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

by Imani Perry

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? Witness the dance.

The American way is what has been bequeathed to us all in unequal measure. 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. But that just won’t work for the story of the South. Or the nation.

This country was made with the shame of slavery, poverty, and White supremacy blazoned across it as a badge of dishonor. To sustain a heroic self-concept, it has inevitably been deemed necessary to distance “America” from the embarrassment over this truth. And so the South, the seat of race in the United States, was turned on, out, and into this country’s gully.

Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation. Like the conquest of Indigenous people, the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country.

But any virtues were distorted by a greater driver: unapologetic greed, which legitimized violent conquest and captivity.

Discrimination is everywhere, but collectively the country has leeched off the racialized exploitation of the South while also denying it.

Remember, the Deep South was made at a crossroads between the lust for cotton and the theft of Indigenous land.

The truth is race is a fiction, and Blackness is at the heart of the making of the South. But it is no privilege. That gift belongs to Whiteness and whoever it chose and chooses to embrace. Whiteness is not only domineering. It has also been fickle.

We like stories about frontierspeople and tough living against the odds. Even under the mocking taunts about inbred cousins, feuds, and rednecks, there lies a fantastical admiration for Appalachia’s folk heroes, including miners and subsistence farmers. We have a love affair with the sound of the bluegrass singer yodeling into the night. His voice is labor, faith, and fight. In marvelous contradiction, the mountains represent the heart of American romanticism, that tradition of writing, art, and music in which vast emotions are yoked to awe-inspiring nature, and disaster is the condition of a natural nobility. Heroism becomes a kind of prison.

Appalachians, White ones, can be used to tell the story of conquering nature. Armed with only Whiteness, they can be the Americans facing the wild. However, they, Southern and isolated, can also be convenient repositories for shameful Whiteness—virulently racist, backwards, and unsophisticated.

The myth of surface gentlemanliness was a sly fiction then; it is certainly understood as a loud fiction now. But still, we don’t hold it up to the light nearly enough. Gentlemen were not gentlemen at all.

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.

The postindustrial United States, in which we have shifted to a service economy in which workers don’t produce goods but provide services to others, has been a hard transition for the American working class. I think the commonly reported resentment about American companies outsourcing work to Asia is a result of both frustration and envy. Somewhere else, someone has been given the work of usefulness, of creating things that make the engine of the country possible. Disregarding the horrific terms of that labor—sweatshops and debt—is easy in a place where slaves were once similarly hated competition.

I wonder, can we see that these are Davy Crockett’s grandchildren, heirs to the king of the wild frontier who could shoot a gun and split a bullet in half on an ax? They are manifestations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mandate of self-creation and recognition of the power of experience.

Keep in mind “crimes” are created. Governments declare actions criminal all the time that don’t have to be, like making moonshine or “ginseng larceny.”

Foragers steal to provide what will heal others, and that same bounty circulates to palliate their own pains with chemicals that eat away at them. Meth labs and ginseng roots sometimes even share residence in dealers’ homes. It’s a hardscrabble cycle. A few people make a heap of money from it, while regular mountain folks stay scratching a life from digging into the dirt.

My grandmother, who we called “Mudear” or “Mudeah,” a Southern contraction of “Mother dear,” used to repeat the words she learned from her auntie: “You weren’t born to live on flowerbeds of ease.” From the eighteenth-century pen of the “godfather of English hymnody” Isaac Watts, the phrase made its way to a Southern meditation of, as Gwendolyn Brooks described it, “living in the along” by facing adversity and making do. This sentence that echoed through our lives as a mantra might be a testament to toughness or a simple reckoning that your circumstances simply weren’t going to be easy.

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.

Affrilachians have a broad Southern experience but also a rare one, with a color line, a fragile Jim Crow, a problem with cruel racism and poverty, and the kind of intimacy that comes when you live in small places even if they are unequal. 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.

Acting like you know everything and acting like you don’t know how to be respectful will keep you ignorant. Be humble.

If you want to understand a nation, or have aspirations for it that are decent, myth ought to be resisted.

Conquest, violence towards the Indigenous, a drive to mastery and master-class abundance reaped from other’s labor—those were the terms.

There are three kinds of apologetics for this disingenuous argument: one, they operated out of political necessity; two, they were men of their time; and three, their aversion to the word “slaves” means that they didn’t really like slavery, but they found themselves in a bind. The truth is, values are never necessities. They are priorities, choices, modes of self-creation. Whatever the intentions, this is the world the founders made.

Lynch law began as a means of wresting power from the dominion of the Crown and continued as a means of exercising dominion over the vulnerable.

The Southern ideal of family is distinct from that of the Northeast, and a little word says why. In the Northeast, “we,” that two-letter word, provides an alchemy of domestic partnership. It is the word of the married couple, the unit of significance, the collaborative propertied venture: We decided to send our kids to the neighborhood school. We summer in Newport. We bought this house ten years ago, and its value has appreciated dramatically. In the South you are more likely to hear “me ’n’”: Me ’n’ yo’ mama got to talking, and before you know it, we had talked all night. Me ’n’ Buck went down to Wingstop. “’N’em” is a companion orientation: Clara ’n’em lost they home in the storm. I’m going over by Johnny ’n’em’s party. The “me ’n’” and “’n’em” give you the flexibility of grouping. They specify, but you know that the intimate relations with parent, child, spouse, cousin elder, are many. This is the language of people who are used to thinking of family as a sprawl.

What arrogance, I thought, to presume one self-aggrandized touch could heal the wounds of distance made clear by the lynching tree, that it could level the most rational distrust under the banner of religion. To think it could purify her of an inherited untrustworthiness and, more than that, give her the authority to set the world aright in the personal chamber of an ailing and vulnerable Black man.

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 repository for her despair was the God of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Homegrown right here in Virginia, this God is reaped with the Christian Coalition and its backlash against hippies and women’s libbers and civil rights. This God could look favorably upon Donald Trump no matter how many sins were found on his moral ledger because he hated the right (or rather left) folks.

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.

The American fantasy of fantastic wealth and power lies on one side, and the passionate defense of the ideals of democracy and liberty on the other. This is another Janus face that splits into a thousand variations. Our roots take different routes.

We women age, eyes sweep over us in obvious disregard, our moments of confusion are mocked, our knowledge makes us schoolmarms rather than experts, nags rather than wise. She believed in the architecture of her own suffering, but also that faith might grant revenge. It was a coping mechanism. I didn’t approve of it, but I understood it.

And so, as usually is the case, I prayed against the cruel violence of dominion and diminishment. And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves. That God is far more tender than the one she praises, even to women like her.

Shouldn’t we always be disturbed by such elegant surfaces, by the tendency to prune? Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all this happen? Should I have reveled so easily in the bourgeois luxury? Given who I was, who we were, who we are, what we’d been talking about, how was reveling so easy? This is a bit of navel-gazing, but if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.

There’s a lot of delight in the pomp of the American South, and if you can take the ugliness out of the equation, not just historically but conceptually, there’s a lot of fun to be had. Americans are quite good at taking up pleasures of history and leaving its victims to fend for themselves.

So two scientists, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, were sent to the New World to draw the line. Together, aided by soldiers who beat back, displaced, and killed Indians along the way, and accompanied by dozens of workers, they traced the 233 east-west and 83 north-south miles of borderland between Maryland and Pennsylvania with their newly gleaned knowledge. Stones were placed at every mile along the way. And every fifth mile, a seventy-pound crownstone, imported from England, was placed. Each had an M on the Maryland side and a P on the Pennsylvania side. That was how the Mason-Dixon Line was made.

I offhandedly mentioned to her that I was just now starting to think of Maryland as the South. “Of course it’s the South!” she said, smiling. “And an important part of it! But this is the urban South.”

The life task of the enslaved person was to stay alive and where possible love and find some joy.

The Confederates may have been traitorous, but they believed themselves to be following constitutional precepts. And even though the fifty-state flag is post-slavery, it certainly isn’t post–Jim Crow or post-racially-discriminatory-federal-policy, and it always implies the earlier flags, the one flown over the slave nation from the beginning.

My child argued that Southerners who lay claim to Confederate heritage and honor—their commitments to distancing themselves from the nation’s name and focusing instead on bravery, leadership, and even heroism, their appeal to the ideal of state self-determination—have a lot in common with all American patriots. 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.

With attitudes and tastes remembered, those nameless registers were acts of historic aggression. They were not, however, true. And you know why that matters so much? Because every brutality was human to human. And they knew it.

It is bad enough that Nazi Germany adopted racist ideologies from the United States, but it seems worse still that after they committed genocide, their scientists were invited to Jim Crow Alabama, to plot their way to the sky.

The cold political calculus of how to achieve global power included a sign that the proclaimed democratic values of the nation weren’t as deep as declared (something that Black people in Alabama already knew quite well). Or—and this might be the most frightful and the most honest option—maybe it simply indicated that anything, absolutely anything, could be justified for empire.

But whether their bodies are among those interred here or not, there are gallons of sorrow in the soil. Including Dred Scott’s. Perhaps, as religiosity promised, his wife and children rose into freedom in the heavens, a freedom in death unattainable in life.

In fact, in virtually every cultural arena, there is both common ground and disaffection between Black and White Southerners. As Albert Murray said, “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite . . . the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. These musicians, collectively, played on over five hundred records including songs by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Joe Cocker, Willie Nelson, and many more. Audiences were frequently surprised, at least until their reputation was solidified nationally, that they were mostly White. But perhaps they shouldn’t have been. In the rural South, musical inheritances are not neatly segregated.

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.” There is simultaneously a jealously guarded color line and an ease between Black and White in the South.

The growth of the religious right in the 1970s was in large part a backlash against the civil rights movement and women’s movement.

I’ve described the God of masters and the God of slaves. They each are the product of impassioned beliefs, but theology is also a product of the distribution of power and politics.

Home for the Southerner eases into the cracked places like Alaga, thick and dark sugarcane syrup. Woundedness is pro forma; disaster touches everyone, even if only because you caused it. The unregulated emissions gather in your chest. The blood is so deep into the red earth that grief spirals into madness.

You hold your people close, but that, too, is a matter of understanding that they have been ripped out of your arms again and again over generations: sold away, killed by a grinding gear, a careening car, off in the labor camp, off on the chain gang, down from the lynching tree, away to the prison, dead from the sugar, from sepsis, from cancer, from a broken heart.