Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, (NY: Harper-Collins, 2022), 383 pages
Imani Perry teaches a variety of courses in gender,
law, public affairs and jazz studies as a professor of African American Studies
at Princeton University. Her book South to America has elements of a memoir,
black history, black culture and a travelogue. Travelogue applies given section
and chapter titles have the names of regions, states and cities she visited and
writes about: Section I. just below the Mason-Dixon line, Section II. the
mid-south, Section III. the south along the water including Cuba and the
Bahamas.
In Appalachia, Perry visits Harper’s Ferry where she
narrates the history of John Brown’s raid. The raid, its failure, and Brown’s
execution are familiar to many, but Perry fills in some lessor known details
like the participation of two black men, Shields Green and John Copeland,
executed for their part in the raid.
Readers learn freedman built a one room school house at Harper’s Ferry
in 1866. The school became Storer college, a historic black college. In 1906,
the Niagara Movement for racial justice met there with W.E.B. Dubois and
William Monroe Trotter in attendance. Perry writes the story of this
conference. To them John Brown was a hero that made it possible for blacks to
envision freedom.
Perry shifts to narrating a walk about Harpers Ferry
and along the Shenandoah River. During her walk she encounters a Civil War
re-enactor on the Confederate side taking the day off from his job in
Washington, D.C. She dubs him Bob and describes their hour or so of cautious
conversation before reflecting on the search for identity for Appalachia and
the black people that live there.
Commentary ranges widely such as a midnight walk through an Appalachian
Walmart, comments on Appalachia by Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, a
discussion of Appalachian coal mining, strikes and violence that brought
momentary black and white class solidarity and a lengthy discussion of the
Highlander School.
This Appalachian chapter has the characteristics of
all the chapters. It has stories related to the chapter’s region and the black
community there. She writes varied commentary of her visits with family,
friends or the strangers she meets, which she reflects on as a black woman born
in Birmingham, Alabama in 1972 and raised in the south. The chapters are
sprinkled with a variety of seldom mentioned black accomplishments. I learned
that a black jockey, Issac Burns Murphy, won the Kentucky Derby three times and
that two black bartenders invented the recipe for the mint julep. She reflects
on the music of Chuck Berry and James Brown and their seldom recognized
influence on the music of Elvis Presley.
Stories and reflections come with reminders that race
and class figure prominently in American history and contradict our ideals such
as the Virginia chapter where Perry quotes a seldom quoted part of Thomas
Jefferson’s biography: his racist views of black people. Many know of the Dred
Scott case, but not his life on an Alabama plantation or what happened to his
children after they were separated. That 380 acre plantation became Oakwood
University and might be the site of their remains, but Perry reflects it does
not matter “there are gallons of sorrow in the soil.”
Some of Perry’s stories reveal someone wrestling with
class and its relation with race as it plays out today. Remember southern white
boys fought and died by the thousands to save slavery for wealthy plantation
owners, but those well-to-do plantation owners offered only one reward: whites
could be above black people in the social class hierarchy. Trump reminds us
that insistence remains in the United States of 2024, as Professor Perry so
well knows.
As an educated member of the professional class Perry
tells a story of attending a writing retreat in Louisville, Kentucky with a
group of black women professors. “By the external measure, we were a group of
Black women who had scaled the heights.
. . . Some of us could trace our ancestries back to the plantations
here, others to plantations in the Caribbean.
. . . Some came from elite families, most from struggling ones, all from
people who eked out from under the race and gender rules. The past for us was
something sorrowful and beautiful at once.”
At the end of their retreat, they took a tour of
distilleries; Perry called it a bourbon tour. “I loved it. The science, the
aging process, the history. The scent was intoxicating.” . . . But then, she
relates “In retrospect, knowing what I know now, and reflecting on the sensory
and social pleasure of that visit, I feel uncomfortable.” On the tour she
learned these Kentucky distilleries emerged during slavery and depended on
slave labor. “Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all
this happen? Should I have reveled so easily in the bourgeois luxury? . . . “This is a bit of navel-gazing, but if
you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”
The narrative has lots of navel-gazing, or as I would
call it, reflecting on race relations in a personal way, as an insider. In more
navel-gazing Perry reflects on a trip to the Bahamas and the gulf between her
and the black women that worked at her hotel. “It is an uncomfortable
feeling. 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. . . . But the truth is that
relaxing in a multinational hotel makes me a part of the problem that people
like [the maid for my room] have to manage, and for too small a compensation. I
became 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 one of her exploiters.”
The book coheres as a memoir because so much of the
narrative covers Perry’s personal feelings and includes commentary of her
experience and of her family’s experience as part of the black community, and
on writers, composers, and activists connected to black history and culture.
She quotes from, and comments on, people both black and white like W.E.B.
Dubois, Ida B. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, June
Jordan, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and many more. There are no footnotes,
no bibliography, as would be required of academic writing, and no “academize”
to burden the reader.
The book’s narrative stays below the Mason-Dixon line
as the subtitle, A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a
Nation, suggests it will. Readers will find dozens of stories of white, mostly
male, discrimination against blacks. Some are mid length; some are short. Some
come from long ago; some are more current. Among recent cases include
discussion and comments on the murderer of Trayvon Martin, the Duke Lacrosse
rape case, and the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: “Our hearts broke
for Breonna.” While the book has no obvious thesis if what Perry narrates of
the south applies to the soul of the nation, then America continues to be
racist.
Even so there are quite a few millions of white people
who have, or had, black classmates as students, have black colleagues at work,
and more and more have black neighbors. These whites can feel accepting,
respectful and friendly toward the black people they know, even as they avoid
thinking about white racist misconduct. Let me suggest the moderate tone in her
writing and naval-gazing brings an optimistic note to the end of the book, and
an invitation for whites to rethink what should be the soul of the nation.
