Northerners reflexively understand that New York is not Chicago is not L.A., but for many of those same people the South is the South through and through — a monolith, singular. Southern accents, Southern music, Southern politics, and Southern race relations all tend to reduce to generalizations once they escape the orbit of the South itself.
Imani Perry’s rangy, observant book, South to America, is in large part an attempt to undo that reflex, to expose multiple Souths. Indeed, she argues, conventional wisdom has it exactly backward: the resistance to the diversity of the South reveals a racist instinct to apply uniformity that has infected the rest of the country. Rural Floridians are not Alabamans are not Appalachians are not Black Belters, but north of the Mason-Dixon line, the scapegoating instinct is the same. “I have learned in the course of my travels that there are ‘Souths,’ plural as much as singular,” she writes.
Outsiders do this in part to compartmentalize, ignore, and scapegoat: it’s the place where Northerners can comfortably shunt racism as something that isn’t their own but instead the legacy of the Klan and lynching. (As if those were exclusively Southern phenomena.) Appalachian Whites, she notes, are “convenient repositories for shameful Whiteness — virulently racist, backwards, and unsophisticated.” Perhaps the rise of protests and activity around Black Lives Matter has changed or ameliorated that perception, but Perry — a professor of African-American studies at Princeton — has good reasons to be skeptical. They’re right under her feet in every place she visits.
South to America is structured as a travelogue, chronicling Perry’s travels through Virginia, Birmingham, New Orleans, and more. In that regard, it’s modeled after Albert Murray’s 1971 book about his Alabama roots, South to a Very Old Place. But where Murray could often be sardonic, Perry is more plainspoken and omnivorous, determined to reveal the range of cultures that overflow from her travels. Although the legacy of slavery is omnipresent, she honors places where it was transcended. In Washington, D.C., Howard University represents “a parallel to Ellis Island of sorts, a place through which a person might travel to become something — not an American, per se, but rather to become a person who understood her relationship to empire.” In Birmingham, her hometown, she finds a haven and proof that the Great Migration was not uniformly northward. Nashville’s Pearl High School, segregated during the Jim Crow era, stands as evidence of “the reach of institutions that nurtured Black children in the wake of a White supremacist order.”
But, naturally, the South she explores is also filled with scars. In New Orleans, she is reminded that the fleur-de-lis was used as a slave brand. In North Carolina, the “Silent Sam” Confederate statue has been taken down, but is now in possession of a Stars-and-Bars heritage group: “Refuge from White supremacy remains elusive in North Carolina,” she notes. “Refuge for White supremacists seems to be always available.” The best of the region’s music has been taken and reclaimed by the North. So has much of its history of racial activism — the Black Panthers, for instance, rooted in Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. And in pockets of the South, the old rules of White supremacy still apply: “We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different. Now the fugitives are from Central America, and the unfree laborers are in prison.”
Perhaps by necessity, Perry’s book is disorderly — now celebratory, now lamenting, now observant. She describes some stops as pilgrimages, some as simply having a good time, though the good time is always a little fraught. (Visiting the Bahamas — essential to any true map of the South thanks to its relation to the slave trade — she is obliged to note the presence of “water slides instead of history.”) If our understanding of the region is to change, Perry argues, we will have to take two distinct, somewhat contradictory tacks. First is to recognize the diversity of the region, which her book serves to demonstrate — it is an almost deliberately overgrown narrative, the better to speak to that lushness and complexity. But alongside that, she wants us to recognize the South’s “changing same,” the way that White supremacy continues to manifest itself in the face of efforts to unwind it. Slavery’s inheritance is today’s culture of incarceration and detention, and “the difference is one of degree but not kind.”
That inheritance forces the visitor of the South, or the student of its folkways, to be particularly attentive and intentional. It’s no small thing, she notes, that Mississippi is “the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of its capital.” And #metoo rests uncomforably in the South, as a site where Black men were routinely lynched under false accusations of sexual assault. Efforts toward justice are challenged and tangled thanks to a racist legacy that has proven stubbornly difficult to dismantle. Where many see progress, Perry’s reflex is to see lateral movement at best. As a historian, she doesn’t want to sugarcoat any of this. But nor does she want to neglect what makes the South meaningful and appealing. It is, after all, a home — and home, she points out, is the key reason many Blacks didn’t head North during the Great Migration.
Perry refers to W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of twoness, how for Black Southerners life in the South is constantly contextualized within the region’s violent history. Although Perry doesn’t proffer a Grand Unified Theory of the South, twoness is ever-present, albeit in different forms in Alabama, Florida, or the Carolinas. One of the book’s most powerful chapters chronicles Perry’s search for details on an early ancestor of hers, alternately named Easter or Esther or Stace, born in Maryland in 1769, perhaps a runaway slave at some point. Her story is frustratingly vague for lack of documented details, but it’s also all too familiar. Perry’s urge to unpack her story is aligned with the same urge to unpack the national story. “What would it mean to cultivate a sense of nationhood that would honor Easter/Esther/Stace — the ones who labored in these fields?” she writes. “It would require us to put aside our focus on powerful individuals in favor of a collage of historical meaning, allowing for what will remain unrecorded, and what will come to the surface unexpected.” South to America is a model for what that collage can look like.
[Published by Ecco on January 25, 2022, 416 pages, $28.99 hardcover]