SOUTH TO AMERICA
A Journey Under the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
By Imani Perry
At the beginning of “South to America”, Imani Perry implores the reader, “Please remember, although this book is not history, it is a true story.” I tried to keep these instructions in mind – not always easy with a story so painstakingly researched and full of facts and quotes – but in the end I rejected them. After all, Perry focuses on everything from hip-hop to the United Fruit Company and her own grandmother. Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which spans across the genre, kicks the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages in literary criticism, and flashes from journalism to memoir to academic writing — well, that’s a silly message. and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and relocation project.
This is not a “both sides” affair: Perry is an unabashed “move baby”, raised by intellectual freedom fighters. The belief of this book is that race and racism are fundamental values of the South, that “creating racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to customs and dispositions that eventually became the everyday ways of doing things in this country.” In other words, the south is America, and its history and influence, cannot be dismissed as an embarrassing relative at the country’s banquet table.
Inspired by Albert Murray’s 1971 memoir-cum-travel journal “South to a Very Old Place,” Perry travels to more than a dozen southern towns and villages, unearthing histories as well as modern realities. She starts at Harpers Ferry, W.Va. We meet Shields Green, a Black South Carolinian known as the “Emperor of New York”, who was executed along with John Brown. His heroism was nearly lost to history, and to make matters worse, his body, after being hanged, was given to Winchester Medical College for dissection. In telling his story, Perry reveals the first of many patterns in the quilt stitched onto these pages: At each stop, she tells an atrocity, but also resistance. And she doesn’t shy away from documenting the consequences.
From the three essays examining Alabama, it becomes clear that, despite a childhood in New England, Perry’s heart belongs to the quirky Yellowhammer State. Her tone becomes tender when she thinks of her dancing cousins or the foot-washing Baptists. Her portraits of her grandmother combine elegiac longing and the rigor of a historian who sets the record straight. Equally moving are the messages from Louisiana, her mother’s hometown.
The theme of unmarked graves and untold stories permeates this work. As a remediation, Perry mentions dozens of Southerners: some famous, some unknown. As Andre 3000 stated, “The South has something to say.” And it’s something breathtaking — from fine art to reality television, internationally traded companies to roadside rib shacks whose flavors inform the American palate.
Perry vowed to visit and consider as much of the south as possible for this project; this ambition is both a gift and an obstacle. The advantage of such a large canvas is that patterns are easy to spot. Historical injustices such as the Wilmington massacre cannot be dismissed as a one-off, nor can the contemporary violence of Dylann Roof or the legendary resistance of Rosa Parks. Perry believes that a “hidden virtue of an uncertain genealogy is a vast archive of ways to be learned from birth.”
Inevitably, though, not all sites receive the same amount of care and attention—and it’s clear that her allegiance lies with Alabama. Perry, an acolyte of Toni Morrison, nevertheless has one criticism of the Nobel laureate’s characterization of the women of Mobile. I understand her pain because it’s the same feeling that is evoked me as I read the chapter on Atlanta, mine birthplace. While Perry has the benefit of a guide in places, here she doesn’t cite the personal conversations that led to her insights, and the resulting observations feel a bit chilly. Perry declares that “the great metropolis of the South does not have an adequate public transportation system or a polyglot culture…” but goes on to propose that survivors of dirt roads instead seek solace in the shiny baubles sold in Lenox Mall. Well, that hurt my feelings.
Aside from the wounded pride, it must be said that this work, though at times uneven, is an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even being American itself. This is, as Perry puts it, “not conservation. This is intervention.” For too long the South has been scapegoated and reduced to a backward country on the other side of a translucent but impenetrable barrier.
Beyond the literal separation of the Mason-Dixon, Perry is fixated on the line that separates past and present. On her travels, she meets a Confederate reenactor who is celebrating a birthday. Though he has brought nostalgia and revisionism to life, Perry finds him surprisingly pleasing. Assuming he’ll talk about “northern aggression,” Perry chooses not to question him, and this is also the legacy of the intimacy of slavery – we’ve lived together for so long that we think we can read each other’s minds.
While visiting Maryland, Perry sees people in muslin shirts and straw hats working in a field. Her guts cramp, fearing she’s witnessing a brutal pre-war cosplay. As she approaches, Perry hears the men speaking Spanish. She was “sad, and also relieved. Workers, not re-enactors.” But this, of course, underscores the chorus of this immersion in Southern (American) life and history – to what extent are we all reenactors of the country’s brutal history? This work—and I use the term for both Perry’s labor and its fruit—is determined to provoke a return to the South’s other legacy, the ever-urgent struggle for freedom.