to face and very painful ways in writing this book and something that really makes me, that makes me quite sad. >> thank you. >> thank you. we've run out of time. and i want to -- [applause] >> i want to thank you for coming and sharing this hour with us. thank you. they will be signing books in about 15 minutes in the authors tent which is on the other side of this. thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> this event was part of the texas book festival. to find out more about the festival and the authors that. they are, visit texas book festival.org. >> i essential engineer, why science alone will not solve our global problems. its author joins me, henry petroski. welcome, and tell us what is the reasoning behind the subtitle here, why science alone will not solve our global problems? >> we hear a lot about the global problems, climate change and so forth. we also hear a lot about the importance of what science will do to help alleviate these problems or outright solve them. the history of science and technology teaches us differently. science and scientists generally do not solve problems. they help but engineers are the problem solvers. engineers and problem solving are really hand in glove. >> in your book you define the

difference between scientists and engineers and how they work together. tell us more about that. >> scientists generally want to understand the world that is given to us. the university of you will, the classic scientist studies the planets and the stars and wants to know the origin of the universe and so forth. getting to the bottom of things. but engineers on the other hand really want to change the world. they want to introduce new things, new machines, new devices. things that contribute to our civilization and our comfort. scientists and engineers get together in what's called research and development, r&d what we hear a lot about. but again the scientist on the research and engineers are on the development. there has to be teamwork, a passing of the baton from understanding the situation as it is to changing the situation through engineering. >> what's the difference between how engineering and science got us to where we are now, and have engineering and science will take us into the future? >> that's an excellent question because as you know a lot of

people think those are the people that got us into trouble in the first place. well, we always have incomplete knowledge. science is always a community further knowledge. we are always working, as engineers, with incomplete knowledge of the world and the laws of nature. so we make mistakes in that sense. have to call them innocent mistakes in the sense they were done, generally speaking, you know, without full knowledge of application. that's not to excuse them because we really should look down the line to let the applications of whatever we do will be. however, if we try to study the problem, we never get to solving the problem. and that's a fine edged -- financially separate issues. >> in later chapters you talk about speed bumps. why did you use speed bumps as an example of the relationship between scientists and engineers? >> well, every problem that we try to solve, or every part of

nature that we try to understand, we invariably have to regroup partly along the path to the and. and i described these as the bounce because i think it's a very good metaphor but it's not original with the, actually, but, you know, speedboats are sometimes helpful. and i try to point that out in the book also, that they make us think, they make us recalibrate, they make us think about whether they we're not on the right road or the right street. if we're being reminded of that, we are going to fast. it gets us back to what we're talking about that if we're going to fast to a solution, we might miss some of the applications that we might regret later on. >> you will be presenting later on you at the national book festival. what we tell the folks who come to see a? >> i've only got about 20 minutes and were to allow time for questions and answers. i'm going to focus on the difference between scientists and engineers. science and engineering.

because i think there's a general misunderstanding about that. a lot of times engineers are just grouped with scientists. it's not that they resent that. is that it is inaccurate because of the distinctions that i try to draw. and especially in these days when we are trying to deal with so many global problems, so many really important issues. we hear a lot out in washington really, right where we are, that if we want to innovate, if you want to really change the way we do things so that we can affect the economy and improve it, we've got to throw more money at science. that leads engineering out of the equation entirely. maybe there's a confusion that may be engineers are intended to be included in science, but more often than not it's clear that they are not included. and by not understanding that connection, i think we miss opportunities. all the great innovations of the world basically, all history,

our engineering innovations. and they are usually done, if not always done, with incomplete scientific knowledge. and i'll talk about some of those examples this afternoon, the steam engine. there was no science on which to base this dimension that it was only after the steam engine was operating for a couple centuries that scientist begin to look at as an object of study. the wright brothers are another excellent example, trying to develop an airplane that would give us powered flight. the wright brothers looked for scientific up bases on which to design their wings and propellers and even wrote to the special institution right on this mall and asked, what do you have in your files that will help us. and after they got back was well, there's nothing directly related to what you want to do. so what the wright brothers had to do is they had to go into the of science. they had to do tests so they could figure out what the shape of propellers should have, something as simple and basic as that.

so the airplane was really developed with very, very little science to back it up. and i want to emphasize things like that this afternoon so that we understand that if we just wait for science to bring us the raw materials for innovation, we are either going to have to wait a very, very long time, or they're wasting time because we don't need complete information to move ahead. >> in addition to being an author, do you consider yourself a scientist or and engineers? >> i consider myself both. in this regard, but i'm an engineer in that i am very interested in creating things. i mean books i see as creations. but i'm a scientist because i do have to study. i do not get to the heart of the matter. and in most of my study, most of engineering education includes a lot of science so you really learn to think like a scientist as well as an engineer. one of the things i'll talk about this afternoon is outward i said you show that you can be both, and he's a classic example

but it's not widely known that it's widely known that he worked as a patent office when he was young. largely because he couldn't get a job as a scientist. but then in the 1920s he began to be an inventor in his own right. after he won the nobel prize and become really, he could have just sat back and do science. but there was a special challenge to doing and invention and engineering, and what he did was a very mundane thing among others, but refrigerators in the 1920s were very, very new. and they were subject to leaks, and refrigerant that the leaked was poisonous. so whole families were being killed when they were sleeping because of the leaking refrigerator. einstein said that must be a better way, and that's exactly what an inventor says. he went on to invent a refrigeration system that would not leak.