South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

by Imani Perry

I think maybe reenactment should be described as a performance art, even if I am still uneasy about the pleasure it provides.

Acting like you know everything and acting like you don’t know how to be respectful will keep you ignorant. Be humble.

A fiddler, a lawyer, and eventually a politician, Henry believed that both slavery and the fact that the Anglican church remained the official church of Virginia were injurious to the development of the colony. He was also a slaveholder. This is what I think of when people say we must have practical politics. Murderous hypocrisy is an old American habit.

The enslaved, it explains, were property and people both. The logic that followed was insincere: as people they must have some form of representation. But of course the three-fifths clause was not representation of the enslaved at all. This is what it doesn’t say: we believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls, and this is why those individuals must count for more in our government. It is not the case, as some argue, that the clause was a term of art meaning that Black people counted for three-fifths of a person. They did not count at all. Rather slaveholders were made larger people by virtue of holding others as slaves.

We think of the Klan as the violent thugs of history, because they were. But the familiarity of their ethos should shake us to awareness. Their practice was described as generous, family-oriented, and respectable. The Klan is so very American.

The distinction between country and Southern is a fine one. Southern is regional and cultural; country is a disposition.

(Incidentally, the difference between “folks” and “folk” is the difference between a collection and a collective. Folks can be relatives or a community. Folk is never just family; it is always the larger group.)

If you think, mistakenly, that American racism can be surmounted by integration, by people knowing each other, even by loving each other, the history of the American South must teach otherwise.

You see, there is no point in the entire scope of magnificent events when we—and I mean Black people homegrown over multiple generations rooted in the Deep South—were ever under the delusion that racism was gone rather than sometimes, temporarily, quieted.

The Mississippi River has been called the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world.

When I entered higher education, I was taught to treat Richard Wright with skepticism. He was not a vital force in the African American literary tradition according to the canon I was taught, but rather a flat-footed Marxist (in contrast, elegant Marxists were allowed).

In the nineteenth century, cotton “came to dominate world trade . . . the factory itself was an invention of the cotton industry,” according to Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton. And the rise of the United States as a global power rested upon cotton.

One way to read this is in simple Marxian terms: the working class was divided against itself by means of the false consciousness of race. But that is too easy an interpretation in a society that had been forged by race. Whiteness was an article of faith. It redeemed suffering. And afforded compensation in the ability to feed bloodthirstiness—lynching, burning, beating, raping, humiliating—which also became matters of faith. That might not provide a tidy economic explanation, but it became an undeniable and central aspect of the social order. It was material.

Everything changed when Bob’s father went on an evangelical trip to Europe, hoping to convert Jewish people to Christianity in order to protect them from Nazis, which of course drips with irony and yet is wholly Southern.

In fact, I would argue that 1954 to 1965 was the most significant decade in the history of US constitutional law and legislation.

In 1864, Union General Sherman marched to Savannah after the burning of Atlanta. Upon reaching Savannah, I have read, Sherman was taken by its beauty and could not bring himself to destroy it. I have also read that Savannah’s mayor offered immediate surrender in exchange for the Union Army keeping property and person undisturbed. Perhaps both details are true. In any case, it is one of the best-preserved cities in the South.

One of the difficult side effects of desegregation—and you’ll hear it again and again from Black people who lived in the before time—is that something precious escaped through society’s opened doors. Even acknowledging how important desegregation was, the persistence of American racism alongside the loss of the tight-knit Black world does make one wonder. What if we had held on to those tight networks ever more closely, rather than seeking our fortune in the larger White world that wouldn’t ever fully welcome us beyond one or two at a time? Such reflection often leads to a sorrowful place, though not what I would call regret.

The Janus face of Southern Whiteness—they know what they’ve done wrong, and they know you know; they hate you for it, and hate themselves for it, too—is strange.

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Jacksonville is two hours south of Savannah on I-95. It is the largest city in the United States by area, and at nine hundred thousand residents, it is the most populous city in Florida and in the Southeast.

The dollar store is one of many business models given to us by the South, like Walmart but far more modest and even cheaper.

A significant number of Seminoles live in Oklahoma now, as a consequence of the Indian Removal Act. But several hundred stayed in Florida and their number grew over the generations. They constituted themselves a Maroon colony that, in fighting to maintain their land, would earn the distinction of becoming the longest-standing military defense against the United States waged by an African or Indian group.

In 2007, the Seminole purchased the Hard Rock Cafe brand, an international theme restaurant featuring rock music paraphernalia, and relocated the business to Florida, first to Orlando and then to Davie, just north of Miami.

While the South lost the Civil War technically, White Southerners did not in fact lose the war substantively.

I would venture to guess that horror is also part of why New Orleans food is so delicious. Food is the blues here.

When one tells the history of the mid-twentieth-century South, it ought not simply be a story of the struggle for civil rights and its backlash. It is also a hemispheric economic history. And to the extent that the unfinished history of the movement includes persistent economic inequality that depended on the repression of labor movements, political domination, and extralegal violence, that is a history that sits within the region writ broadly. New Orleans is a crossroads.

Norbert Rillieux, cousin to painter Edgar Degas, an homme de couleur (man of color) offspring of a White planter, earned a place in history by creating what is termed the multiple-effect evaporator for sugarcane. Rillieux created a machine to harness steam from boiling cane syrup, putting it through three chambers. At the end of the process, he was left with refined sugar crystals.

Along the route is the Nottoway House, the largest surviving antebellum plantation house. It is three stories tall with sixty-four rooms and has been named a triple-A four-diamond resort. Guests get to sleep in four-poster beds and have their pictures taken in the glory of the antebellum South. It survived the Civil War and the civil rights movement, and is pristine in its glorification, poisoned air or not.

Like the Whitney Plantation, also along the Great River Road, which has been restored as a way to tell the history of slavery. It retains all of its beauty and its horror. In 1811, the largest slave revolt in the US South took place there. About five hundred enslaved Africans rose up. When they were defeated, dozens of the enslaved were executed and beheaded. Their heads were planted on poles as warnings. Now, in a memorial to the insurrectionists, sixty-three heads are set before a white picket fence with twisting vines. Each face is rendered distinctly and permanently in ceramic. And yet I am unsettled about this permanent image of violence, as authentic as it is. I’d rather see them armed.