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

You see shotgun houses everywhere in the Deep South, but they come from New Orleans via Haiti.

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

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

To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.

Walking, close to midnight, in the Walmart, with that insistent sickly blue brightness against the dark outside that turns everyone sallow and shows every crevice and caked sore, is a lesson in the loneliness of poverty that was born in the shadow of prosperity.

Galveston sank. Houston rose. Less than a year later, in January of 1901, the gusher came. On Spindletop Hill, oil shot out of the ground. The soil in most of Houston is black gumbo, dark heavy clay. When it gets wet, it stays wet. And it’s hard to work for farming. But something farther below yielded more. Eons ago, living beings—algae, plankton,

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,

Aretha and Elvis are both one-name icons. They call him the King of Rock and Roll because Beale Street infused his White body. They called Aretha the Queen of Soul because her voice refused a choice between the secular and the sacred. She was exacting, precise, disciplined in her song, and also knew how to shout heartache, grief, and exultation, so

MIAMI IS THE MOST CARIBBEAN of American cities. But it is not just peopled with people from the Hispanophone Caribbean. It is a palimpsest of historic inequalities and a threshing of cultures where the heat radiates in waves off the concrete. Spanish explorers arrived in what is present-day Miami in 1513. But they struggled with forming a permanent

Culturally speaking, Atlanta is the bright star of the South that we steadily watch, even if with disdain. Atlanta is the cutting edge on unsteady ground. The Black queer mecca, the heart of the Black music industry, the place where McMansions are maintained, pristinely, by the descendants of domestics who now pay somebody else to clean their house