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

by Imani Perry

In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be manumitted. This fact attracted Black people from across the Atlantic world. In 1841, there was a revolt on a slave ship called the Creole, which was transporting people from Virginia to be sold in New Orleans. The insurgent Africans ordered the ship sailed to Nassau.

Haiti has always been made to pay for being free. Their national debt, and recurrent economic suffering, began in the demand that they repay France for its loss of a profitable slave society. They were punished with military occupation and dominion that impoverished Haiti and Haitians. They are punished by disdain when they seek refuge in other nations. This reality became extremely clear in 2019 after Hurricane Dorian

King wrote his mountaintop speech in the Bahamas,

Tour guide Ansil Saunders remembers taking King to the “holy grounds” where mockingbirds, vireos, and sugarbirds flew above and snappers surrounded them in the water. King stated his belief in God as he considered that view.

King would gaze at Bimini today and see the stricken and ravaged dwellings of Haitians post–Hurricane Dorian and be reminded of why he had shifted gears in his last months to focus his organizing on poverty, economic exploitation, and neocolonialism.

In the Bahamas, Junkanoo is celebrated from December 26 to January 1.

Junkanoo is a tourism boon for the Bahamas, and has all but disappeared in the United States.

FOR 102 YEARS, THE REMAINS of Columbus were housed in Havana. They were placed at the Havana Cathedral in 1796, when France took over Hispaniola. In 1898, when Cuba freed itself of Spanish dominion, they sent his ashes with them. In the Bahamas, Discovery Day, in honor of Columbus, was celebrated until 2012, when it was replaced by National Heroes Day.

Toni Morrison wrote critically about Ernest Hemingway’s racial politics in his novel To Have and Have Not.

Hemingway, for his part, distinguished between Cubans and “niggers.”

The babalawo told me that the orisha were uncertain of my intentions because the circumstances of my life were different than when I had seen a Mae Do Santos, a woman Candomblé priestess, in Bahia, Brazil.

Langston Hughes was more skeptical than I. When he and Zora Neale Hurston visited a conjure man in the woods of Georgia, Hughes described his ritual in detail.

Tobe Nwigwe, a rapper who has garnered a large following on Instagram, sang his outrage. “Try Jesus, not me. ’Cause I throw hands.” Along with his partner, Ivory, known as Fat, and producer LaNell Grant, they provide in the square frames of Instagram a theological service under the hashtag #gettwistedsundays. It is profane, socially critical, gospel-inflected, and unapologetic hip hop.