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

by Imani Perry

What does occur to me, however, is that any monument is in a sense both an icon and a grave—a burial vault, in which the messiness of history is often dispensed with for the sake of the imagined community. And that should always concern us.

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 occurred to me that the tight network of Black life that Black colleges and universities make is a Southern thing, even if it’s not always precisely happening in the South.

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.

How do we consider Nazis in Alabama? Where does their presence lie in the story of the state? Is it simply an alarming fact that they moved from one hateful, murderous order to another? Or is the better lens one of relationship? 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.

If you think, mistakenly, that American racism can be surmounted by integration, by people knowing each other, even by loving each other, the history of the American South must teach otherwise. There is no resolution to unjust relations without a structural and ethical change.

It is a slur that demanded the tongues of Black people at the outset, forced to wear the mask of subservience. Some of those tongues turned in on themselves, forked, sucking in poison; some others—more I believe—began to speak on two registers, or three, or four. In case you haven’t noticed, Black American language does that frequently. Our words mean multiple things, sometimes opposing. Of course they would. How else in this nation could there be a way for Black people to both love themselves and stay alive?

The rules of manhood and the rules of race grow into a monstrous beast, begging for our destruction in dozens of different ways. And the resulting grief notwithstanding, it seems to be so hard to pry the cold wet hands of death-dealing from our throats.

When I heard about the suicide of Nigel, I thought about the ways people join forces of shared bigotries across the color line. Not all interracial cooperation is decent or good.

You don’t get to claim innocence when adopting the ways of masters. At best you get to be a trickster, and not a subversive one. Sacred and profane ugliness are conjoined.

In his dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts likened the decision to the Dred Scott opinion, by now considered one of the worst-decided opinions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Roberts likened the substantive due process of allowing a same-gender couple to be a “we” to human bondage. The analogy is so strange that it defies coherent interpretation. It must have been based in the anchor of faith, or in his self-constitution, rather than the Constitution of the United States.

Local cultures and power structures are remarkably resilient. The God of masters, as it were, has kept a hold on power. Hence, North Carolina has experienced what Amiri Baraka referred to as the “changing same.”

One of the phrases I live with is this: “Trauma repeats.” PTSD returns us to the time and place of a life-shattering moment or moments. We are snatched back psychologically. Sometimes we replay the moment by making ourselves the perpetrator, the destroyer, the powerful. More often we quake. This isn’t just a mind game. It is often a doing.

At the crossroads of culture, history, industry, nature, and humanity, we (and this “we” is the national we) repeat injuries as the way it always was and ever shall be, world-ending again and again.

Refuge from White supremacy remains elusive in North Carolina. Refuge for White supremacists seems to be always available.

Perhaps it is my way of making meaning of my own disabilities, but I think pain that shoves itself into your consciousness around the clock, especially when it’s at your center, can make things clearer when you are seeking a moral witness. That’s not an idyllic observation. Pain forces you to pare down to the essence of every question, to feel the stakes, literally.

I like that the Duke quad is named for Abele. But it can’t erase the prohibition of the architect any more than affirmative action can be an adequate compensation for all of the tobacco plantation workers dizzied in those fields, sweating in those rows, who labored for the prosperity in these grand buildings. Necessary but insufficient. And not a justification for the American habit of putting blinders on one’s cruelty. Self-soothing to prevent self-loathing. North Carolina speaks to Faulkner’s assertion that the past isn’t even past. We live in it as a changing same. The only possibility is reinterpretation of the scriptural underpinning. Making sense of it in the words as understood by the God of the slaves in the present as much as our repudiation of the past.

But my intrigue turned into digging, because by now you have probably ascertained that nosiness is at the heart of my gift for research and association.

Her secret is knowing that sometimes survival must be chosen over victory even when you know you deserve to win. We endure.

If we ask the question “Why didn’t enough change?” one answer is this: domination is creative as well as consistent. The way the region does working—working people like dogs, working to the bone, working somebody to death, working hard “ALL my life,” as the old folks would describe it, for little to nothing—was kept up. Servants became service workers. So did farmers and factory people. The lash and the prison farm became the chain gang and the prison farm and then the penitentiary and the prison farm. Birmingham, once a place of dynamite and industry and social transformation and protest, coalesced in the other thing it has always been: resilient.

Staying alive on the grounds of your ancestors’ murder and abuse is no small matter. It requires a living witness to their alchemy.

By now we know that the flower children, the yippies, the gay rights organizers, and the second-wave feminists were all inspired by the voices of the freedom movement. But the ripple is much bigger. In each successive generation, expression has pushed past existing boundaries, arguing that their insistence is more than a matter of style or taste, but rather that it is a matter of freedom. It’s completely reasonable to argue the point about whether an insistence is frivolous, substantive, or righteous. But it seems to me undeniable that we’ve collectively taken that reaching voice as a case for living.

The way some histories are left untraced while monuments to other histories pile up tells you a great deal about what we call “the uses of history.”

Other colonial and antebellum Jewish communities were scattered throughout rural towns. They remained small, and antisemitism was always a threatening undertow. But it was a distinct status. In the context of slavery, Jewish people were understood to be White, with higher rates of slaveholding than their Christian peers. They had some access to political power, notwithstanding the existence of antisemitism.

The contradiction of being included in Whiteness in relation to Black people, but also subject to virulent antisemitism at times, continually placed Jewish Southerners in a liminal status.

The fervor of anti-Jewishness in response to the case makes clear that hostile attitudes were just under the surface of White Christian Southern tolerance of Jewish communities. 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.

It should be no surprise then that when the Agrarians turned to literary criticism, they avoided the matter of context. In the “New Criticism,” the term applied to their school of thought, analysis was text, text, text, never intent, never context. It wasn’t a bad school of thought. There is a great deal to understand about literature when narrowing in upon the words and their architecture, without always seeking authorization from the author or the politics of the time and place. But how convenient for writers of the Southern gentry to not have to acknowledge the scorched earth and beaten bodies, and the Blackness all around.

Ask any Black student at Princeton or Black students at any peer institution the same, and the odds are quite good that the celebration of their admission was diminished by a claim of unearned benefit. “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.

Rumors, even when not based in fact, are often based in truth. This one reflected the economy of race and entertainment, and the history of the way they were intertwined. 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.

An effort to place Elvis more accurately in history doesn’t just require a recognition that he saw his indebtedness to Black musicians. It also means thinking about how he stands in the American imagination above Black musicians who were his forebearers and peers. Now and again, popular media will point out Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, and the most famous among them, Little Richard, as masters of the form of which Elvis was deemed King. And music critics will continue to restore them to their rightful place in history. But there’s something to be understood just in noting the difference. 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.

“Patriotism” is a confused word. Is it virtuous? Is it found in the effort to make the nation live out the true meaning of its creed? Is it found in holding the nation true to how it was made, suffering and all? Would that make it a scandal? Is it looking at its documents, with a passionate fervor, or refusing to let its people going hungry?

And there are things that are important for us to know about the Mississippi River now. It has been invaded by carp, bighead carp, black carp, grass carp that leap into the air, as well as zebra mussels, gobies, walking snakehead fish, all imported for various reasons—aquariums, food markets—and then loosed or escaped into the river. Wild hogs, which were imported there by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, and the big mammalian nutria, which were brought to the US for fur in the late nineteenth century, spread disease, destroy levees, and chomp up crops. The Mississippi River has been called the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world.

Just remember, the sounds of this nation that captured the whole world were born out of repression. Up from the gutbucket, as it were.

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.

And yes, slavery was abolished, Jim Crow is over, but the prisons, the persistence of poverty, are constant reminders of how the past made the present.

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.

Take one word: “commissary.” The same word was used for sharecroppers, soldiers, and prisoners to get provisions. Modest means of sucking the poor into indebtedness. Coercing them to buy here, because where else are you going to go? Some people are required to do for their country without their country doing much for them.

But the blues, a composite form into which its men and women poured their individual selves, had a lot of different ways of seeing, doing, thinking, and feeling. It is challenging to hold them to one particular truth.

Between drifting and captivity, there is an undeniable melancholy. The blues is testimony to the possibility of a laugh, a sweetness in each place. A libation poured for the dead. And joy. Of course the lost-cause narratives of “happy slaves” on plantations were false. But it is true that the culture made by enslaved people insisted upon joy. It was not a naive childish satisfaction. No, it was, it is, the joy of a voice that could soar one moment and growl the next, giggle and holler. It’s the joy of dancing in a whip-scarred, food-deprived, achy body. The joy of love, of the binding between souls across the borders of flesh and the rules of society. It was a refusal to be rendered entirely in the image of White Americans, even when completely beaten down.

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. Nor do I believe they should be tidily set aside in moments of patriotic fervor or national piety like the Fourth of July or the following days: President’s, King’s, Labor, or Memorial. But even if you are a lover of the national romance, integrity requires that the stories be at least halfway honest. It is not enough to set aside a little time or attention here or there to grieve our national sins, then, soft as butter, turn back to proclamations of greatness. Because history is an instruction. And what you neglect to attend to from the past, you will surely ignore in the present.

Somebody was lynched without a name recorded. Like the slave ledgers, disregard dumped on violence.

Enter Black power. Or perhaps reenter. Black nationalism and Black secession and Black armed self-defense had always been a part of the political imagination of the Black South, from Martin Delany through Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey and the Stono Rebellion and Garveyism and the Deacons for Defense. For some reason, folks want to act as though Black power started in New York and Oakland, even though the Black Panther logo came from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, and even though Huey Newton was born in Louisiana, and Sundiata Acoli in Texas, and Eldridge Cleaver in Arkansas, and Kathleen Cleaver in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Gil Scott-Heron was raised in Tennessee, and Assata Shakur in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt in Louisiana. Sterling Brown commented in the earlier civil rights era: “It is a mistake to believe that this protest in the South is instigated by Negroes from the North . . . I found a large degree of militancy in Negroes who were Southern born and bred, some of whom have never been out of the South . . . I found this protest natural since the Southern Negro is where the grip is tightest and the bite goes deepest and most often.” Stated another way, Southern Black people learned steeliness the hard way, under the thumb of Jim Crow. And perhaps from seeing how the North wasn’t much better, if at all. They learned there was nowhere to turn and no option but to fight back.

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.

I am sorry people mistake withholding for timidity.

The Gullah Geechee worked in tandem and in mutual aid. The owners who had had them chained and stacked left them on the island on their own. Owners distanced themselves from the evidence of the fetid hold, the salt-soaked death on their skin, satisfied with the proceeds of their labor: indigo, rice, cotton. This absenteeism was common on the Sea Islands during slavery. The Africans who were left there became water people, people who lived by fishing and tides, but also people who understood water to be the most feasible path to escape.

That a people choose to dance is not a mark of simple happiness. That a people still sing is not a picturesque story of their satisfaction. It is art. To this day, the children of the children of the children of the slave South, in ghettoes and hoods across the country, will clap and stomp in unison. They will “cheer,” as the expression goes, and rhyme. They will study for hours how to make their voices careen and their bodies work in tandem precision. They will evade boredom and desperation with the stern discipline of kinetic beauty. We do not know empty hands. Our bodies do not gleam and muscle because of genetics; it is because our ways of being, our singing, maudlin or joyous; is a disposition towards the fact of living that persists no matter how much changes.

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.

One of the difficult side effects of desegregation—and you’ll hear it again and again from Black people who lived in the before time—is that something precious escaped through society’s opened doors. Even acknowledging how important desegregation was, the persistence of American racism alongside the loss of the tight-knit Black world does make one wonder. What if we had held on to those tight networks ever more closely, rather than seeking our fortune in the larger White world that wouldn’t ever fully welcome us beyond one or two at a time? Such reflection often leads to a sorrowful place, though not what I would call regret. Black folk knew they had to push the society to open its doors. They just didn’t know how much it was going to cost.

The South is a monster of a place that one cannot help but at least partially revile. And everybody knows it, no matter how much they might glory in neo-Confederacy. The Janus face of Southern Whiteness—they know what they’ve done wrong, and they know you know; they hate you for it, and hate themselves for it, too—is strange.

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. I spoke to Walter on the phone about it, and he said he was glad. That perhaps people in Savannah would cease treating her like some sort of local saint. I was glad, too, but also I felt that familiar disappointment that a writer who I not only liked, but who I believe understood and explained Southern idiosyncrasy and violence so well, had been such an utter failure when it came to what might be the most basic moral question in the history of this country: Can it ever be remade in the image of the Declaration of Independence? Or will the founders’ racist sins taunt us always?