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

by Imani Perry

Through Mississippi’s Black Belt, all the way up in the Northwest alluvial plain with the most fertile soil that is called the Delta, you can trace the blues. There are 187 sites along the Mississippi Blues Trail, and Parchman Farm located dead set in the Delta, the most notorious penitentiary in the history of the South, has one at the entrance. 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. Parchman blues were different from old plantation work songs, which were sung to make the work go by, different songs from the ones that could keep you swinging or shucking or pulling. The blues were songs of the interior. Shared, they were sung on a common ground, but with private memories and longings; the things they knew about each other included the fact that there were things they would never know about each other—joys and hurts and wants.