South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
by Imani Perry
updated 8mo ago
by Imani Perry
updated 8mo ago
Bimini, part of the Bahamas, is just fifty miles east of Miami. In the nineteenth century, it was a way station for fugitives from the powerful, a home for pirates, a wrecking spot. Later it was known for alcohol smuggling and as the playground of that quintessential figure of American masculinist national literature: Ernest Hemingway. In fact, in
... See moreThere was also a community of Black Miamians in Liberty City, and one in Coconut Grove, though there, in the early twentieth century, Bahamian culture predominated. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston visited Miami and was delighted to witness a Bahamian dance. This prompted her to travel to the Bahamas,…
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The Black Belt is a crescent-shaped stretch of land from Virginia through to Louisiana and Arkansas, where the head turns into a sickle. Or like the hammerhead of a shark. Because slavery was concentrated in the Black Belt—it was good land for growing cotton—the name acquired a double meaning. It grew to refer to the counties of the South with majo
... See moreUntil recently, it was thought that the Dismal Swamp, which stretches from south Virginia through North Carolina, was a modest settlement at best, and that Maroon communities founded by runaways were rare in United States slavery. But recent archaeology has revealed it was a settlement that was sustained over generations. Literally thousands of peo
... See moreIt is like Jamaica Kincaid said: That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is
... See moreEverywhere there are remnants of the trade in human flesh and the transport of unfree Black people. And they are not just architectural. They are also sociological. Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison system is 66 percent Black, twice the state’s Black population overall. It is a harrowing inheritance.
Coal companies built towns for workers and their families. Theirs was an isolated and organized life. Miners were poor folks who usually stayed poor no matter how hard they worked. The company store kept the books, placing them in crippling debt even though they were the ones whose labor made others rich and gave light and heat to the country.
If you think, mistakenly, that American racism can be surmounted by integration, by people knowing each other, even by loving each other, the history of the American South must teach otherwise. There is no resolution to unjust relations without a structural and ethical change.
While prominent people wielded power locally as well as internationally, working-class people sought their fortunes in Houston. Black people from rural areas migrated to the city during the Great Migration, making it the Southern city with the largest Black population, larger than that of Atlanta or New Orleans, by 1940.
all identity is in part myth, the kind that we can use to sort out living, for better or worse, depending upon its uses.