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

Virginia is Perry’s next stop, and the meaning of “dominion” with specificity to the state is central to this chapter since it refers to opposing forces in the state’s history: enslavement and freedom. For example, Patrick Henry, the Virginian revolutionary known for the line “Give me liberty or give me death,” thought enslavement was “injurious to the development of the colony” (34); however, he was also an enslaver (34). Virginia’s history is wrapped up in national mythology, but Perry encourages readers to resist these images if they want to truly understand national history and have “aspirations for [the nation] that are decent” (34). The author notes that Virginia was a land of conquest, displacement, and suppression of Indigenous Americans, and enslavement.

Perry traces some of her own lineage to enslaved peoples in Virginia and is repulsed by the notion that she is “expected to digest the founding fathers’ venom casually, as though it is merely a part of the nation’s genealogy but not its soul” (36). This “venom” includes Thomas Jefferson’s disparaging and racist statements about Black people and James Madison’s writing in the Federalist Papers that enslaved Black people were humans and property; thus, Madison “amplif[ied] the representation of those who have dominion over other souls” and suggested white Americans’ voices should direct US politics and government (36). Such ideas are not necessary ones; they are choices made by Founding Fathers. Although the US is theoretically a republic, enslavement and a plantation-based society created an aristocratic ruling class that controlled politics. The Declaration of Independence that Jefferson drafted says that all “men” are created equal, but practice says otherwise.

Perry’s visit to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, exemplifies the above contradiction and its persistence in the modern US. While having breakfast at a diner one morning, she notices that no one greeted her and that she is the only Black person in the restaurant: “I had breached a quiet but firm social norm. Black and White Southerners greet each other, mind you, all over the place. But local people also generally know the places to be and not to be, the unspoken zones of segregation” (43).

In 2017, another Virginia college town, Charlottesville, was the site of a white supremacist rally, counterprotest, and racist violence that proved deadly. Yet it is represented as a “quaint” and “picturesque” small city known for Southern hospitality. Residents blame the violence and death on outsiders who came in to cause trouble. However, Perry points out that “[…] there’s something to be said about outsiders thinking your place could be a place for their hate to bloom” (45). This defensiveness is shrouded in a “cruel and willful ignorance” (46).

Virginia is also the birthplace of the right-wing, evangelical Moral Majority, a fact that is “not incidental” (46). Moral cleanness and “family values” typically characterize the theological beliefs of those white evangelicals who are willing to violently defend their beliefs. The definition of family in the South includes extended family, as opposed to being limited to a single, nuclear unit. This network can become confining, and the author writes that white supremacy is built into its very foundation. Perry describes the God of evangelical Christianity as “the God of masters”—the God who justifies colonization and the violence that accompanies it, as well as enslavement. He is “the God of the settlers” (51). This is the deity who condemned the feminist movement of the 1970s and the movement for civil rights. He is also the God who justified Donald Trump’s presidency, despite Trump’s moral failings. Perry points out that Trump was palatable to the religious right “because he hated the right (or rather left) folks” (51). Viewing the Christian deity as the “God of masters” contradicts Perry’s perception of the same figure as “the God of slaves,” “the God of [the Biblical] Exodus” (51). Again, she writes, the US is “Janus-faced:” “Our roots take different routes (52). 

Perry’s third chapter focuses on Kentucky, particularly the city of Louisville, as physical and cultural borderlands. There is a tension in the commonwealth’s history that is especially illuminated in Louisville, which is on the Ohio River. This river transported enslaved people southward while also acting as a route along the Underground Railroad through which enslaved people from farther south escaped to freedom in the North. Some in the city were enslavers, while others were devoted to abolitionism. Furthermore, even though it did not secede during the Civil War, Kentucky “was never a completely Union-identified state” (55). After the war, however, many Kentuckians identified with the Confederacy.

Perry begins at the Heigold House, of which only the painted, patriotic façade that was adorned with busts of American leaders, including President George Washington, remains. Though a German stonemason, Christopher Heigold, had the home built in 1850 as an homage to his new nation, residents never accepted him as American gentry. The area of town where the house stood, known as The Point, eventually because a dumping site where structures were destroyed or left to rot. The city relocated Heigold House’s façade to a new location in 2007.

The famous Kentucky Derby horserace and Kentucky’s whiskey industry likewise exemplify the state’s conflicted history and culture. The Derby started in the late 1800s with talented Black jockeys, and “the races were interracial affairs” (57). However, due to the onset of Jim Crow, these jockeys were driven out of the sport. Black bartenders invented Kentucky’s mixed drinks, including the Derby’s signature drink, the mint julep. Distilleries relied on the labor of enslaved people, and scholar Erin Wiggins Gilliam discovered documents that specifically highlight the distilling abilities of enslaved people. Perry asks, reflecting on a distillery tour she attended, “Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all this happen” (60)? The façade is attractive but hides hard truths.

The drunkenness and revelry of the Derby also inverted social norms and hierarchies. The façade of propriety fell away during the race’s festivities as “those at the top of the social hierarchy used the occasion to teeter on the edge, to take risks, to live precariously (if only for a quick moment) like those people whose lives they made vulnerable” (58).

Peeking behind the façade, however, is not the only way to find truth, because “there is instruction in the surface as well, to what we provide as a surface, what they or we choose to present” (58). Today, for example, immigrants from Mexico and Central American countries staff the stables where Black Americans once worked. Their employers pay them very little, leaving them “vulnerable to the whims of the ones who own the horses […]” (59). The system that began with the abuse of enslaved people is sustained by the labor of vulnerable and exploited immigrants who have few other opportunities and little agency.

Louisville is also the site of Breonna Taylor’s murder in 2020 at the hands of police while she was asleep in her apartment. Louisville may have changed in some ways, but in others it has not. At the time of Perry’s writing, only one of the police officers involved with Taylor’s death was charged with any crime, and it was not murder. Perry questions what will happen next. Will white Southerners continue their Derby traditions? Will Black Kentuckians rise up in resistance to ongoing white supremacy?