Imani Perry, born in Birmingham in 1972, has already established an astonishingly impressive career. This volume is her eighth and won the National Book Award, and Perry personally was made a MacArthur Fellow. “South to America” is in a tradition of journey / commentaries on the South. Sometimes the traveler is an outsider like V. S. Naipaul or recently Paul Theroux. Just as often, the sojourner is a native, like Albert Murray, returning to see the South through older, perhaps wiser eyes, observe changes, to have a fresh look.
Perry moves all around the South in this volume. There are chapters on her encounters and adventures in many places: New Orleans, Virginia, Nashville, Charleston, even Cuba and the Bahamas, where there is also a history of plantations and slavery. There are dozens of conversations, sites, observations, literary and historical allusions. One can only mention a few, and summarize. Much is decidedly negative: in many of these places, she comments on the history there of slavery, cruelty, lynching, the sexual abuse of enslaved females. Some of this is familiar, some not, but Perry is so observant and articulate, attention must be paid. For her: “Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation.”
There are few mitigating circumstances. To be a house servant was NOT a cushy job in antebellum times. One was still “property.” She doubts whether there were genuine interracial romances. Even if there were affection, the power differential and the dynamic of slavery itself would have distorted romance—even in the case of Thomas Jefferson. Can there be such a thing as a “kindly master” or must that be an oxymoron? Although Perry does not express it explicitly, this book is in harmony with the thesis of the 1619 project, but there is a twist. While the whole country is besmirched with slavery and racism, Perry asserts that the South has been asked to shoulder the blame, been “turned … into this country’s gully.”
The introduction to the book is stern, but some of the interviews, encounters are gentler. And many take place in Alabama. Perry has an unabashed love of her family home places, Huntsville and Birmingham. And pride in the fame accumulated around the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. She reminds readers of the importance of Miles College and Rev. Shuttlesworth in the Civil Rights Movement. It was not all the SCLC.
There is some good news. For example, although African-American family history was once thought to be lost forever, Perry reports on how, using unlikely written records like posters describing fugitive slaves and genetic search capabilities, families can sometimes uncover their history for generations. And throughout, she celebrates the toughness, the insistence of the African-American to survive and to express joy and individuality—through dance, through music and song, through distinctive personal adornment.
