You Must Go Home Again

I cannot suggest how to categorize South to America, Imani Perry’s beautifully written and enlightening journey through the southern United States.

It is more than a travelogue, part memoir at times, an extended rumination, a refocusing of history, and a gentle, erudite scolding on occasion where our stereotypes or commonly held beliefs do not match the facts. Perhaps the reader can consider this statement her thesis: “Paying attention to the South—its past, its dance, its present, its threatening future, and most of all how it moves the rest of the country about—allows us to understand much more about our nation, and about how our people, land, and commerce work in relation to one another, often cruelly, and about how our tastes and ways flow from our habits.”

Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America.

She travels through several Southern states within the book, beginning with Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where abolitionist John Brown was captured, tried, and executed in 1859 by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion.

There, Perry meets the reenactor “Confederate Bob,” a pseudonym that takes an ironic spin in a state literally created because of its people’s abolitionist stance during the Civil War. Bob drove to Harpers Ferry for the day from his home in Washington, D.C. to celebrate his birthday. They speak for an hour. “As skeptical as I was of why anyone would want to playact at preserving Slavery, I was endeared to him,” Perry writes. “He wanted to live inside history….I think reenactment should be described as performance art, even if I am still uneasy about the pleasure it provides.”

She worries, “because I’m Black I would never be able to access the minds of those that hold on to the Confederacy….I couldn’t get inside the Confederate’s head.”

Perry’s adeptness at self-reflection, of questioning her own perspective while trying to understand others’, is one aspect that makes South to America read as a memoir. Perry, in conversation with herself, effectively draws the reader into her inner dialogue while also endearing her to us as an imperfect, and at times conflicted, guide to the region.

Stopping in Atlanta, Perry brands the city, correctly I think, as an amalgamation of influences: “Atlanta has a way of sucking in features from here, there, and everywhere of the South, repackaging it, and selling it to the world.” Supporting this assertion, she notes Coca-Cola’s invention by a doctor named Pemberton in Knoxville, Georgia, as a curative for his painful Civil War injuries. He sold his final rights in 1888 to Atlanta native Asa Candler, and the company has long been headquartered in the city: “Atlanta is now a Coca-Cola city, literally and symbolically.”

Music also flows from Atlanta, “a center of Black music production.” The legendary James Brown was from Augusta, Georgia, close to the border with South Carolina. But without Brown there is no hip-hop, according to Perry, and Atlanta “is the place where Southern hip hop was shined up.”

However, Perry notes the dismissiveness of Northerners in judging this style. “Under the gaze of the Northeast, Southern hip hop was mocked almost from the outset,” she writes, offering suggestions on the reasoning. “The repetitive vulgarity of Miami bass was deemed corny by Northeastern hip hop heads” and “The slower pace of Memphis crunk and the lean, dragging sound of Houston was called less than lyrical.” The Southern style ultimately prevailed thanks to massively influential performers led by Atlanta’s OutKast.

Reading South to America underscores how a shared, seemingly straightforward, situation may have drastically different meanings for the people involved.

On a return trip to her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, Perry rides in a taxi from the airport to her aunt’s home—a simple act that you or I may not think a moment about. But Perry is taken aback: “My driver was a White man. I got in and was stricken because I could not remember the last time I’d spoken to a White person in Alabama who was not working neither in a store nor a university.”

She strains to understand his accent, finally understanding that he’s talking about working in a coal mine for nearly three decades. Perry finishes the anecdote with a crushing insight: “Once upon a time, not being able to understand the particular twang and yammer of a White man could have been deadly for a Black woman.”

In Florida, Perry ponders the architecture. “The architectural heritage, the Florida Cracker House, is, like the shotgun [house], a smart form of building that allows for indoor and outdoor living.” Cracker, the word, evokes many different images. Is it a “derogatory epithet” for poor white people or a reference to the “crack” of the overseer’s whip during slavery?

It is in this space between meanings where Perry often attempts to suss out the singular origin of a word as a foothold to accurately revealing our past—maybe an impossible task because words are instilled with meaning by whomever utters them. And we don’t only have one history, but rather a concatenation of histories blurred and colored by its tellers.

Much of what Perry writes is wrapped in warmth, love, and family. “I was born in Birmingham because my grandmother believed in the promise of a bus ticket,” she says, remembering time spent together in her grandmother’s mint-green kitchen. “As she lived, I sucked down every story she ever told me about her life.” The story and history that Perry shares is alive and tangible because she allows us inside her own heart. Southern history for her is personal.

What is clear to me after reading South to America, a lyrical and searching rumination by an author who clearly loves the region, is that to know and understand the United States, one must encounter the South. “A nation is an imagined community,” writes Perry, and that community is shaped by those who are doing the imagining and where they are from.