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

by Imani Perry

A FRENCH QUADRILLE IS A DANCE of four couples. At certain moments all dancers take the same steps. Other times they pivot and turn against each other. They twist and curtsy in and out of unison. Music tailored to this set dance signals when to be still and when to glide.

The Africans danced quadrilles, too. Out of doors. In Congo Square on Sundays. And they did the calinda, hips shimmying until they touched a partner’s, then easing back in unison. They did the bamboula, in a round.

They were Virginians, Bajans, Bini, Edo, and Kongo. And native Orleanians.

In 1839, Henry Bibb, with his wife and child, lived in a slave pen. Henry had what was called drapetomania: the psychiatric condition of repeatedly running away to freedom.

I wish people wouldn’t truncate history into romance. I mean, really, do you think that house slaves lived in ease? Do you think a “kindly master” was anything but an oxymoron?

The United States is, formally speaking, the child of Great Britain. And we teachers, historians, and patriots all have inherited a British inclination to tell history in a linear forward sequence.

In 1839, Washington Irving declared his dislike for the name of the nation. “America” was inadequate.

Edgar Allan Poe agreed, in part:

Poe thought claiming the Indigenous name “Appalachia” might be some recompense for Indigenous people who had been “unmercifully despoiled, assassinated and dishonored.”

So many people live in the ruins of the American drive for prosperity.

Mountain Dew soda, the most excessively sweet drink you can think of, is called that after moonshine, mastered in mountain country.

“Family values” was a catchphrase of the rise of the religious right. The way they did it was hypocritical at best.

The church gave her a sense of purpose, saved her soul.

mint julep,

the drink was neatly uprooted from Black bartenders who concocted that and other drinks under the yoke of slavery.

Jim Cook and John Dabney, whose recipe reportedly was “Crushed ice, as much as you can pack in, and sugar, mint bruised and put in with the ice, then your good whiskey, and the top surmounted by more mint, a strawberry, a cherry, a slice of pineapple

a three-year-old filly owned by J. S. Stables named Breonna was raced at Churchill Downs during Derby Week. She won. The jockey rode her like a beast. They claimed it was a way to “say her name.”

True savages!

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. There is no resolution to unjust relations without a structural and ethical change.

If a Southerner says “skeet,” you should know it means ricochet and not just a sexual reference from a rap song that got to the mainstream in the early 2000s.

“Black,” “African,” and “Nigger” were roughly equivalent words of degradation, precisely because the charge was that Blackness itself was inferior, that Africa was the dark continent from which niggers could and should be stolen because it was without human value,

pastor Harry Hosier, born in 1750, was never literate, but he preached the gospel with a preternatural ability to memorize long passages of Bible verse.

Omar Ibn Said, was a scholar. Captured from where Senegal is now and sold into slavery, Ibn Said escaped his first owner in Charleston, South Carolina, and found himself incarcerated in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

In 2012, the Wilmington Ten were finally pardoned.

Harvey Gantt, a Black man, lost in senate races to Jesse Helms, a former Klansman, twice.

he was just a country Black boy who first balled on the land where his forefathers felt the lash.

Critical theorist Walter Benjamin once distinguished between two types of storytellers: one is a keeper of the traditions; another is the one who has journeyed afar and tells stories of other places. But there is a third, and that is the exile.

Michael Jordan matriculated at the University of North Carolina, where a prominent Confederate statue called “Silent Sam” was a fixture. Silent Sam was dedicated by Julian Shakespeare Carr in 1913.

There is even a town in North Carolina, Carrboro, named after Carr.

I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed this pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison,

In that case, it was the decision of UNC to give the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and to offer the organization a $2.5 million trust for its care and preservation—in other words, a windfall.

Soulja Boy, an Atlanta rapper, once said, mortifyingly, “Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa.

PepsiCo, hails from New Bern, North Carolina. Caleb Bradham invented Pepsi in 1893 in his drugstore and marketed it as a digestion aid. RC Cola, the first canned soft drink, first made in Columbus, Georgia, became a favorite among Mountain South miners through clever marketing that claimed a MoonPie and an RC would keep you going all day

The Chattanooga Bakery has been making MoonPie since 1917.

singer LaShun Pace’s “I Know I’ve Been Changed,” I noticed the line “God’s chemical laboratory of redemption took my black soul and dipped it in red blood / And I came out white as snow.”

Tapson Mawere, a revolutionary intellectual in the fight for Zimbabwean independence, came to Birmingham to speak of the global African liberation struggle.

When I entered higher education, I was taught to treat Richard Wright with skepticism.

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole were forced out of their national territories in the Southeast because of cotton greed.

American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity: oil, coal, and cotton.

thousands of Hobby Lobby–owned artifacts, presumably intended to be housed at the museum, were confiscated by the FBI because they had been stolen from Iraq. Hobby Lobby paid a fine and returned the relics. The museum claimed no intent to ever hold them. It did, however, feature fifteen Dead Sea Scrolls. As it turns out, those were all fakes.

Jackson is named for Andrew Jackson, though, like many parts of the South, it might just as easily have been named for Stonewall Jackson.

Chicken production remains a dirty business. Five companies—Tyson Foods, based in Arkansas; Pilgrim’s Pride, a multinational company that began as a feed store in Pittsburg, Texas; Perdue of Salisbury, Maryland; Sanderson Farms, the only Fortune 1000 company in Mississippi; and Koch Foods of Illinois—all with processing factories in Mississippi, together control about 60 percent of the entire US chicken market.

Muhammad Ali, from the Upper South city of Louisville, Kentucky, mocked the Beaufort, South Carolina, Low Country–born Joe Frazier, calling him dumb, slow, and ugly. Ali described himself as slicker, prettier, lighter, and better as a boxer and person. It is mortifying to recall that time when a hero diminished himself with an outsized ego. Joe Frazier was still talking about how deeply it hurt him three decades later.

Albert Cleage, a Black nationalist Christian minister and writer who renamed himself Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman.

Denmark Vesey, one of the South Carolina’s most significant enslaved insurrectionists, was once a member of Mother Emanuel. It had been founded in 1816. City leaders forced them to close their doors in 1818. Too much freedom happened there. And after Vesey’s revolt, the building was burned to the ground in 1822, only to be rebuilt.

Vesey had bought his own freedom with his earnings from a local lottery, but hadn’t been able to free his first wife and children, or the members of his church. The revolt he planned had the ultimate goal of, after freeing the enslaved, sailing to Haiti. The plan was squashed before it began. Thirty-five Black people, Vesey among them, were hanged in penalty for plotting their freedom.

Dollar General began in 1939 in Scottsville, Kentucky, as J. L. Turner and Son. In the mid-’50s its name was changed to Dollar General, and in 1968 the company went public.

Cuban conservatism has everything to do with the Cuban Revolution and the early departures of certain sectors of Cubans from Castro’s Cuba.

Puerto Ricans have been written into the nation-state as second-class citizens of the United States since 1917, with formal full citizenship but only partial voting rights as long as they live on the island.

In 1979, police officers chased thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie on his motorcycle, claiming he’d made a vulgar gesture at them. When McDuffie toppled off the bike, police removed his helmet, beat him to death, and then replaced the helmet.

with his assistant Sam Yette, who would later become well-known as a journalist who famously described White supremacist thinking as a form of genocide.