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

Part 1, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Mary’s Land: Annapolis and the Caves”

Maryland is a site of the Mason-Dixon Line, the line that partitions the state from Pennsylvania and is considered the marker between the North and the South. Perry has ancestry in the state, according to census documents from the late 1800s, but the scant surviving data makes it difficult to know much with any specificity about her family member, probably named Esther, who was once enslaved. This imprecision speaks to the loss of identity that enslavement brought and with which the African American descendants of those enslaved people continue to grapple. Throughout the chapter, Perry wonders about Esther’s life and her place in American history.

Though Maryland is part of the Upper South, “[y]ou’d be hard-pressed to find a Deep Southerner who would EVER call Maryland or Washington, DC, the South” (65). Nevertheless, there are many “Souths,” despite some commonalities that unite the region. Although many view the South as overwhelmingly rural, there is an urban South well beyond the reaches of New Orleans and Atlanta, its most popular metropolitan areas. Perry describes Maryland as the urban South.

Perry visits Annapolis, Maryland’s capital, and tours a historic museum home. In the kitchen, she imagines the enslaved woman who prepared the meals of the elites who lived there and who possessed both skill and knowledge that canonical history long overlooked. She imagines this woman as her ancestor, Esther, whose main goal was to survive her horrific life circumstances but who also strived to find moments of joy amid the terrors through which she lived: “I imagined this cook lying on the intact ground, shivering, sweltering, alone, and knowing. An archive in her head, her name left on no ledger, no wall in this house” (69). This leads to an essential question: What is “home,” particularly for those who were enslaved and for their descendants? Perry asks, “Did slavery make home always somewhere else?” (70). Home is both physical and emotional, and Black Americans are frequently stripped of both: “Property ownership is cherished and vulnerable, often fleeting for us” (70). Perry wonders if her ancestors ever felt a sense of home in the US and if Black Americans today do or can have this experience.

Likewise, Mexican and Central American immigrants today feel this displacement. Many of them are children who work the South’s tobacco fields in which Black people once toiled: “The past isn’t even past […]” (73). Likewise, the recent child-removal policy that the Trump administration implemented, in which children were separated from their immigrant parents at the country’s southern border, is not really a new practice. Exploitative labor practices, including child labor, and separating non-white children from their parents are but one of enslavement and colonialism’s legacies. Perry notes that this “difference is one of degree but not kind” (73).

Perry also takes readers to rural Maryland to visit the underground caverns known as the Crystal Grottos. The rural part of the state feels more southern to her, and the tour guide who takes Perry’s group through the grottos echoes the white supremacy that is frequently associated with the rural South when she describes one of the crystal formations as “all white and sparkling, just like a king should be” (79).

Later, Perry reads one of the white supremacist books she saw in an Annapolis gift shop, The Practice of Klannishness. The Ku Klux Klan was and is a violent domestic terrorist group, but Perry also reminds readers that “[t[heir practice was described as generous, family-oriented, and respectable. The Klan is so very American. We are used to making virtue out of shameful ways. And justifying brutality for the sake of virtue” (81). She challenges readers to think carefully about which values and history they will preserve and which elements they will reject.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Ironic Capital: Washington, DC”

A venture into the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, also raises questions about what is and is not southern. Enslaved people built the city, and until the 1970s the population was majority Black, earning the metropolis its nickname, “Chocolate City.” Today’s DC still has a large Black populace, though the city’s historically Black neighborhoods are gentrified, and the number of Black residents has decreased.

The Confederate flag is a symbol of America’s history of enslavement and racism. Yet Perry argues that traditional American monuments, like those found in DC, are not that different from those of the Confederacy. Enslaved people built the White House, for example. This system is embodied in these physical structures and symbols of American democracy, so that “[…] any monument is in a sense both an icon and a grave—a burial vault, in which the messiness of history is often dispensed with for the sake of the imagined community.” (87).

For Americans to see the United States as exceptional, they must ignore the horrors of its past and its present, including enslavement and colonialism. Nevertheless, society is less generous in its conception of the South, which “is supposed to bear the brunt of the shame, and the nation’s sins are disposed upon it” (86). The South’s significance to the nation’s birth is marginalized, and Perry challenges her audience to be more truthful about the nation’s ugly history and the South’s place in it.

DC is also Howard University’s home. Howard is one of the nation’s most prestigious historically Black universities. It is also part of what makes the city a Southern one, since Black educational institutions were mostly established in the South. HBCUs are, thus, intrinsically Southern, but they are also global institutions that connect Black Americans with the Black diaspora, especially the Caribbean. They are, thus, sites of Black diversity “in a nation that often flattens Blackness of every sort into something simplistic and two-dimensional” (91).

Perry asks multiple Black friends and associates if DC is the South. Their responses fall along generational lines, with those in their fifties saying yes, while younger people either disagree or offer “differential assessment based upon what ‘Southern’ means—and to whom one is being compared.” (96).

Perry also notes that gentrification is sweeping through DC. As a result, Black inhabitants are being pushed out of the city in a repetition of the historical pattern of exclusion of non-white people. Regarding the nation’s capital’s Perry asks, “What is this symbolic republic?” (97) that does not stop this process of ejection or erasure of Black people.

Part 1, Chapters 4-5 Analysis

Chapters 4 and 5 of South to America are united by the question of what makes a place Southern. This question allows Perry to unpack the South’s common characteristics while also identifying what distinguishes it.

Perry notes that both DC and Maryland are the “urban South,” contrasting them with the popular perception of the South as mostly rural. She likewise distinguishes “rural” from “country,” arguing that “country” is a “disposition” that is not confined by geography, so that even someone from the urban South, like DC, can be country. Perry describes this disposition as “keeping a sense of your value in the face of diminishment,” something that Black Americans had to do in light of the violence and discrimination perpetuated by Jim Crow. She further expounds on this disposition within the context of American hip-hop music:

The country idiom of hip-hop was there since the beginning and remained a minor note, perhaps a grace note, for a long while. You can see it if you search hip-hop lyrics websites for words like collard greens, granddaddy, big mama, cuss, coming out of the mouths of people from New York and Los Angeles (Perry, Imani. “The Country Idiom of Hip-Hop.” Oxford American. 13 December 2022).

The urban South that Perry explores is united in its demographics. Washington, DC, was historically a majority Black city, though the Black population has decreased in recent years. According to the most recent US Census data, Washington, DC, is 45.8% Black, and Baltimore, Maryland, is 61.6% Black (“US Census Bureau”). In fact, in 1975 the funk band Parliament released a song called “Chocolate City” that identified DC as the premier Black city in the US. Perry demonstrates that gentrification in DC repeats the historical pattern of driving Black people away from their homes; she notes that the capital was over 70% Black in 1970. While DC remains nearly 50% Black, this decrease of over 20% in 50 years reflects the nation’s tendency toward Black displacement.

Both Maryland and DC have strong connections to enslavement’s history. Maryland’s economy centered around it, and Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), one of the most influential Black abolitionists, spent part of his youth as an enslaved person in Baltimore (A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland, 2008). Enslaved people constructed much of historic Washington, DC, including the White House. The city was also home to the “Williams Slave Pen,” which Solomon Northup famously described in his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (Deutsch, James. “D.C.’s Slave Trade Ended Here, Next Door to the Smithsonian.” Folklife. 18 September 2020). Northup was a free Black man who was kidnapped in DC, enslaved, and transported to the Southern US. Northup describes the irony of gazing upon the capital from these quarters, which he compares to a cattle pen.

Though DC and Maryland are upper Southern, the above aspects of their history tie them to the rest of the South. Despite common misconceptions, it is not necessary to be rural to be Southern.