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

Imani Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama but her family moved away when she was 5 and she grew up in Massachussets and Chicago. She is now a professor at Princeton University. I was also born in Birmingham, but with my father’s family in Detroit and having now spent most of my life living in various other states and overseas working with people from all over the US and the world, I know from experience the reaction that I often get when people discover where I’m from. The image that most people have of the South in general and Alabama in particular is not very good. It’s assumed to be backwards, prejudiced, racist, and poor. One only has to look at Hollywood stereotypes of Southerners as a bit ignorant and with an over-exaggerated accent. Perry is writing to force Americans to take another look and appreciate the South in a new way. Her appreciation is built not on a whitewashing of the bad and exaggeration of the good, but on a true understanding that recognizes its place in America and, in some ways, a truer microcosm of the rest of the country. Perry would even argue that, when we think of the American heartland, the South has a better case for that appellation than the Midwest. The South is shaped by its tie to the land and she proposes that it is the nation’s cutting edge both for the worse as well as the better and she points to lots of examples of business, scientific, and cultural phenomena as well as the fact, and a fact she notes has been largely forgotten, that most of the Founding Fathers were Southerners. She argues that the South takes the blame for the country’s history of racism and slavery conveniently allowing the rest of the country to ignore its own complicated history of virtual enslavement and racism. The racial problems were not solved after the Civil War because the rest of the country did not want to treat the formerly enslaved on an equal basis either and many supported sending them back to Africa (which was implemented to some extent leading to the founding of the current nation of Liberia). As for dealing with the thorny issues of how to integrate them into society, the nation had little energy and left it to the South to figure out what to do with them with predictable but disastrous results which we are continuing to suffer from. Perry arranges the book as a journey through key locations in the South starting in Appalachia but covering various cities along the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, the Black Belt, Florida, and even throws in Cuba and the Carribean as counterpoints. What comes out is that the South is not really so different after all, that it is, in many ways, the core of what the entire nation is. And she is quick to point out that the civil rights movement didn’t spread throughout the nation until it first took root in the South, especially in Atlanta and Alabama. There were many things that I would argue with and I found that she often painted with broad strokes. And while the civil rights movement took root in the South, it did so with a lot of help from people from outside sometimes risking their lives to come down and give support. On the other hand, she is also right in that this was still ignoring the color lines that existed in the rest of the country at the same time, though less clearly defined and overt. Perry is not trying to make the South look better than it is. She is trying to show that the South is not exceptional. I enjoyed her style of writing, almost as if listening to a friend talking. Or maybe as if someone were writing an elegy after careful thought and introspection. Even in places where I disagreed, I appreciated her forthright and open tone, speaking the truth as she saw it but with an attempt to understand and withhold judgment. We are living in a time of confrontation where lines are becoming more and more deeply drawn and it’s becoming ever harder to just listen and to respect an opponent and disagree without condemnation. This book is a welcome breeze.