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

by Imani Perry

Appalachia, however, began as a different kind of errand in the wilderness, one that I would argue is much more central to who we are as Americans, despite how remote Appalachia is from most of our lives. The gospel was extracting abundance from the wild landscape. Human sacrifice was expected. Suffering death and repetition served the new-world aristocracy of wealth. In Appalachia the errand isn’t an end but a repetition. Alliances and affections shift, but the whole cast repeats itself. And the frontier hasn’t closed up even now, even where the earth has been sucked dry. People wrestle against the landscape, living on land that only yields a little bit, or on abundant land from which they only have legal right to a little bit, if anything. The song of the Mountain South is that which rings out into open air. It, too, is a way of asserting oneself, as not a cog in the system but a presence. The vibrato, the Southern yodel, cracked grief in wet bluegrass, is a sermon that repeats itself.