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

by Imani Perry

Here is another contradiction. The South is home to some of the richest queer culture in the world, and some of the deepest intolerance to any order other than patriarchy.

Collecting and writing history has a similar pattern. We think we have come across definitive stories, and then there is a disruption. New details, new artifacts, new attentions, new timelines.

Sometimes repairs are done to physical structures that also ought to be done to human ones. And Dylann Roof is and was the product of an American house eaten out by its choices and built atop the graveyard of what came before. He, too, was called an outsider by locals, rather than an alarming testimony to American violence. This vanity of innocence is like guarding a gate when the warriors are already inside.

I suppose the thing I most want to say is that it is rarely acknowledged that every time that group of parishioners gathered in Mother Emanuel, they stood in a tradition of refusing to be rendered soulless and unfree. No gentrifiers, no hierarchies, no displacement, no new arrivals, and no, not even massacres that laid bodies low, one on top of another, can erase that. Their testimony is already embedded in the land.

But now Florida’s distinction as the “orange basket” is under threat. The work is not simply underpaid; it is diminishing. The trees are suffering from an epidemic of citrus greening. The disease first stifles the ability of the trees to make fruit, then begins to kill the trees altogether. The growers are trying to fill the economic gap with different crops. Some options are beans and hops. The seasons of history change things.

But then I learned that dollar stores are by some accounts the top link in the sweatshop chain. They provide affordable goods to poor people in the United States made by poor people in poor countries.

Cuban conservatism has everything to do with the Cuban Revolution and the early departures of certain sectors of Cubans from Castro’s Cuba. First it was largely elites, those classified as White or nearly so. They set the terms of the Cuban American community. Later, as Cubans felt the brunt of the US embargo and the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuban exiles became increasingly more African. Cuban Americans are largely either those who fled revolutionary ideas or those who were starved by the US because of them.

There isn’t any safe place when the instruments of war are always within reach. They promise a fantasyland of power and action films, and underneath there is always wasted love.

Laughter does the same thing beauty does: allows for us to believe we can digest the indigestible. It’s all fun and games until somebody ends up dead.

A significant number of Seminoles live in Oklahoma now, as a consequence of the Indian Removal Act. But several hundred stayed in Florida and their number grew over the generations. They constituted themselves a Maroon colony that, in fighting to maintain their land, would earn the distinction of becoming the longest-standing military defense against the United States waged by an African or Indian group.

However, the dynamic between Indigenous and Black Seminoles changed when the Seminole were eventually pushed into Creek territory. The Creek allowed slavery. The Black Seminole weren’t safe from capture into slavery, and found their community subject to raids. Some of them escaped to Coahuila, Mexico, across the border from Texas, where slavery had been abolished. There they were known as Mascogos. Some escaped to the Bahamas, where slavery had been abolished. Others made their way into Florida’s wetlands.

Among Hurston’s legacies is her extensive anthropological travel and narration of connections between the Caribbean and US South. In a sense she collected the common threads through culture, as historians had done through records of transport, sale, and shifting settler colonies. What is revealed repeatedly is that, even with variations when it came to the particulars, the color line persisted through the Deep South and Caribbean. It can even be called a single region if one tends to history more than borders.

In 1963, Miami established the first modern bilingual school program in the United States.

Though the media covered these events as a sign of the local conflict between Latino and Black communities, something more complex was at work. Racial stratification of the sort that had existed throughout the South and the Caribbean was in operation. Racial stratification was the logic of slave societies long after slavery had ended, whether or not it fit the picture of White and Black Southerners. The concentration of political and economic power among high-status, politically conservative, and white-skinned Cuban Americans and others of Latin American origin was a factor in what transpired. These were the days of an intense national backlash against the civil rights movement. But it was also in the midst of Cold War politics. The US gave preference for Cubans who disdained Castro, a disdain that had to do not only with lost land and autonomy on the island, but with the loss of the plantation-based structure of Cuban society. In contrast, Black immigrants, from places over which the US exerted a lot of economic control, were treated with disdain.

Among the concerns of African American activists in the 1980s and 1990s was the dramatic difference in the way the United States government treated refugees coming from Cuba and Haiti.

though Black support for the Clinton administration is frequently touted, a number of prominent African Americans were outspoken both about how Bill Clinton advocated for welfare reform with an approach that deepened extreme poverty, and played into a culture of poverty myths about Black people, and at the same time embraced policies and practices that destabilized and dispossessed Haiti. Black politics in Miami were both local and hemispheric.

There are so many more of us who aren’t of the planter class than those who are, of every race. And even those who are, you know you’re wounded, too.

The idea of building a home on a chassis is old. It goes back to the Conestoga wagon vintage 1717. And in North Carolina, post-Reconstruction, horse-drawn homes were set up on the Outer Banks. But they became a different thing altogether after the automobile.

Because our bodies were prescribed for toil, used as repositories for rage, like rags for waste, we learned elegance as a way of loving.

And you have to know that the powers that be were ashamed for that ugliness to be exposed—denying itty-bitty children the joy of an amusement park—so they tried to slap the film out of Black hands.

If in Maryland it is hard to specifically locate the sites of human trafficking, in New Orleans one can’t avoid them.

Grief and pleasure are twins.

When you watch the street dancer’s masterful footwork, hear the music in which wailing horns merge into up-tempo rhythms, it is evidence of a discipline exercised for human survival. You have to be able to work around the pain. Dancing is cathartic, and so is song. They sweat it out.

The banana business was dominated by American businessmen, and the rights and demands of Central Americans for more than a subsistence wage were squashed due to the Americans’ influence and power. The United Fruit Company, the most powerful company among them, came to be reviled by working-class people in Latin America generally.

Yes, New Orleans was and is a place where the world’s people meet. But New Orleans is Empire’s graveyard. Katrina came through to us like a biblical story, but it was tragedy that took place on grounds that were already both sacred and damned.

But his story, as a historical artifact, was fictionalized. Sometimes fiction is the history, though. It tells you something about the nature of the place.

Despite that name, the French Market was initially an Indigenous trading post and is the oldest continuous open-air market in the country, as it began before the country and its colonies. Now Café Du Monde is a simple open-air restaurant where people drink chicory coffee and eat beignets.

I cannot help but think about sweetness born of the violence of slavery as a metaphor for New Orleans, which is a cradle holding together the South and its strands at the root. Like its native drink, a Sazerac, it’s sweet and strong enough to knock you on your ass or knock you out. And of course, as often as people try to cut it off from the rest of the South, it functions like a phantom limb, one that we feel everywhere in the fabric of the country, even when we don’t see it right there on us.

Each sentence had volumes of grief. It was all of our grief in a sense. We were touching death shared in solitude rather than ritual. That’s what the pandemic wrought: people who were shipwrecked in sadness.

Since that time, now and again, I hear that a plantation wedding is like holding a wedding in a concentration camp. But despite how distasteful it is, that’s not a good analogy at all. Concentration camps were not intended to be glamourous. They were not meant to feed the fantasy of being a master or mistress who is gloriously indulged by their chattel. They were brutish. But the strange, cruel beauty of the plantation, its gothic horror, is a holdover from the past, intoxicating witnesses with the scent of honeysuckle and fried chicken along with the smell of blood-soaked soil.

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be manumitted. This fact attracted Black people from across the Atlantic world.

It is one of the tragic ironies of global history that Haitians, the people of the first independent Black republic, the nation that inspired the Black world to fight for freedom, are so frequently treated as belonging at the bottom of social hierarchies in American nations. But it is precisely because Haiti has always been made to pay for being free. Their national debt, and recurrent economic suffering, began in the demand that they repay France for its loss of a profitable slave society. They were punished with military occupation and dominion that impoverished Haiti and Haitians. They are punished by disdain when they seek refuge in other nations.

Being an African American, even an upper-middle-class African American, often insulates you from the guilt of empire. After all, “we,” in any collective sense, have never been the ruling class. “We” have stood on the moral side of things, dominated and marginalized, often searching for solidarity with colonized and dominated people elsewhere. But the truth is that relaxing in a multinational hotel makes me part of the problem that women like Olive have to manage, and for too small a compensation. I become her monster, and she is mine, though she is blameless. Because just a generation ago, my people were her. I’ve laid claim to a heritage that includes women situated just as she is, yet here I am, now one of her exploiters. If that didn’t provoke a moral crisis of sorts, I would wonder about my own ethics.

Skepticism is an undercurrent of the proverbial “Southern hospitality.” You’re supposed to be kind to everyone, but that doesn’t mean you trust or are trusted. People have to know your angle before they let down their guard. I felt that in the Bahamas, just like I have been trained to conduct myself that way by my own people. I do not open my door to any stranger who stops by. The Bahamians knew I was there to shop and sun, even if I hoped for something more substantive. Let’s not pretend.

When Langston Hughes traveled to Cuba, he’d been kicked off a beach in the Dominican Republic, like I had. Hughes had a local politician intervene on his behalf. But despite the fact that my friend and I had paid $20 US to visit the beach, and protested in English, we were treated rudely and ultimately disbelieved. People make a big to-do about the fact that there are gradations of race throughout the Americas, as though the one-drop rule in the United States is somehow crueler. But one thing I know is that the residues of empire, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade mean that no matter where you are, the Blacker you are, the lower your status, and any sort of Blackness at all can sometimes serve as a reason to kick you out, as the light-caramel wavy-haired Langston Hughes was an example of. Mulatto as he might have been in the Cuban racial order, he was too Black for that beach.

Mind you, in all of the places I named, plenty of Black American women visit without incident. That’s the thing. Color lines aren’t absolute in most places anymore. Bodies are read not just for race but alongside assessments of where one fits in the hierarchy of the world. Those assessments shape how the body is responded to.

And if there is a dramatic difference, besides language, between there and here, it is that the Cubans, no matter how white their skin, do not deny the fundamental Africanness of who they are the way Southern White people do, assiduously. Visiting this babalawo helped me think about that fact. What exhaustion must be required to passionately deny that which has shaped so much of who you are? Maybe this is part of the White evangelical discipline of prayer. To absolve the self-denial. To drown it in catharsis. White Cubans have no need. But I do not think that is a mark of virtue as much as it is a marker of nationalisms. Countries get accorded races, no matter how multiracial they are. And Cuba is Blackish brown. The US is White; we (Black people) are its built-in other.

I can tell you a story of how and why this is. How wealthy White Cubans fled the revolution and were re-baptized White in the US and have fed inequality on the island by sending money to their relatives. Meanwhile others have to make do with resources that are limited because of the endless embargo, the ongoing fallout of the end of the Soviet Union, and the steady global erosion of socialist possibility. Even if a nation isn’t capitalist, the global marketplace is. There’s really no avoiding it now. The heartbreak of a stymied revolution, and the failure of a nation to eradicate the badges of servitude and the legacy of slavery, is what it is two times over. The difference, this young woman reminded me, is that sometimes something is actually done about racism in Cuba. Unlike, she opined, in the US.

As is part of the standard choreography, news stations rushed to find any infraction Floyd had committed. I do not understand this impulse. At best it is a bizarre effort at evenhandedness, as though execution is a casual punishment. At worst it is the same old American way of declaring Black people unworthy.

Though Oliver North, a Texan and member of Reagan’s National Security Council, took the fall for the administration, over the years the tangle of corruption has been revealed to have included Bush family oil interests, cocaine trafficking between Colombia and Nicaragua that was aided by the CIA, and the funneling of crack into Black neighborhoods in the United States. We’ve never stopped living the complications caused by oil dependence. We are embroiled, seemingly forever, in political choices motivated by the control of oil, a word that we laypeople say with little thought to the consequences of how it binds us.

Dreaming isn’t dead. It can’t be. We can do it anew. Me and you, both of us are required. I believe writing can be a moral instrument if it asks you to do more than read. Do you? How many times will you witness people being starved or worked to death, driven out of their homelands, the land blasted and lives destroyed, and be only quietly horrified? When will you finally be repulsed enough to throw a wrench in the works? When will you allow curiosity and integrity to tip over into urgency? I’m asking you. I’m asking myself to dig deep enough for the truth to flood in. Let’s sing those blues.

“Greatness” is such an egotistical and dangerous word. But in the land of big dreams and bigger lies, we love greatness anyway. And if we want it, if we aren’t afraid to grab it, we have to look South, to America.