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

The Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay in July of 1860, fifty-two years after the slave trade was declared illegal. Slave traders broke the law by importing captured Black people, either from Africa or the Caribbean, and secretly depositing the cargo at hidden locations along the Gulf Coast. It was a lucrative game of cat and mouse. With the Clotilda,

Orchids are native to Florida, but you’d hardly know, as they’ve been rendered so exotic in our popular culture as to be wholly unfamiliar to us.

In Savannah, she recommended that members of the writing workshop eat at the Grey Market, where she worked part-time. It is a New York bodega-inspired offshoot of the Grey, Mashama Bailey’s fine-dining Savannah restaurant. Bailey, a Black woman who moved between Georgia and New York throughout her childhood, learned to cook first from the women in

It was not the politics most Black Americans wanted of Jordan, especially not when, right outside of where he balled in Chicago, housing projects ate away at the lives of the descendants of migrants; especially not when in his home state Harvey Gantt, a Black man, lost in senate races to Jesse Helms, a former Klansman, twice. When appealed to for a

the culture of the people on the Sea Islands. With majority-Black populations, and after generations of absentee landlords during slavery, their language and folkways are more distinct here than anywhere else in Black American life. They are called Gullah Geechee people, a portmanteau of two traditional names for the language and the culture. Even

Nnamdi Azikiwe was a miner in West Virginia, and as an activist in Nigeria, he stood with miners against colonial authorities.

At the airport, leaving Nashville, I had a taste for something sweet. I stood in front of the vending machine, trying to find a treat that was both satisfying and not too bad for me. Ridiculous, I know. To my left, a White man hovered. He was pale and small with a drawn face. He had a cap on, and a dark blue uniform that hung on him, leaving his br

Wells was best known as a journalist for exposing the lies behind the justification for lynching. Negroes charged with recklessly eyeballing a White woman, or worse, were often people who had found prosperity and respect despite the constraints of Jim Crow. The lynchings put them back in their place. Wells nearly met a similar fate, but escaped as

The Mardi Gras Indians are Black people who have been parading for over a century. They honor the Indigenous people who assisted enslaved folks who ran to freedom, while participating in the rituals of European carnival merged with African cultural practices. I’ve been told that when the Plains Indians marched in Mardi Gras, Black New Orleanians we