by Shana Scudder
January 18, 2022
Shana Scudder is an instructor of First Year Writing at North Carolina State University, a novelist, and a freelance writer and copyeditor. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Post, Men's Fitness, and Muscle and Fitness Hers. Shana is a former reviewer for the websites Feminist Review, Bad Subjects, and Altar Magazine. Originally from Lynchburg, VA, she currently resides in the Raleigh, NC, area.
South to American: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of America by Imani Perry; Ecco; 432 pages; $28.99
Imani Perry’s South to America is a sweeping exploration of the US South: the impact of this region nationally, personally, and globally. Perry is the author of six previous books ranging in subject from motherhood to hip-hop to influential Black authors. South to America in many ways seems to circle back to the themes she explores in her first book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), but this time with a specifically regional focus.
South to America is divided into three parts: “Origin Stories,” covering Appalachia, Virginia, Louisville, Maryland, and DC; “The Solidified South”: Upper Alabama, North Carolina, Atlanta, Birmingham, Princeton and Nashville, Memphis, The Black Belt; and “Water People, The Low Country”: Florida, Mobile, New Orleans, and ending with The Bahamas and Havana. Her main argument is this: if you want to understand America you need to understand the South. She reiterates this argument throughout the book beginning in the introduction: “Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation.” However, another of her central purposes is to dispel the myth that racism is solely the purview of the South, a cancer that began below the Mason-Dixon line and then spread to the rest of the nation: “... there is a consensus that the South is supposed to bear the brunt of the shame, and that the nation's sins are disposed upon it. . . But if we are to tell the truth about how central the region is to all of us, we have to be honest about the shared habits of the past and their justification.” She argues that, in a sense, Americanness is infused with Southerness at its core and that, “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.” She also illuminates how much of the economy and resources of the South play into America’s economic position globally.
Perry lists her main influences and inspirations for this book as James Baldwin, Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place (1971), V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, and Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic . Much of her narrative is self-reflexive and autobiographical, as is the case with her previous books. Perry has a lyrical style of writing and beautiful phrases that will lead the reader into many unexpected places and suddenly you will find yourself in a new place, unsure of the path you took, because you were lulled by Perry’s poetic prose. However, this meandering structure often lends a kind of scattered quality to her narrative, which is very evident in the first few chapters, though less so by the end.
She begins in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, maybe because, as Nikki Giovanni stated, “West Virginia saved the nation,” as it broke off from Virginia over slavery and if it had not, the South may well have won the Civil War. But Perry also starts in Appalachia because this is the region more than any other accused of displaying the most overt racism and ignorance, which is ironic because most people in these southern mountains were too poor to own other humans even if they did have an interest in doing so. Therefore, beginning in this region demonstrates how the South is often scapegoated for the ills of the country, and by extension, the world, as Perry illuminates the empire of America throughout South to America and how it reaches throughout the globe in its ideological impact.
This initial ordering of her chapters makes sense – beginning in Appalachia and then moving into Virginia where the first colonies formed. From here she walks the reader from the mountains to the seas, ending outside the borders of the United States, in Cuba. However, Perry is a daughter of Birmingham, and thus Alabama is over represented in this book that purports to be about the whole South – taking up the entirety or at least the bulk of three chapters, where other states (South Carolina, as the most glaring omission, receiving a brief nod in the chapter on the Low Country) receive little mention (which she does acknowledge towards the end). Despite Alabama’s over representation, when Perry is writing about her home, her prose is at its finest: gorgeous, lyrical, resplendent in its poetry. However, in its content, South to America is sometimes doing too much and at other times not enough; her selection of sites of focus needs more justification and explanation.
If Perry’s central argument is that “... the Southern region of the United States has both shaped the world and been filled by it,” then this book may not be sufficiently persuasive. In order to truly argue this point, Perry would have needed to include more comparisons with the rest of the country and the world other than just Princeton, Cuba, and the Bahamas. If her purpose is simply to educate, to uncover some of the South’s so-called secrets and to facilitate a deeper understanding of the region, then she does this fairly well. What South to America does, however, is to solidify Perry’s own place as a Southerner, and certainly an Alabamian, as this undertaking is transparently a deeply personal endeavor. In this way, South to America almost feels like two separate books shoved together and not always seamlessly: a history of the South and Perry’s own autobiography as a Southern Black woman. She illuminates many historical figures and incidents in Black Southern history throughout and tells a multitude of stories that are not widely known from history, which is certainly a strength. In many places, these histories and her narrative of her own past and present seamlessly connect, but often they do not, leaving the reader wanting more of one or the other or at least a clearer connection between her own story and the historical accounts this book offers.
South to America will certainly find its way onto many college syllabi, and for good reason. Perry tells many little-known stories of underrepresented historical figures, and on this ground alone this is certainly a worthy read. Perry's writing style makes it easy to overlook some of the structural flaws and oversights in the text, and thus this book is recommended for anyone interested in African American, Southern, and/or American history and culture.
©2022 West Trade Review
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The Past is Present: A Journey to the Roots of American Empire in Imani Perry's South to American
NONFICTION REVIEW
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