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

Florida’s history is linked to multiple colonialisms. The Spanish colonized it and later the US. It is the site of Indigenous resistance to colonial power and the site of immigration from Caribbean islands. Today, immigration to the state is fed by Florida’s tourist industry; in the past, political instability in the Caribbean drew immigrants to the state.

This colonial history explains the racial hierarchy and colorism among Latino people in Florida. Americans often treat US Latinos as a homogenous group, but this view is simplistic. Perry explains, “There are Latinos who are positioned as White according to their historic origins and social location who, as much as any White Americans, have committed themselves to protecting that status” (280). Those who identify as “mestizo”—having both European and Indigenous origins—likewise distinguish themselves from Black or Indigenous people. These identities play a role in political affiliation and power. Elite white-classified Cubans who fled Cuba’s revolution and their descendants are mostly conservative. Puerto Ricans, in contrast, have limited voting rights, even though the island has been a US territory for over 100 years.

African American ethnographer and novelist Zora Neale Hurston wrote about the Black South, including Florida, and its connections to the Caribbean. Hurston grew up in Eatonville, a Black town founded by emancipated Black people during the late 1800s who sought refuge from the violence of the Jim Crow South. Thus, the town stands as another example of Black creation born out of survival efforts. Today, the town is smaller than it was in Hurston’s life, but the population remains mostly Black. During the 1930s, Hurston researched the story of Ruby McCollum, a married Black woman who was accused and convicted of murdering the white man who was identified as her boyfriend and father of her child, Leroy Adams, Jr. Adams was a physician who served in the Florida legislature. Hurston’s research areas of expertise included interracial relationships in Florida, so the Pittsburgh Courier commissioned her to write about McCollum’s trial. She found that McCollum did not have a consensual relationship with Adams. Rather, written evidence showed that he raped her multiple times. Though McCollum’s conviction was eventually overturned, she was institutionalized. Perry observes, “Maybe McCollum didn’t say ‘no’ every time, but what did that mean when ‘no’ wasn’t ever a real choice?” (287).

In today’s Florida, immigrants from Mexico and Central America mostly comprise the migrant labor force. Historically, Black and white Southerners held these poorly paid jobs. Perry observes the prevalence of dollar stores along Florida’s highways. These stores provide impoverished people with cheap goods that are manufactured by impoverished laborers overseas. The author views this as a distinctly Southern business model.

Perry links US imperialism and colonialism, the military, and Southern society: “If you had a map of the Deep South and Caribbean with no state designations but simply dotted with military bases, you’d see a common landscape” (293). The US military is part of Southern culture due to remnants of “the aristocratic culture of honor among the planter class. It is intensely patriarchal and tends towards authoritarian ways” (293). Moreover, this militarism, or lack thereof, is politicized. Critics deem pacifism a cowardly political choice, even when it is a moral one. Both the Pulse nightclub shooter in Orlando and George Zimmerman, who murdered the Black Floridian teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, are products of this culture.

Martin died in Seminole County, which is named after Florida’s Indigenous Seminole population. Some of the Seminole people are descended from formerly enslaved people. Most of the Seminoles were sent to Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act, but others remained in the state to resist US colonialism. Black and Indigenous Seminoles supported one another’s interests. It was only in 1976 that the US government agreed to provide the Seminoles with payment for their forced dislocation.

Miami exemplifies Florida’s position as simultaneously part of the Southern US and the Global South. Black Americans built the city but lived segregated in Overtown, which has since attracted Black immigrants from the Caribbean. Imperialism led to migrations of people between Florida and the Caribbean islands and established “a linked fate between different types of Black people” (299). The color line that appears in the US South extends into the Caribbean. The influx of white-identifying Cuban elites to Florida because of the Cuban Revolution, which advocated racial equality, shows this connection:

The US gave preference for Cubans who disdained Castro, a disdain that had to do not only with lost land and autonomy on the island, but with the loss of the plantation-based structure of Cuban society. In contrast, Black immigrants, from places over which the US exerted a lot of economic control, were treated with disdain (303).

Immigrants fleeing the Castro regime, who were often white professional people in the first wave of immigration, had legal access to immigration, in contrast to the obstacles faced by immigrants from countries with a higher proportion of Black and Indigenous people. Perry extends the definition of the US South to include the Caribbean as a result of immigration. She presents Florida as both unique and “our company in kind” (305).

Alabama is unlike the states between which it sits. Writer Mildred Cram described it as truly American, in contrast to Florida and Louisiana, which reflect European colonial influences.

Perry describes the mobile home parks that appear along I-10, which links the city of Mobile to other Southern urban centers. These communities allowed white Americans to maintain segregated neighborhoods in the wake of the civil rights movement’s successes. Mobile homes offer the false promise of ease and freedom of movement. Ownership traps buyers, because the structures’ poor quality makes it difficult to move mobile homes. Furthermore, owners cannot afford to move them when park proprietors inevitably sell the land the homes are placed on to developers or increase rents: “Bitter irony strikes those who longed for segregation” (310) but find themselves trapped on the site that they envisioned as liberating and under their own control.

The Clotilda is a ship that sank off Mobile’s coast in 1860, when enslavement was illegal. Still, Timothy Meaher dared to transport captive Africans from Benin to Alabama. Upon arrival, the ship’s captain set the ship ablaze to hide Meaher’s crime, and the ruins sank into Mobile Bay. The Africans who were transported on the Clotilda established a colony called Africatown north of Mobile after the Civil War. Anthropologist Hurston interviewed one of the Clotilda’s survivors, Cudjo Lewis, and was disappointed to learn of his conversion to Christianity and that he was sold into enslavement by fellow Africans. Hurston also observed distinctions between the people of Africatown and African Americans, noting that Lewis’s homesickness was unabating. Perry, however, notes that this sense of loss is something African Americans share with Africans of the diaspora. The African American search for one’s ancestors speaks to this loss. Yet “there are African elements to the South. Some parts of the past are retained and remain with us, cherished” (313). For example, many towns in the South are like African villages, and shotgun houses, which are West African in origin, appear throughout the Deep South.

Perry looks through photographer Gordon Parks’s images of Black life in the 1950s South, including an image of a group dressed in their Sunday best posed in front of a church. Reflecting on Toni Morrison’s description of young, Black churchgoing girls from Mobile, Perry observes that Morrison shortchanged these women by characterizing them as plain and uptight: “Underneath the nervous maintenance of a Black Southern good girl is an ocean of feeling” (318). This maintenance of image continues to coexist alongside moments of joy: “The South, and Mobile women, both live and hold fast. They have to.” (320).