South to America : A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. - 2022 - 410 pages
National Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction -2022
New York Times Best Seller
"An meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.”
— Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
My ancestors first arrived in the American South long before anyone thought to use use that expression to refer to the region, my estimate is maybe 1650. Some how some of my maternal ancestors moved to then Florida about 1790, settling near what is now Orlando. Family records document that they founded the first library in central Florida. Like everyone else they were farmers. I would acknowledge some ownded slaves.. They fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. In junior high school, maybe 1960, students sang "Dixie Land", said the Lord's Prayer, all things unthinkable now.
I learned to love the staples of southern cuisine. I was also brought up to view racism as an aborent shameful way of thought. I was among the last of students in Florida to attend legally segregated schools in 1965 when I graduated from high school.
In her marvelous book Perry talks about how white American students were taught to view the "War Between the States" as a "lost cause". Little mention was ever made in the classes I took the early 1960s about slavery. Students never learned that iconic American presidents like Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.
Try to think back to what you might have learned in college or high school about how enslaved persons were to be counted. Here is the truth:
"The enslaved, it explains, were property and people both. The logic that followed was insincere: as people they must have some form of representation. But of course the three-fifths clause was not representation of the enslaved at all. This is what it doesn’t say: we believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls, and this is why those individuals must count for more in our government. It is not the case, as some argue, that the clause was a term of art meaning that Black people people counted for three-fifths of a person. They did not count at all. Rather slaveholders were made larger people by virtue of holding others as slaves. Sven Beckert described the impact as follows: “Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of their power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never ending political support for the institution of slavery.” "
Perry is an African American woman, descended
from enslaved peoples, who grew up in Alabama, went to college initially in an historically Black college. Part of this marvelous book is a memoir of her return to the south, she grew up partially in Birmingham, Alabama, and the emotions and thoughts this journey through out the South invoked in her. It is also a very valuable source of historical insight.
Perry deals with the divide in American society. It is no coincidence that almost all the states of the South, but for Georgia, went for trump. The central political theme of Going South is that the blame for the abominations exemplified by the support by around half of White Americsns is claimed to belong totally on the American South is a false and pernicious idea used as an excuse
Perry devotes a lot of space to talking about Queer culture, particularly Drag personalities (and the Governor of Florida seems obsessed with Drag Shows). I knew nothing of the history Perry reveals:
"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. I suppose that is why the Lady Chablis was wont to say, “Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it.” Every cruelty is also an acknowledgment that the thing or people reviled are there, and ain’t going nowhere. I think this was Flannery O’Connor’s point when she said, “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.”
As Perry documents through the published letters of Flannery O'Connor, she made use of racist expressions. I was saddened by this.
Perry talks about now revered African American writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison (both Gay and both moved to Paris once they could) and Toni Morrison dealt with their Southern heritage. She goes in depth into Zora Neale Hurston’s treatment of the experiences of African Americans in central Florida.
"The pride Hurston took in being from Eatonville was due to how she saw it. It provided a much different origin story than Jacksonville could give. Eatonville was the first incorporated Black town in the United States. It was established in 1887 by freedpeople who, through collective purchases, established and advertised their town as a place of possibility for African Americans. They built wood-frame houses, schools, and a municipal government. It provided a refuge from the violence just outside their borders. Orange County, in which it sits, was once the center of racial violence in the South. 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. Hurston set her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Eatonville. The town still exists. It is small and overwhelmingly Black to this day, but isn’t defined by a story of racial violence in the way many of the other incorporated Black towns during Jim Crow were."
I have quoted more than I normally do from a book. I want to share the beautiful prose of Perry with my readers.
From The National Book Foundation
"Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the New York Times bestselling author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. She is also the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two"
I offer my thanks to Imani Perry for this wonderful book.
Mel Ulm
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