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

by Imani Perry

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

“I think that when you look at the great history of Appalachia, we know that the Civil War . . . would have been lost if West Virginia had not broken up, then Virginia would have gone over to the Ohio River. It would have changed the war. So in many, many respects, West Virginia saved the nation.”

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded,

Inside Harpers Ferry, I experienced a carefully maintained history. It was authentic and yet controlled. But there is a wild haunting just beyond its borders.

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.

Mountain Dew soda, the most excessively sweet drink you can think of, is called that after moonshine, mastered in mountain country. Their first bottles had a picture of a hillbilly on them. You can even watch reality shows these days that show you how people called hillbillies still make moonshine.

Precisely where a number of the “first families” of Virginia settled. Elites at home, wealthy journeymen here. These were not the persecuted Puritans of farther north.

Birmingham lost a bid, which it only offered in lackluster fashion, to become a Delta Air Lines hub in the 1940s. Birmingham gave financial preferences to the coal industry, which included a fuel tax, and with that, Atlanta emerged as the regional hub. Atlanta runs on commercial prosperity. It is the home of Coca-Cola, the most popular soft drink company in the world, and CNN, the business that revolutionized the news, paving the way for our reality-show-like attachment to information.

We Alabamans have the highest rates of mental illness and the lowest rates of medical care.

I walked past Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home. The thing about O’Connor, as devoutly Catholic as she was, is that she exposed some of the vulgar innards of the South that most try to ignore. The practices of Southern humility, of grace, of conformity, can be so great that madness is often a necessary refuge. O’Connor talked about that.

Cuban Americans are largely either those who fled revolutionary ideas or those who were starved by the US because of them.

Florida is still Spanish and Louisiana is French, while Alabama, set exactly between the two and only separated from them by an imaginary line and a different colour on the map, is wholly American. Alabama still belongs to a social past that was characteristically American in spite of, or perhaps because of its cosmopolitanism.