South to America

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

Imani Perry

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780062977380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." —Isabel Wilkerson

An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived therecan rattle off a list ofsignifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery.But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

A Recommended Read from: The New Yorker • The New York Times • TIME • Oprah Daily • USA Today • Vulture • Essence • Esquire • W Magazine • Atlanta Journal-Constitution • PopSugar • Book Riot • Chicago Review of Books • Electric Literature • Lit Hub

II

The Solidified South

The Clearing

Upper Alabama

WE WERE MOSTLY GIRLS. So we took turns dancing the hustle with my boy cousin Durrell, who knew how to do the dance. It was one night, after hustling and watching cartoons, when we were outside, and I found myself ashamed. I hadn’t meant to kill, only to catch, that lightning bug. I meant to cup it delicately and open my hands slowly, revealing the softly bright creature. Instead I smashed it, and my left hand glowed.

Writers have praised the Alabama sky at daybreak. Pure blue. I always preferred the night sky when the deepest indigo is broken by heat lightning. The lit sky flashed sharp and angular, a blaze without a sound, and the lightning bugs danced. We ran across grass so green it gleamed in the dark, wet and redolent. Every sound, no matter how close, had an echo. This is the place where my grandparents came from, and so my relationship to it feels ancestral. Perhaps that is why my memories of times there are impressionistic. They merge with how I have imagined my grandparents’ lives in rural Alabama.

Huntsville sits along the Tennessee River. The river courses through both states, Tennessee and Alabama. Its most prominent landmark, the Redstone Arsenal, takes up 1250 acres along the river. It was built in 1941 as the second US chemical weapons plant, completed prior to the nation’s entrance into World War II but certainly in preparation. When the Army occupied the land, over five hundred families were displaced, most of them tenants and sharecroppers living in small rural communities. They had lived among their dead. It is estimated that forty-six distinct cemeteries were on the land. At first the Army planned to move the bodies. But that didn’t happen. Remains remained. In 1988, road building outside the arsenal uncovered one of these cemeteries. Fifty-nine bodies were found, most of them Black people. We know this, even though their flesh was long gone. Forensic anthropologists make racial assessments using calipers to measure the nasal bones, chin, skull, and brow. Upon encountering these skeletons, the road was taken in another direction. The arsenal had already been a site of disruption for generations.

Immediately after World War II, and after my grandparents had already left, German scientists arrived in Huntsville as part of Operation Paperclip. First the scientists built ballistic missiles and other weapons. Later they worked on establishing NASA.

The leader among them was a rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun. A Nazi, he was a master of rocket technology in Germany and was brought to Alabama to do the same. Although von Braun claimed that his Nazi party membership was solely utilitarian, concentration camp victims remembered that he selected prison laborers for his laboratories. And he worked mere steps away from torture facilities and walked among the corpses. It is bad enough that Nazi Germany adopted racist ideologies from the United States, but it seems worse still that after they committed genocide, their scientists were invited to Jim Crow Alabama, to plot their way to the sky.

Von Braun was a cautious researcher, and some of his colleagues believed that caution was what allowed the Soviet Union to beat the United States in the first major step of the space race by launching Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Americans feared the implications of the Soviet achievement: the first man-made satellite to orbit above the earth. Astronaut Frank Borman recalled, “I was teaching at West Point when Sputnik was announced . . . The Cold War was a very real thing and there was a very great concern of a nuclear exchange and all of a sudden this country that was our real enemy had jumped the gun and launched a satellite, and it was an enormous impact.” However, when the United States one-upped the Soviet Union in the moon landing, from farther south, on Florida’s Space Coast, it wasn’t a victory in everyone’s eyes. The event was protested by an Alabaman civil rights leader. Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center with five hundred people a few days before the launch. They brought two mules and a wooden wagon to illustrate the contrast between the gleaming white Saturn V rocket and families who couldn’t afford food or a decent place to live. It was a theatrical repetition of Gil Scott-Heron’s pointed phrase “A rat done bit my sister Nell with whitey on the moon.” Though the protestors were invited to watch the launch, and they were disarmed by that invitation, the point they tried to make remains poignant. The future had arrived, and the rural Black South was stuck in the past.

How do we consider Nazis in Alabama? Where does their presence lie in the story of the state? Is it simply an alarming fact that they moved from one hateful, murderous order to another? Or is the better lens one of relationship? The cold political calculus of how to achieve global power included a sign that the proclaimed democratic values of the nation weren’t as deep as declared (something that Black people in Alabama already knew quite well). Or—and this might be the most frightful and the most honest option—maybe it simply indicated that anything, absolutely anything, could be justified for empire.

I imagine the ancestors haunting space flight. Maybe they have also gone up into the night. Huntsville’s ghosts have a story that one finds all over, of being suffocated under the weight of ambition. It was true during slavery. It was true afterwards. Von Braun, making himself into an American, told the people in Alabama to pronounce his name “Brown.” And he was fully immersed. Signs of his influence are everywhere. He created a research center at the University of Alabama, and various institutions bear his name, such as the Von Braun Center and the Von Braun Astronomical Society. In 2014, von Braun’s custom-built house in Huntsville was up for sale. I looked at it on Zillow. The nearly three-thousand-square-foot ranch on Big Cove Road is a large mid-century modernist home with a two-car port and built-in bookcases in the den, set back behind cedar trees. A moss carpet lies before it. It is an understated but historically recognized dwelling. Yet there is no marker out front bearing his name. It doesn’t matter; local people know.

The relation between the powerful and the less so is, in part, about sowing, reaping, and building. It is also about death, burial, and rebirth. My grandmother used to tell me about the house her family owned in Huntsville and the acres on which it sat. I’m not sure how they acquired so much land, although I’ve verified that they were landowners through census records. When I was younger, the stories were a luxury for me. You’d hear so much about the way life piled up on Black people that the sounds of a life of abundance gave ease. “It was a raggedy house,” she said, “but a big one.” There was a fireplace in each room, a farm outside. And the trees were heavy with fruit.

We do not own that land anymore, but there are artifacts of our history in Huntsville. The church my great-great-grandmother would take my grandmother to is still in operation on the very same property where it was located in 1869, then called African Baptist Church, now called Indian Creek Primitive Baptist Church. Black folk in Huntsville were Primitive Baptists and building churches even before emancipation. (Incidentally, the difference between “folks” and “folk” is the difference between a collection and a collective. Folks can be relatives or a community. Folk is never just family; it is always the larger group.) Primitive Baptists are old-school foot-washing people who take “primitive” to mean not undeveloped but original. They believe that only those elected by God will experience salvation, they await the Second Coming, and they profess the virtue of acts of humility. Primitive Baptists initially rejected dancing and music, making rhythm only with voices and hands. That has changed, however, in many congregations, including Indian Creek.

Indian Creek Primitive Baptist Church has had fewer than ten pastors since 1869, and that is but one example of its traditionalism. Another is its conviction to divine purpose. In 1952, the church was destroyed by lightning with nothing saved except the piano. Taking that as a sign, they rebuilt quickly on the same spot, creating a more elegant edifice with multiple rooms and bathrooms as well as a balcony. The same building remains.

I do not know why my grandmother converted to Catholicism. I have speculated that the relative quiet of Primitive Baptists among Black Protestants when it came to music might have made the transition easy. But she told me a few stories about the old church in the place that she called home. And she maintained some of the Primitive Baptist sensibilities. For example, she always warned us against telling our personal business in confession and drinking from the Communion cup. Primitive Baptists disagreed with the idea that church should interfere with the dominion adults had over children. For Black Primitive Baptists, I imagine this doctrine resonated deeply. They had been disallowed possession of their own children for generations prior.

Churches in Huntsville and throughout the South are places in which people make sense of history. Theology is professed more often than the past is invoked. But the past is ever present. A mile and a half to the south, a mile to the east, there is another site for old-time religion in Huntsville: Oakwood University. It was founded by the Seventh-day Adventist denomination in 1896. The specific mission of this denomination in Huntsville was to educate freedpeople. The sect purchased 380 acres of land that was once a plantation and named the school for the huge oak trees that cover the campus. In slavery times, the most famous Black plaintiff, Dred Scott, lived on Oakwood’s land. Born in Virginia around 1799, he was brought by his owner Peter Blow to Alabama in 1818, along with five fellow bondspeople. If you know the Dred Scott story, you may have heard the name of his second wife, Harriet. She was much younger than he. Together with their daughter, they litigated for freedom. The Scotts had been taken to free territory, and precedent suggested that this should have made them free. But they lost their case before the Supreme Court. Justice Taney, writing for the majority, declared that not only were they not free, they didn’t even have standing to bring a case before the court because Black people were not and could not become citizens of the United States.

Before Harriet, Dred Scott, then called “Boy Sam,” reportedly had another wife in Alabama. And two children. By some accounts, they were sold away from him in 1840. By others, they died and are buried here on the campus of Oakwood. Their names and fate remain unknown, subject to conjecture and dispute. But whether their bodies are among those interred here or not, there are gallons of sorrow in the soil. Including Dred Scott’s. Perhaps, as religiosity promised, his wife and children rose into freedom in the heavens, a freedom in death unattainable in life.

Oakwood grew over generations. Its history tracks along with the larger history of the nation. It became a junior college in 1917 at a period in which there was a substantial uptick in college attendance in general and for Black people in particular. The footprint expanded to accommodate more students in 1918. Still a firmly Christian institution, Oakwood experienced the rumble of protest from students in 1931. Nine Black youth had been falsely accused of raping two White women on a train nearby in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Scottsboro case became a national and international story, an example of the racism of the American justice system and social order. Arna Bontemps, a Harlem Renaissance poet and a native of Alexandria, Louisiana, was on the faculty of Oakwood at the time, and hosted protestors from across the country, agitating the school administrators further. Their request that he burn his radical books eventually prompted Bontemps’s resignation. He went to the Midwest.

The students went on strike during the annual Board of Trustees meeting, refusing to attend classes, chapel, or work assignments. They organized speeches and prayers among themselves, putting faith to the purpose of freedom.

Their statement of protest read as follows:

We are tired of lying. In view of the fact that conditions at Oakwood Junior College are not favorable to mental, physical, and spiritual advancement, we the student body, are appealing to our interested brethren in the field for help. Too long, Oakwood has had to feel the brunt of despotic rules. Too long, we have been living under conditions entirely contrary to God’s plan of operation for Christian institutions.

These events led to the ouster of the president and the installation of the first Black president of the institution. Though consistently a conservative institution, Oakwood was also the site of student political organizing in the 1960s, as was common at HBCUs during that time. But even after the social transformations of the ’60s, it remained deeply conservative, at least on social issues. Today it is a university. Oakwood serves an 86 percent Black student body, and remains a Seventh-day Adventist institution. Although it is the only Seventh-day Adventist HBCU, Black people have been an important part of the denomination for generations. Currently, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is diverse: 37 percent White, 32 percent Black, 15 percent Latino, and 8 percent Asian. Its congregations are primarily in the South and West. Though segregation remains (as the saying goes, Sunday morning is the most segregated time in the United States), much continues to bind its parishioners. For Adventists, like evangelicals, churchiness, including sect and gospel, is common ground between Black and White people in the South. In fact, in virtually every cultural arena, there is both common ground and disaffection between Black and White Southerners. As Albert Murray said, “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite . . . the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

However, when it comes to race relations, Black Southerners often struggle against what White Southerners try to maintain. Nevertheless, many more old ways, in one way or another, are treated as virtuous. And the old ways can be a recalcitrance when it comes to progress. They are also found in wearing slips and girdles and pantyhose, in still having rollers to place in one’s hair. They are in eating the evening meal early, and disconnecting all electrical devices when it’s storming out. It is putting “Miss” in front of an elder’s first name. And, when your mother or auntie or any elder woman to whom you owe respect calls you, answering, “Ma’am?” Black Southerners lament the land that was swindled or in a moment of desperation sold away for a pittance, but even without a foot of property to your name, the old ways become properties, constitutional and therefore more intransigent than the intimacy with land. Massive resistance to desegregation and devotion to lost-cause history is the ugliest part of this disposition. However, I refuse to call its expression, in the large sense, “backwards,” when “traditional” is far more apt.

* * *

IN MUSCLE SHOALS, ALABAMA, beginning in the 1960s, two of the most famous music studios were situated: FAME, founded by Rick Hall, came first in 1961, and then the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in 1969. At FAME the group known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section was founded. They were a shockingly good collection of White studio musicians who played background to soul, R&B, and country artists. The first group of musicians was lured away to Nashville. Another group replaced them. Then four of those members went on to create the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. These musicians, collectively, played on over five hundred records including songs by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Joe Cocker, Willie Nelson, and many more. Audiences were frequently surprised, at least until their reputation was solidified nationally, that they were mostly White. But perhaps they shouldn’t have been. In the rural South, musical inheritances are not neatly segregated. Rising in popularity over the 1960s, they went most often by their nickname, “the Swampers,” because that’s how the music sounded. Blended and muddy like a swamp, a jambalaya, a gumbo of the sounds of the South. The Swampers played on at least seventy-five gold and platinum hits.

When I first heard the Alabama Shakes in 2012, they reminded me of the Swampers. They were a White band with a biracial Black front woman, Brittany Howard, who belted like a blues queen, and moved her voice across gender and genre lines with elision, rising and falling, wails and howls. Her falsetto is gender- and genre-bending, sounding like a gutbucket Smokey Robinson as she sings, “I just wanna stay high with you.”

One of my favorite musician interviews was with Brittany Howard. The interviewer asked her about growing up biracial in the South, and she answered thoughtfully that she didn’t much think about it. That she was more aware of being poor and raggedy: the kind of dirty-kneed kid who other folks didn’t want their kids playing with. In another interview, Howard said she thought she was getting away from racism when she traveled to the Northwest but then realized that “[t]he South has tons of black people, so even if you’re racist, you’re still down with the black people. But up there, they ain’t got that many black people so they don’t even know how to act.” There is simultaneously a jealously guarded color line and an ease between Black and White in the South. It has to do with both numbers and history, including the ever-present knowledge that that which is prohibited has always happened, especially when it comes to sex. This is not progressiveness, though. It is the matter of fact of living. So while that’s true on the one hand, we are still careful driving through Cullman County right by Madison County, where Huntsville is, because it was and is known as Klan country. You make do with each other, and you’ve been in each other’s families for a long time on opposite sides of the color line. Howard’s voice is a testament to that. She can belt, round and strong. And she can holler, too.

Howard’s point is about history and genealogy, but not in the way people tend to find most fascinating. The one-drop rule is a source of endless speculation and spectacle for Americans because miscegenation titillates. You’d be hard-pr...