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

Americans often treat the South as a monolith. Perry suggests instead that there are multiple “Souths” and that the urban South has played an important role in US history. As Atlanta-based rapper André 3000 once said, “‘The South got something to say’” (148). Indeed, the South birthed the freedom movement and the Black Power movement, and the urban centers of the South that Perry visits provide lessons and hope for the future. Furthermore, the South includes the Caribbean because of the flow of people and exchange of cultural influences between the two regions.

Perry questions the definition of the South and highlights what unites the regions and what makes areas within the South unique. Florida, for example, is shaped by Spanish and US colonialist legacies, Indigenous resistance, and connections to the Caribbean, especially Cuba. Moreover, Cuban and Bahamian racial stratification mirror racial hierarchies in the US and are derived from colonial legacies. New Orleans, likewise, lives with the remnants of colonialism and enslavement. Visible throughout the city are symbols of this institution, and the former United Fruit Company building stands as a monument to US colonialism and corporate interests. Appalachia, in contrast, is far less racially and ethnically diverse than these areas of the Deep South; nevertheless, it is impacted by the color line, as the division between white and Black coal miners illustrates.

Perry interrogates the popular perception of the American South as a backward place. Her experiences as a Southerner in exile especially equip her for this task because she experiences the color line in the North, too. In a 2022 interview with NPR, Perry said:

People are astonished when I tell them this, but my fear about race as a kid was ignited in Boston. That’s the place where I experienced racial terror with bottles thrown at our car and having slurs hurled at me. I have never in any place in the South had someone call me a racial slur. I’ve had it happen numerous times in Massachusetts, more than I can count. My point is not that up North is more racist than the South or something, but that disposition to sort of imply that that’s a Southern thing actually gives a lot of freedom to not confront the racism in other parts of the [country] (“Want to understand the U.S.? This historian says the South holds the key.” NPR. 25 January 2022).

Perry reminds readers that the South gave rise to the freedom movement and Black nationalism. Today, Mississippi is “the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of its capital. Jackson is publicly, unapologetically Black […]” (245). Past and present racism in the North at Princeton University, such as students’ donning blackface for a talent show or the remnants of an auction block for enslaved people on campus, stand in stark contrast to these examples of Black empowerment in the South. Black Southerners who chose to stay in the region, rather than heading North during the Great Migration, perhaps knew that the racism they experienced in the South was not absent from the North.