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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-5

Part 2, Chapters 6-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-12

Part 3, Chapters 13-15

Part 3, Chapters 16-18

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Key Figures

Imani Perry

Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived until her family moved north to the Boston area when she was five. She frequently visited her family members who remained in the South as she grew up, and she has traveled extensively through the region throughout her life. Her background as the daughter of Black civil rights organizers, her work as an interdisciplinary scholar of African American studies, and a life split between the southern and northern US equipped Perry to write South to America, a memoir of her life as a Southerner in exile, an ode to the Black South, and a chronicle of the South’s frequently overlooked centrality to the historical and modern US.

Perry holds a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University’s School of Law and a PhD in American Studies from the same institution. She currently holds an endowed chair in African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a nationally recognized, award-winning author; South to America is her eighth book. According to the department’s public profile, “Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West […]” (“Imani Perry.” Princeton University). Indeed, South to America addresses the above themes as Perry weaves together narratives about her personal and family history, African American history, and cultural issues, and past and current political and social justice issues. These include the lynchings of the Jim Crow era and the more recent murders of Black Americans at the hands of white supremacists like Dylann Roof.

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an African American ethnographer and novelist whose work informs Perry’s, particularly her writing on Florida and the Caribbean. Both scholars view the American South and the Caribbean as intimately linked. Hurston’s scholarly and creative work focused on the folklore and lives of Black Americans during the early 20th century and was often informed by her lived experiences.

Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a town established by emancipated Black people in 1887 as a haven from the violence of the Jim Crow South. She was educated at a boarding school in Jacksonville and then at a historically Black high school in Baltimore. Hurston went on to attend the HBCU Howard University before enrolling in Barnard College, the women’s college attached to Columbia University.

She was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a rebirth of Black art, literature, music, and intellectualism during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Perry, Hurston was interested in exploring Black culture and issues surrounding the color line in the South. Perry draws extensively on Hurston’s work in her chapters on Florida and the Bahamas. Perry argues that Hurston’s work extended beyond her ethnographic studies to include creative writing because “art gets closer to the sensuousness of talk and presence, echoes them in a way that the formal study of language as structure misses, and the constructed utilitarian approach to faithful transcription ignores” (288). Hurston demonstrates this focus in her most frequently studied novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which chronicles the lives of fictitious migrant workers in Eatonville.

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American academic and civil rights activist whose writing inspires much of Perry’s analysis. His travels in the South, thoughts on the Black Belt, commentary on the color line, and thoughts on whiteness all appear in Perry’s work.

Du Bois opposed Jim Crow-era discrimination and racist violence. He additionally stood in opposition to European colonialism and imperialism and encouraged the liberation of Black colonies from their colonizers.

In his 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote about the “color line” that Perry frequently references in South to America. Du Bois argues that the color line, meaning segregation, was the defining problem of the 20th century. Though this term originally referred to segregation, Perry shows that the color line persists in American society, though it may sometimes become blurred. Integration, she argues, did not solve the problem of the color line. Black and white Americans always lived in proximity to one another, despite racial segregation. Familiarity, she argues, does not destroy white supremacy, because it is ingrained in the institutions and systems that comprise the US.

Perry also draws on Du Bois’s theories of “twoness” and “double consciousness.” This thinking means that one is both Black and American, identities that can be contradictory, though Blackness is integral to the nation’s existence: “Being a Black American requires a double consciousness [...], the habit of seeing from inside the logic of race and the lives of the racialized, and from the external superego of what it means to be American [...] (18).