In South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, a daughter of Birmingham explores homesickness, hope, and struggle.
By Josina Guess
“It’s cold,” Imani Perry tells me when I ask about the weather. I’d called to talk about her latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, but since she’s lived most of her life in places with bone-chilling winters, I started with the weather. At her location just outside Philadelphia, temperatures wouldn’t rise above 27 degrees Fahrenheit that day. It wouldn’t get above 50 degrees where I was in Georgia, and I laughed about how cold it felt now that I’ve lived in the South for over a decade. “I guess it’s all a matter of perspective,” she reflected.
Perry has spent more seasons away than in the place of her birth, Birmingham, but she regularly returns South in body and mind. She calls herself an exile from a place that conjures immense pride and critique. “It is such an intense pride,” Perry admits, “that I think it actually irritates some people because I feel like it is just this incredible legacy of imagination and beauty and resilience, and it is such a huge part of how I identify the things that I most value about myself.”
She is quick to point out that though it's tempting to call her sentiment nostalgia, the melancholy she feels is born out of love for a place that she knows, like all places, is constantly changing. Even so, no matter the miles, the passage of time, or the deep flaws, the South will always be home. It’s all a matter of perspective.
South to America invites the reader into Perry’s many journeys South to feel the layered social, political, economic, environmental, and religious climates therein. Sometimes the book oozes with the warmth of creativity, resistance, and possibility. Other times it chills you with patterns of human cruelty. To get a sense of America — not just the United States, because her scope enfolds a south beyond this nation’s southernmost boundary — with all its contrasts of beauty and horror, Perry insists one needs to look south.
This book has been years in the making. A seed of it can be seen in her 2018 Harper’s Magazine article As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation, exploring the ways the past and present blur in her home state of Alabama. In that article and even more so in her book, Albert Murray’s 1971 South to a Very Old Place serves as a guide. In Murray’s book, the fellow Alabama native and cultural critic explores what Perry calls “the changing same, the things that were old and the things that were the same and the relationship between the two.” Inspired by Murray’s subject and form and the works of a great lineage of writers and artists Perry finds most inspiring, South to America takes an experimental approach. It starts with a dance, the French Quadrille, and it reads like jazz. Blue notes, flourishes, unexpected transitions, and juxtapositions of times, people, and places are held together by the nightmares and dreams of what America has always been and never been. Perry joins the chorus of truth tellers flipping myths of romance and righteousness to reveal the underside of the tapestry.
As a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and a former professor of law at Rutgers University, Perry weaves into her deeply informed work family lore, personal experience, and inner meditation. It is an entry point toward understanding.
“It is not an arguing book,” Perry insists about her eighth book, “it’s a witnessing book, it's an invitation book.”
Come, she beckons us, see the Arabic writing carved on the pews of the oldest Black church in Savannah, Georgia; learn the legacy of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi; hear how the earth quaked after a Kentucky murder — the bones refusing to stay buried; listen to the breathing of North Carolina trees that are “older than Jesus.” Go farther south, onto the tropical beaches where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. walked, to Central American fruit plantations (a nightmare of Confederate expansionism), and deeper still into the waters of Mobile Bay, where 60,000-year-old trees, still rooted, bear witness to it all. This is the America you may not have learned about in school asking, with great urgency, to be fully seen, once and for all.
Perry’s travel, research, teaching, friendships, and years witnessing her father’s activism illuminate the threads between history and current events laid out in the pages of South to America. Her dialogue with the living and the dead, famous and everyday people, underscores the importance of community to form and inform our sense of self, individual and collective. She discovered a surprising kinship with several of her peers in African American studies whose ancestors, like her grandmother, were educated at the all-Black Pearl High School in Nashville. Her understanding of today's prison industrial complex was shaped by childhood conversations with Alabama prisoners. The author’s friendships with other creatives and activists like Farah Jasmine Griffith, Shantrelle P. Lewis, Tarana Burke, Yaba Blay, Bob Zellner, Kiese Laymon, and Henry Louis Gates, just to name a few, are mingled with conversations with check-out clerks, cab drivers, and tour guides. She admits the survey is incomplete, shaped by the people and places she knows, or felt she could know, intimately. But the people and places she chose to include in her book illustrate how communities formed around race, gender, religion, class, and place can define or bind us. Her work invites introspection and liberation.
Perry lives with lupus, Graves’ disease, chronic migraines, and kidney stones. She cannot draw direct causation from early exposure to environmental toxins in Birmingham to the illnesses abiding in her body, but she sees how these ailments connect her to family members and people from her region suffering the physical consequences of years of deregulation. Perry says she chose academia and writing over practicing law as a way of adapting to her physical limitations.
She sees writing “as a way of keeping rhythm with life.” She writes herself emails, keeps a journal, takes notes everywhere she goes. In 2018, she wrote Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, about the playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun,” whose life shared some parallels with Perry’s. In 2019, she wrote Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. Her elder son just started college; the other is still in high school. As a parent, she writes when she can. Sometimes it's only 10 minutes a day, but she tries to write every day. She loves to write into that quiet darkness before the dawn.
She reads voraciously, as evidenced by the countless literary references and internal conversations with historians and writers. And though she’s fallen out of regular practice, she jumps on a mini-trampoline, sometimes an hour at a time, to keep her heart and mind healthy. Her mother was once a novitiate in a New Orleans convent, but she left for academia and motherhood. Though Perry admits to holding an open, ecumenical “Emersonian” approach to theology, I see something of a monastic life in Perry’s disciplined pursuit of growth and truth telling for herself and her readers, in her tenacious belief that a beloved community, a better world, is yet possible.
Perry was eagerly anticipating a return to Alabama in March after almost two years away. Before 2020, her pilgrimages were at least annual. After she became a mother, she would visit up to four times a year. Her homesickness is palpable. As many of the trips she had planned for 2020 and 2021 were canceled and her exterior world became smaller, the floodgates of memory opened in vivid ways. She couldn’t put her finger on a psychological term for it, but the stillness and loneliness of the past few years “unleashed video footage” in her head, conjuring up people and places that were physically inaccessible.
Perry grew up with the music of The Commodores; her uncle even worked as the group’s sound engineer while they were at Tuskegee. She loves that Lionel Richie still has Alabama in his voice, as in “Just To Be Close to You” he pronounces value as val-ya. But the lyrics in “Zoom,” her favorite song, carry her to a place even more precious to her than Alabama, a place of hope:
I wish the world were truly happy, living as one.
I wish the word they call freedom someday would come.
“‘Zoom’ emerged from the Movement,” Perry explains, “but it's not a Movement song. It captured the sense of what it meant to be dreaming in the ’70s, but also it has a melancholy undertone to it. It is hopeful and plaintive. We are not at that world, and so it feels like it's always apt.”
How does one expose the repeat environmental degradation, ongoing systemic violence, and continued racial disparities at the core of our nation’s legacy and conclude on a note of hope?
“What does hope sound like?” I ask her, on a cold day in early 2022.
“Hope is not an organic word, it is a labor word.” Perry responds. “So when Mariame Kaba says ‘hope is a discipline,’ I often say, ‘Hope is a practice. It’s a thing you do.’”
The thing Perry hopes is that her writing could be used as “a moral instrument.” She doesn’t mean this in a dictatorial sense. There is no prescribed solution, no tidy conclusions for America to live beyond its imagined greatness, except to learn and be willing to be changed by that learning. As a public intellectual, Perry lives by Ida B. Wells’ formulation: “The people must know before they can act.”
Perry hopes, with all sincerity, that readers will look at their everyday decisions through a historically informed lens, because if we refuse to learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. “The desire,” she tells me, “is for it to move us and think differently in the world.”
Perry does not see her exile as permanent. “I’m always thinking about coming home,” sooner rather than later, she adds. “My dad passed away some years ago, but he always said, ‘You have to go back at some point.’”
In the meantime, wherever we are, no matter the weather, there is work to be done.
Josina Guess is a senior writer for The Bitter Southerner and a student in the Narrative Nonfiction MFA program at the University of Georgia. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, edited by Valerie Boyd.
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