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

by Imani Perry

He is the man I have known to distrust. He is the one whose race and manhood once (and maybe still) made him my ruler and me his mule. He could kill me then, and if he had a badge, he could kill me now.

It is what Du Bois called a twoness—two warring souls—Black yet American. You face it in its most raw truth below the Mason-Dixon Line. To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.

The driver’s gentility, despite the fact that he could have, could still, string me up without the world flinching? That toothless smile that could easily accompany either mirth or murderousness, depending on the eyes? 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.

“Affirmative action” is said with a sneer. It is a straw man of the right wing. Because of course college admissions are not an exercise in fairness, no matter what the brochures claim. They are a product of all sorts of inequality. It is not as though labor and talent are inconsequential; it is just that they don’t count for nearly as much as opportunity.

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.

The founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, emerged from Sandersville, Georgia, a place that was demographically, if not geologically, the Black Belt, and is said to have witnessed three lynchings before adulthood. It was a town through which General Sherman had slashed in his March to the Sea, and the White folks never stopped making Black people pay for that humiliation. No wonder so many left.

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.

On the one hand, the White Northerner often seeks to find sympathy and common ground with the White Southerner by disappearing the Black Southerner. On the other, the White Northerner seeks to express solidarity with the Black Southerner by turning the White Southerner into a caricatured demon in comparison to his own virtue. Both are insidious. In the Black Belt, you cannot separate out what happened to the Indigenous and what happened to Black people. To kill and push out, and then to bring down, to wear the earth down. You cannot separate out the hand-to-mouth of the tenant farmer, with nothing but his Whiteness, told to thrive on that when there is no thriving to be had, thus turning what is supposed to be a blessing of birth into a bitter gall. It is all the same theater of creation.

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Lest that sound too glib or cruel, she also said, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

There are Latinos who are positioned as White according to their historic origins and social location, who, as much as any White Americans, have committed themselves to protecting that status. The fact that Spanish language makes many White Americans skeptical of their “Whiteness” doesn’t change the fact that Europeanness can be and often is a strongly held and beneficial identity.

I was always given the impression that the etymology of “cracker” was the crack of the overseer’s whip during slavery. And it developed to mean a low-status White person in general who took on the task of striking fear into the hearts of Black people. That, I had been taught, was a cracker. But I have been told in Florida it refers to the sound of the whip on cattle, not chattel slaves, wielded in the Florida backcountry. Maybe.

Nature provides a sanctuary of sorts, as unreliable and wild as it is. This is a common motif in Hurston’s work. And that makes sense for a Floridian. Florida is a paradise of a landscape, abundant and beautiful even after generations of development.

Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South, and Orange County had the highest number of lynchings in the state between 1877 and 1950. You can understand why Eatonville was precious to its daughter.

I am fond of the poinciana trees. The highwaymen painted them at water’s edge, and each one, through their distinctive styles, depicted the organic geometry of the trees. The red is rich, like what we imagine blood to be but almost never is. Crisp, though made by nature, the flowers bend, a pyramid reaching out over the trunk that, no matter how ample the flowers, never looks overweighted.

I think of Zora, traveling down and through color. Remember Alice Walker gave Shug the words “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Because Florida trees remind you that God pleases us, the same must be true of the poinciana, with its delicious red, and the jacaranda, which is blue-purple.

They have twangs or drawls or heavy local idiosyncrasies in their speech that remind you that White folks do indeed have a lot of culture when they don’t run away from it for the faceless bounty of being simply “White.”

Adding to the strangeness of our national mythologies is how Spanish, a colonial language, has been racialized in US popular culture. The most common visual image of Latinos in a mestizo body, or sometimes with African ancestry, renders theirs a “colored” rather than colonial language. And as with all architectures of colonialism and its aftermath, the colonized and post-colonized find themselves tethered to the colonizers. For much of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the colonial legacy today is felt in the power of the United States as well as their European national elites.

The military is central to Southern culture. Southerners are most likely to enlist. Southern presidents are more likely to wage war. The martial orientation is generally agreed to be an outgrowth of the aristocratic culture of honor among the planter class. It is intensely patriarchal and tends towards authoritarian ways.

The obligation to “honor” in terms of enlistment is nonpartisan in Southern culture insofar as it consists of the duty to save face for the nation more than an articulated political ideology. And such service often requires self-effacement and suffering as well as great pride. “How long were you in the service?” is a deeply respectful question, laden with admiration in the South.

The most passionately guarded hierarchies can sometimes be fickle, especially when someone challenges them.

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.