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

by Imani Perry

“The Negro regards the Democratic party as his traditional and hereditary foe. Tradition, gratitude and sentiment bind him to the Republican party with an idolatrous allegiance which is as blind as it is unpatriotic and unreasoning. TODAY THERE IS VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO PARTIES AS FAR AS THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD THE NEGRO IS CONCERNED.”

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t allow me to dig; it was that my spirit, generations tired, didn’t want to.

It is the Whitest region of the South and among the poorest, plagued by failed American dreams.

Being a Black American requires double consciousness, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, the habit of seeing from inside the logic of race and the lives of the racialized, and from the external superego of what it means to be American, with all its archetypes and interests.

So many people live in the ruins of the American drive for prosperity. The residual mining towns are evidence. If you tell a story about the American worker in the twentieth century, you have to talk about the miner, Appalachia’s heroic archetype.

There was no Black cemetery in that mountain town. So the Black dead were buried alongside one another in an open field. There they rested until another building project years into the future meant they would be dug up and interred again elsewhere. Kill them, throw them away, dig them up, repeat. Remember that choreography.

“You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store . . .”

One of the most important global throughlines of the twentieth century is that of exploited workers demanding their due. Another is, as Du Bois put it, the problem of the color line. In mountain country, these two legacies clashed. Poor and working-class White Americans were taught that if they expressed solidarity with Black people, also exploited, also laboring hard, they’d lose what Du Bois termed “the wages of whiteness,” those benefits that went along with not being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is well established that poor and working-class White people have hoped to gain something from Whiteness—and yet also have a complaint with the way it excludes them from all the status it promised.

True Treats Historic Candy shop.

According to epidemiologists and physicians, Southerners weigh too much, have too much tooth decay, eat too much fat, and drink too much coke. We cushion against the hurt with the abundance of love found in food. And we revel in taking up space with sayings: “Only a dog wants a bone,” we say. The constraints are rarely mentioned: overwork, poverty, the convenience of fast food. That’s all a part of the story. It really isn’t a regional story so much as a national one and a historic one. But the sweetest of the sweet tooths grew down here in part because of how the land was organized by deprivation even when what it yielded was abundant. Slave labor, barely free labor, and the land itself were all worked to their limits. Something sweet gives you a little piece. Or peace.

Sometimes a body is desperate for some relief from the weight of worry and the sadness of feeling trapped. And the nasty trick with opioids is that they ease both physical pain and a hurting heart. Both are in abundance in mountain living. At the same time as we track the beauty, we must witness the trouble. The story of when work disappears isn’t just a story for American cities filled with Black people slipping down from working classes to poor. It is also up here, down there.

To that point, in Appalachia, there’s a long history of what anthropologists call tri-racial isolates: groups of multiracial people who retreated from the American racial matrix to be their own thing. They have varying names: Melungeons, Red Stockings, Brass Ankles, and the like. They kept to themselves historically and had to stay that way to remain ambiguous.

The civil rights struggle in Appalachia, as elsewhere in the South, was an effort at remaking what it meant to be Americans. The Highlander Folk School is one of the most important institutions in that generations-long endeavor.

In a profoundly unequal place, Whiteness is supposed to mean something. Whenever that is threatened, a hot resentment bubbles.

Thomas Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, with subsequent editions in the following years. It is a survey, a philosophical treatise, and thick description filled with grousing in the extreme. His disdain for slavery was mild in comparison with his disdain for the enslaved. He said of Black people:

Madison wrote Federalist no. 54 as a distillation of a basic legal order about race. Altogether, the Federalist Papers are a series of documents, argumentative essays, acts of suasion and assuagement, imagination, reason and passion. No. 54 makes clear that the logic of dominion when it came to Black people and also when it came to Southern gentlemen, implicit but potent, was built into our nation’s founding.

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.

A few years into the future, when Notes was in active circulation, Benjamin Banneker, a Black farmer, surveyor, mathematician, and—notably—one of two people who delineated the boundaries of Washington, DC, responded to Jefferson’s racism in the now classic text: I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of Beings who have long laboured under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt, and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments . . . Now Sir if this is founded in truth, I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us, and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the Same Sensations, and endued us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversifyed in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him.

The plantation ensured an aristocracy of people with amplified citizenship. Slavery ensured a herrenvolk nation, in which all were not treated as having been created equal. Even in the evasiveness of Federalist no. 54, even in the words carefully crafted to not be unseemly, what stitched the nation together was apparent.

Who did she plan to rule like kings and queens over? Nonbelievers? Sinners? Others? Speakers of different languages, those of different traditions or different bodies or desires? This God of which she spoke, it struck me, was the God of masters. It was the God that dictated that it was righteous to slaughter the Indigenous and enslave the heathens, and then later said that they could only come into his kingdom stripped of all of who they had been and supplicants to a Jesus with unlikely blue eyes and cascading blond hair, though born in Asia. It was the God of the settlers, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Baptist.

The God I was taught to believe in, a God rendered by the enslaved, was and remains at odds with that God. The God we’d been taught was the God of Exodus, the one who thundered “Let my people go.” Our God saw Caesar’s way was wrong, not because of who was on top and who was on bottom, but because of the addiction to the idea of top and bottom, and the sin of working people to death, and the crises of vice and viciousness.

Deterrence isn’t a theory applied to police officers. They are the crudest enforcement arm of White supremacy.

outrage we will map the relationships that allow the killings to continue. We treat politics like horse stalls, artificially separating our issues we race from here to there wearing blinders. We delight in the prettiest facades without looking around the back to what makes them possible. If we did, we might understand the cruelty of our diversions.

Inexact borders aside, what holds is this: we came before America was America. This woman who bore the name either of my favorite biblical queen or my favorite holiday was here, not as an accomplice to the settler colony, but as the victim of its displacement and captivity. She was a witness to the very exclusions that laid the foundation for the creation of a national identity. It is a remarkable status.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Deep Southerner who would EVER call Maryland or Washington, DC, the South.

Children have never stopped being in American fields, nor have they ever stopped being held captive on American soil. How often are we attentive to the fact that there are still child captives? In a conversation with a friend, I remember talking about the child-removal policy of the Trump administration. And he responded that it was harrowing indeed, but how new was it really? Yes, he was right. Democratic presidents have had the same practices, only less cruelly enacted.

Until recently, it was thought that the Dismal Swamp, which stretches from south Virginia through North Carolina, was a modest settlement at best, and that Maroon communities founded by runaways were rare in United States slavery. But recent archaeology has revealed it was a settlement that was sustained over generations. Literally thousands of people escaped to and lived within the swamp from the seventeenth century through the conclusion of the Civil War. It is a challenge, with the many generations of land clearing, to precisely detail the original size of the swamp, but by some estimates it was once over a million acres in size.

What would it mean to cultivate a sense of nationhood that would honor Easter/Esther/Stace—the ones who labored in these fields? 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.

I also eventually ordered the book I avoided in Annapolis. The Practice of Klannishness offers a tidy lesson. 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. We are used to making virtue out of shameful ways. And justifying brutality for the sake of virtue. It is easy to see the deception with the Klan, but imagine all the other ways those habits are made manifest in our culture.

We choose, daily, to sustain or neglect some detail of our lives and experiences. In this period of history, in which some people are clinging to the past and others are expunging it, perhaps we need to learn to acknowledge that most of us feel uncertain and even uneasy about what we will sustain and what we will leave behind. I’m talking about places like caves and historic homes, but also practices like electoral processes, courts, and constitutional interpretations. I’m talking about heroes of history and our consensus narratives about how we declare ourselves as a nation. I’m talking about local cultures and collective values. What will we make of those things that we decide to keep intact? The moment we refuse the idols of history, we are faced with the question of whether we ignore that it ever was, or turn to crafting a memory of it. I mean, I needed to caress the cool dark dolomite in order to feel the cave. And if we aren’t careful about what we are doing and where we are going—ecologically, politically, socially—we might find ourselves in a clearing that could be a trap. Without a lit way out.

“I mean, I think the Confederate flags and monuments are terrible and I hate them,” he went on, “but what’s the difference between that and any American monument?” He went on to talk about how slavery was a national institution. That many of the founding fathers were slaveholders, that it was central to the wealth and power of the country. “The only difference between the two flags is time period,” he concluded. Freeman was correct, of course.

After all, when American exceptionalism is extolled, it requires us to set aside genocide, slavery, colonialism, and all manner of shameful deeds to trumpet national honor. And when the ugliness is brought up, you can always expect the “men of their time” line will be dropped, as though accountability for destruction has an expiration date.

the South is supposed to bear the brunt of the shame, and that the nation’s sins are disposed upon it.

Howard, founded on March 2, 1867, just after emancipation, is a gathering place, one of those precious ones, for Black people, American and beyond. This is where William Leo Hansberry, the Mississippi-born father of African studies, taught leaders of African independence movements. This is where Charles Hamilton Houston crafted the Brown v. Board of Education litigation strategy. This is where the nation’s first Black sorority was founded. And though it may seem counterintuitive to many, Howard is one of the places that makes DC lean Southern. Sites of Black higher education are overwhelmingly Southern. When Toni Morrison left home, she went south, not as far south as the place her foreparents began, in Alabama, but to a place that had some old ways made of Maryland and Virginia. Countless others did the same. The South, even if it did not necessarily house the bulk of the Black middle class through the twentieth century, certainly educated them.

In 1970, DC was 71.1 percent Black. In 2017, it was 47.1 percent Black. Chocolate City is slipping away. Just take a look at the astronomical real estate listings or the “revitalized” neighborhoods. There are no historic firsts, no grand gestures, no monuments or museums that undo generations of exclusions under law, policy, and practice, or that stop the expulsion. It makes me wanna holler. Tell the truth. What is this symbolic republic?

It was a theatrical repetition of Gil Scott-Heron’s pointed phrase “A rat done bit my sister Nell with whitey on the moon.” Though the protestors were invited to watch the launch, and they were disarmed by that invitation, the point they tried to make remains poignant. The future had arrived, and the rural Black South was stuck in the past.

Von Braun, making himself into an American, told the people in Alabama to pronounce his name “Brown.” And he was fully immersed. Signs of his influence are everywhere. He created a research center at the University of Alabama, and various institutions bear his name, such as the Von Braun Center and the Von Braun Astronomical Society. In 2014, von Braun’s custom-built house in Huntsville was up for sale. I looked at it on Zillow. The nearly three-thousand-square-foot ranch on Big Cove Road is a large mid-century modernist home with a two-car port and built-in bookcases in the den, set back behind cedar trees. A moss carpet lies before it. It is an understated but historically recognized dwelling. Yet there is no marker out front bearing his name. It doesn’t matter; local people know.

Howard said she thought she was getting away from racism when she traveled to the Northwest but then realized that “[t]he South has tons of black people, so even if you’re racist, you’re still down with the black people. But up there, they ain’t got that many black people so they don’t even know how to act.”

We lived together, Black and White. We traveled from the Upper South to the Deep South together. We died together. This intimate garment is a lesson. 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.

Down here, Black and White folks both use the word “nigger.” Not in polite company, of course. And I want to explain it. Do we begin at the beginning? Or do we begin where we are today? It is a slur that demanded the tongues of Black people at the outset, forced to wear the mask of subservience. Some of those tongues turned in on themselves, forked, sucking in poison; some others—more I believe—began to speak on two registers, or three, or four. In case you haven’t noticed, Black American language does that frequently. Our words mean multiple things, sometimes opposing. Of course they would. How else in this nation could there be a way for Black people to both love themselves and stay alive?

When I heard about the suicide of Nigel, I thought about the ways people join forces of shared bigotries across the color line. Not all interracial cooperation is decent or good.

The religious right makes a virtue of White supremacy. And perhaps the best evidence of that is the combination of scapegoating and sexual scandal in their ranks. The religious right leads coordinated attacks on those they deem sinful: queer people, trans people, nonevangelical Black folks, and those who have had abortions. Evangelical preachers’ revelations of queerness, adultery, and breaching of various religious rules are accompanied by tears and shunning. A more complicated dynamic is that the distinction Mencken saw, between business and higher education on one side and religion on the other, is not so tidy. All ways of “knowing” in this country, not just articles of faith, are shaped by the histories of race and racism.

The story of David Walker, the landmark Black abolitionist, is a potent example. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a free woman. Walker argued in his classic 1829 manifesto that if the promise of the nation could ever be actualized, it would require a redemption in the eyes and experience of Black people. The same was true of Christianity, in his estimation. As a young adult, he witnessed an enslaved man forced to beat his wife to death. The redemption of a society that could support such cruelty would require mighty effort and a rebalance of power. Walker’s theology had older roots in North Carolina. There are two Black men who lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the eighteenth century who both articulated an early Black liberation theology.

The deeds of the rioters of Wilmington were illegal. But they went unpunished because the de facto law of the land had always been the respect of White grievance and the destruction of Black flourishing.

It was also the first time since 1870 (back when Republicans were the progressives) that Republicans controlled all branches of North Carolina government. They moved quickly to assert their power. They removed environmental regulations, cut unemployment benefits, refused to expand Medicaid, decried immigration, and targeted trans people with a notorious bathroom bill, insisting that people use the bathroom facilities of their gender assignment at birth. Their brand of reform focused on targeting extremely vulnerable populations, exploiting widespread and unfounded fear and hatred. Many leaders proclaimed that they followed Christian religion in this effort. Their policies became an altar to the God of masters and the people of plenty. People wondered how this could happen in North Carolina. But it ought not to have been surprising. It was part of a long choreography in which wealthy North Carolina elites respond harshly when threatened.

I am old enough and young enough to remember the police killing of Bonita Carter in Birmingham on June 22, 1979, when I was six, and the Greensboro massacre of November of 1979 in which the KKK killed five people, when I was newly turned seven, and the way Liberty City, Miami, exploded in the spring of 1980, when I was still seven, because of the snuffing of Arthur McDuffie—every instance a straight line from lynching and burning that we want to cast way back. But I remember. Murder is a tool of White supremacy.

“As I looked at Silent Sam, face down in the dirt, all I could think was that it was the end of another battle in a war we just can’t quit fighting, because we can’t tell the truth about why it started.” It is true, even in the progressive Southern state, the act of dying in the service of White supremacy is lauded and its resurrection keeps coming. The virtue of racism is proclaimed through thinly veiled proclamations. 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. Members of the UNC community who were outraged by this gift spoke up, and the settlement was soon overturned.

I wonder what North Carolinian Pauli Murray, the first Black woman Episcopal priest, a pioneer in civil rights law, a professor, and, as their personal papers reveal, genderqueer, would have said about it all. How would they martial faith in response to persecution? Murray was rejected from the University of North Carolina law school in 1938 because of their race, and from Harvard because of their assigned gender; they’d faced bathroom crises in their life, dressed in conventionally masculine attire and often read as male. Would they feel fit to battle now? Or would they be struck dumb by how much hadn’t changed? The battle wages on. And it is and was one that is a matter of law and policy as well as symbol, still.

In one of Chesnutt’s conjure tales, titled “Po’ Sandy,” a conjuring woman named Tenie turns a fellow slave, Sandy, into a pine tree to protect him from the hardships of slavery. Each night she turns him back to human so they can keep company. Until one day Sandy, living as a tree, is chopped down for lumber. His body can never be reassembled. Bereft, Tenie sees Sandy mangled, neatly planked, and turned into a small building: a monument to suffering. Uncle Julius tells this story to his Northern neighbors in order to prevent them from tearing down that very structure, which is now on their property. His effort to sway the Northerners is successful. They grant him, the native, authority over the building. And Julius, pleased, goes on to use it as a church.

Atlanta is over 50 percent Black, it is luminous with Black celebrity and iconography, but the unbearable Whiteness of its being—and by that I mean a very old social order grown up from plantation economies into global corporations—still leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable. No matter how it might look, Atlanta still comes out white as snow.