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

by Imani Perry

As a child, I used to speak to Imani on the phone. He called collect, his voice scratchy through the heavy black receiver. He reminded me to mind my parents and be good in school over the choppy line. He told me once that my name inspired him to change his and not to forget it. He was from Birmingham; so was I. He was locked up; I was up North. When he was finally released in 1991, he said it was talking to children that allowed him to keep it together after so many years.

We are people who see no necessary conflict between loving individual White people or the agape love of all human beings, including White people, on the one hand and hating Whiteness and what it has meant for us on the other.

I went back to Birmingham four times in 2019. In February of 2019, I was called back to Alabama to interview Angela Davis, another daughter of Birmingham. She had recently been awarded a human rights award by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and then had it rescinded for her leftist politics. I was selected to speak for the people of Birmingham in our declaration of love for Angela Davis, a defiant reaction to this humiliation, a beautiful and thick love from a socially conservative but deeply self-protective Black community.

I know he has struggled. Just like I know that he thinks I am supposed to struggle more than he does because I’m a Black gal. And that, of course, is the conundrum—I am American. That means something to me, some common ground with others of this soil, even as the country feels irredeemably racist and maybe not worth saving. It is what Du Bois called a twoness—two warring souls—Black yet American.

This is what Black folks mean when we say we prefer the Southern White person’s honest racism to the Northern liberal’s subterfuge. It is not physically more benign, or more dependable. But it is transparent in the way it terrorizes. You never forget to have your shoulders hitched up a little and taut, even (and especially) when they call you “sweetheart.” Cold comfort.

I do not believe in American exceptionalism. But Black Americans belong to so many places in which we have been subjugated. And there’s something rare about that. We are not seen as interlopers, as not belonging, but rather as belonging stuck to the bottom. My grandmother’s refusal of the bottom is storied in my family. And Pearl High, I had gleaned, was part of how she became that way.

In a certain sense, Southern Jewish life, historically, provides an example of the outer limits of Whiteness. That is to say, Jewish people became “White” in a way that was at that time largely impossible in Europe, but a latent otherness, particularly in the Bible belt, also characterized their social position. To the extent that Jewish people were overrepresented in leftist politics in the early twentieth century, anti-Jewish skepticism was heightened. And in the context of the civil rights movement, when significant numbers of the White students who joined Freedom Summer were Jewish, the alliance with Black people placed their Whiteness in further jeopardy. My father, who arrived in Birmingham to teach at a historically Black college, with a strong Brooklyn accent and wiry, curly hair, was acutely aware of the venom directed at him. When he was living, he would tell me the story of traveling to Atmore, Alabama, late one night for activist work around prisons. He’d always cry, recalling how when he left that evening, he worried that it might be the last time he’d see me and my mother. Being killed was a real possibility. This was a decade after the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, three civil rights workers, two of them Jewish. Even after all of the legislative and social change, he was aware of being an outside agitator.

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’s or Princeton’s walls and see their genealogies. Individuals like me, the descendants of those who cleaned the toilets who happened to make their way into the classrooms, are distorted images of some remarkable transformation, but in truth we are the exception that solidifies the rule. We have departed, taking pearls with us, but Nashville’s Black people remain largely poor. Many are imprisoned. The North Nashville zip code has the highest incarceration rate in the nation. It is where Black Nashville was shuttered and ghettoized when I-40 was built through their older neighborhoods.

Ida B. Wells wrote of her friend Thomas Moss: A finer, cleaner man than he never walked the streets of Memphis. He was well liked, a favorite with everybody; yet he was murdered with no more consideration than if he had been a dog . . . The colored people feel that every white man in Memphis who consented in his death is as guilty as those who fired the guns which took his life. And then she offered an indictment of the entire system governing the city: . . . with the aid of the city and county authorities and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as to his business.

Elvis, the man they called the King, somewhat erroneously, knew what was happening with him. When asked about his popularity, he would say he was an apprentice to Black musicians. He knew why he could get what they didn’t.

Even with his poverty, even considering how he was an outsider, Jim Crow logic created a different trajectory for Elvis. And that phenomenon is now built in our popular culture, even with the progressive erosion of a color line in music. For example, Justin Timberlake, a Memphis native whose style is deeply rooted in the traditions of the Black South, does nothing quite as well as Usher (from Chattanooga) in terms of song and dance, and yet Timberlake is tens of millions of dollars wealthier.

Pat Boone, a descendant of Daniel Boone, was born in Jacksonville and raised in Nashville. He had a very lucrative career doing covers of songs first recorded by Black artists. A conservative Christian, he has spent his later life making birtherism claims against President Obama, and charges about homosexual agendas and the existential threat anyone who speaks Arabic poses to Americans. This is simply a continuation of his past. Listen to his renditions of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” or “Long Tall Sally.” They are, frankly, sad, stripped of every tinge of eroticism till they sound like spoiled milk.

There are thousands of little houses like this, all across the South, most without historical markers or fundraising for preservation or a famous name attached to them, and they are the places of creation still.

Of course Confederates saw themselves as holding on to principles set forward at the founding. The Constitution was written to make space for a slave society.

Just remember, the sounds of this nation that captured the whole world were born out of repression. Up from the gutbucket, as it were. You know the song, maybe even the story, but I want you to study its provenance. Because it belongs to you, too. And so you are implicated; we all are. But will you serve as a witness?

In the 1930s the Communist Party of the United States—and, more importantly, Black communists of the South—began to develop the “Black Belt theory,” which argued that the Black people of the Deep South constituted an internal colony of the United States. Some argued that they should embrace an independence struggle like the rest of the colonized world.

Du Bois explained that in the Redemption South, the White worker was offered Whiteness to set himself apart from the Black worker. And no matter how hungry, how imprisoned by labor, how deprived he was, that was his gift, or grift as the case might be. 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.

The labor at Parchman was, and is, akin to slavery. Backbreaking, hot, cruel. But the cruelty is not slavery. Don’t call it that. The cruelty is in being caught up in a system like slavery when you are called, by right and law, free.

In Blues People, Amiri Baraka teaches the history of Black people through sound, a narrative of alienation and self-creation, migration and class.

In the fall of 2019, people began dying at Parchman—nine, twelve, twenty. There’s nothing new about Black men being killed violently in Southern prisons. In the same season at Elmore, in Alabama, drug addiction was taking lives, too. Some who die in Parchman or Elmore lived most of their lives in prison. Others who survive prison are released without a home to return to. Have you noticed how often people who were once incarcerated describe their time locked up as being “away”? Like another dimension. When prisons are now where slavery was, what is that place? Has time warped? Or just betrayed us?

The South has remained the region where the majority of African Americans live. And even with the declining population in the Blackest South, the Blackest Southerners remain. So the question I always ask is not why did Black folks leave, but why did they stay? The answer is home. If everyone had departed, no one would have been left to tend the ancestors’ graves. When you walk past a plantation, even if not outfitted soberly or joyously in the history of slavery, you are forced to remember something. And it is a vile, bloody remembrance, but it is also one that should strike awe at the human mastery of existence that is evidenced in the blues, in the experience of the divine in the spirit-body, that keloid-covered, scarred Black body, that violated, hungry, sparely clothed body, the labor-flattened, thick-soled feet. Had these graves not been seen, daily, over generations, had we not been witnesses to them, I do not know how it would have been possible to sustain hope, or at least to pretend to.

American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity: oil, coal, and cotton. Every piece of evidence of our national distinction has relied upon this wealth of the nation. As you certainly have already gleaned, I do not think genocide, slavery, and exploitation were worth it.

dislodges the everydayness of family. Love has to be scheduled when it comes to people who are locked up.

Rape was a ritual of racial terror wielded against the spirits of Black women. Accusations of rape were a tool of racial terror threatening Black men. What remains harder to address is the way sexual violence exists inside Black communities in the United States, although it does in every community in the United States. The challenge is that we are still afraid. False accusations of rape directed at Black men were a commonplace of the lynching era. We want to heal communities without falling into the old patterns of demonizing Black men that destroyed communities. This is what makes an internal conversation like the one I witnessed so important.

This is what is meant, as far as I can tell, by the importance of “grassroots.” It is not simply that struggle should not be dictated by elites. Of course that is true. But it also means that we must become different kinds of people in relation to one another, that we become the people suited to the society we want to create. That is the best of the tradition of the Southern movement.

Race still matters, enormously. The historical marker of the exact location where Emmett Till’s body was found kept getting shot up and down, replaced, and shot up and down again. It puts one in the mind of Jeremiah 12:9: “Is my heritage to me like a hyena’s lair? Are the birds of prey against her all around?” When it comes to landmarks, the one for Glendora Gin is still intact, even after the cotton gin once was partly dissembled to punish Till. Till’s murderers took a seventy-pound metal fan from Glendora and tied it to his body so he would be anchored to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. The Southern repetition for emphasis is tragically appropriate here: “They killed him dead.”

I would argue that 1954 to 1965 was the most significant decade in the history of US constitutional law and legislation. Black people’s protests offered the prospect of an equitably heterogeneous society. Nominally embraced, it was socially and economically refused. Enter Black power.

And in Mississippi, they have made it the state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. It is the closest we have to a realization of full Black political citizenship. And it is the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of its capital. Jackson is publicly, unapologetically Black, even for Mississippi.

Now, often the people brought in to undercut the cost of a living wage, people who are exploited, are immigrants. Different people, same choreography of suffering. The children of those raided workers were abandoned by the law and swept into its disorder. There was tearful footage, as though it is enough to tell the story of what happened. As though it is enough to care. The workers were deported, lives upended. The chicken factories continued their business, though the profit margin was temporarily unsettled. You must never let the orchestrated story of the journey from slavery to freedom or from Jim Crow to civil rights keep you from seeing what remains the same even when things change. The storied places do not serve you best as sites of commemoration. They are much better as sites of instruction.

The resorts and golf courses and budget luxury—a hotel style first innovated on Tybee Island, Georgia—have creeped up on Sea Island after Sea Island. This was where the forty acres and a mule were promised. And where, after emancipation, the formerly enslaved tried out a collective model of ownership, something that we clunkily call “socialism,” before the land was snatched back. Now, as the younger ones do not want to stay, and the older ones die, and the developers push, the hard-fought-for pieces of land and ways of being are vulnerable. Gentrification is often the enemy of history and honor. And yet visit the islands and you will see herculean efforts to keep tradition alive.

The way Flannery O’Connor overtly despised Black folks, the way she was as racist as could be, had a teasing and tenacious venom to it. Critics fairly studiously avoided it until the New Yorker published a piece dedicated to O’Connor the bigot in 2020.

Americans ran Cuba back then. They owned 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions, 80 percent of public utilities, half of the railroad companies, and two-fifths of its sugar plantations. The US supplied two-thirds of the imports. A friend of Castro’s, García Márquez tried nevertheless to be frank about what the revolution didn’t plan for and didn’t make happen, at least by the time he wrote. Batista started out as leftist, but found himself negotiating with and then controlled by US interests, until Castro and Che and the revolution came along. They reclaimed the wealth and incensed the United States government. In the years since, we have lived with a barrier between the two countries, one erected by a trade embargo, Cold War policies, and steep ideological cleavages.

Toni Morrison wrote critically about Ernest Hemingway’s racial politics in his novel To Have and Have Not. She argued: These tourists in Havana meet a native of that city and have a privileged status because they are white. But to assure us that this status is both deserved and, by implication, potently generative, they encounter a molesting, physically inferior black male (his inferiority is designated by the fact that Harry does not use his fists but slaps him) who represents the outlaw sexuality that, by comparison, spurs the narrative to contemplation of a superior, legal white counterpart. Hemingway, for his part, distinguished between Cubans and “niggers.”

I can tell you a story of how and why this is. How wealthy White Cubans fled the revolution and were re-baptized White in the US and have fed inequality on the island by sending money to their relatives. Meanwhile others have to make do with resources that are limited because of the endless embargo, the ongoing fallout of the end of the Soviet Union, and the steady global erosion of socialist possibility. Even if a nation isn’t capitalist, the global marketplace is. There’s really no avoiding it now. The heartbreak of a stymied revolution, and the failure of a nation to eradicate the badges of servitude and the legacy of slavery, is what it is two times over. The difference, this young woman reminded me, is that sometimes something is actually done about racism in Cuba. Unlike, she opined, in the US. Julia de Burgos wrote in her poem “Presencia de amor in the isla” (Presence of love in the island) the following words about Cuba: I remember that once the stars talked to me From a buried corner, without a glance and without a voyage Something like a world detained in its history Like a trill astray, like a wing without a bird . . . Even in the most virtuous of moments, the legacy of the twentieth century and its promises careens between bittersweet and bile.

She looked at me, in a way that older Black women reserve for younger Black women, and told me, “You are so beautiful.” I will not have that look always. I am approaching being an elder myself, and my job will be to look upon younger Black women and say “You are so beautiful” and mean it. History will make it my turn to return that favor. And I will do so because it has been one of the most sustaining gifts of my life, that look of love that is a witness to everything we have endured and everything we have held onto despite it all. We do not go gently into the night; we spend the final years and days imparting everything we have learned to make this thing survivable. We teach people how to live with the daily heartbreak on your chest, and still laugh and find the pleasure in cursing out somebody who deserves it. We teach you how to remember the moments of humiliation sliding down your face while not killing anybody or yourself too much, to hear the snatch of fabric or the snicker, the feel of blood stuck on you, the shoving, and still push up your chin. As an elder, you have to look for the ones who are told they are wrong, find them, and reassure them, even at the very end, when more than anything you just want to rest and watch TV and escape because you have been disregarded and thrown away. It is an honor nonetheless.