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

Perry sees the Caribbean as a cultural extension of the Southern US. Paradise Island in the Bahamas and Havana, Cuba, are “two places distinct from, independent of, yet deeply familiar and bound to the United States” (349). Moreover, the American South is similar to the “Global South” to which these two places belong. The term “Global South” refers to wealthy nations of the north, like the US, as both dominating and depending on the resources of poorer countries that lie south of them. This definition echoes the American South’s relationship to the US as a whole.

The Bahamas is a former British colony. After the British declared all enslaved people who entered the Bahamas free, an influx of Black settlers arrived. Refugees came to the Bahamas in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.

In 1841, Africans revolted and demanded that their ship be sailed to the Bahamian port of Nassau. Nevertheless, Nassau also served as a base for trade with the Confederate states during the Civil War, and the Bahamas became “a proto-Jim Crow nation” (351). The remnants of this history appear in the “deeply stratified” nature of the Bahamas; the islands serve as a playground and tax haven for the rich, while impoverished Haitians live on the margins of society despite comprising about one-third of the Bahamian population. Another third of the population comes from the Southern US.

Today, “leisure culture” and the tourist industry dominate the Bahamas. Perry describes the discomfort that being an upper-middle-class African American brings on a visit to the island nation: “It was harder for me to connect in the Bahamas than anywhere else in the Black world I’ve been […] The Bahamians knew I was there to shop and sun, even if I hoped for something more substantive” (355). There are reasons for this suspicion and skepticism directed at American tourists. The cruise industry that seeks tax refuge in the Bahamas serves as an arm of corporate imperialism today: “They pollute the waters for American pleasure. They serve Americans who would rather not sleep in the places they want to peer at […]” (354). Likewise, the Bahamian celebratory tradition Junkanoo now serves the tourist industry.

The time that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spent in the Bahamas is significant and demonstrative of the link between the Caribbean and the US South. Perry wonders if he came as a tourist or, like her, sought something more significant. He authored his mountaintop speech, which he gave in Memphis the day before his assassination, in the Bahamas. She speculates about what King saw there that may have inspired him. She is certain that he would see the poverty inflicted on Haitians as a reminder of why he began his Poor People’s Campaign, which focused on eradicating economic inequality.

Perry recounts her visit to Havana, where she is again reminded of her “ugly Americanism” when she finds herself dissatisfied with her hotel accommodations (360). Most of Cuba’s population is Black, another reminder of enslavement’s impact on the Caribbean. Here, she finds similarities to the US, despite the Cuban Revolution’s promise of racial egalitarianism.

Before the revolution in the 1950s, the US treated Cuba as a de facto colony, using it as a marketplace for US imports and exploiting its resources. As is true of the Bahamas today, rich Americans treated Cuba as a playground. After the US embargoed Cuba because of its socialist revolution, the country was no longer able to import American-made cars. Today, Black Cubans maintain classic cars that were built by Black people in American auto plants. While “tourists love the cars in Havana” (361), Perry cautions readers not to romanticize the past: “You can in fact delude yourself into believing you are back inside the time of Jim Crow Cuba, or the United States” (361).

When Perry and her tour guide are refused entry into a club that writer Ernest Hemingway once patronized, she is reminded that racial hierarchies persist in Cuba thanks to the “residues” of imperialism and enslavement: “[…] no matter where you are, the Blacker you are, the lower your status, and any sort of Blackness at all can sometimes serve as a reason to kick you out” (364-65). The color line is not confined to the American South. Perry meets a young woman who is West African by birth but grew up in the US and then emigrated to Cuba. She tells Perry that the police in Cuba target Black people, too, and wealthy white people live in luxury. Perry explains the historical reason for these disparities, despite the socialist revolution:

[…] wealthy White Cubans fled the revolution and were re-baptized White in the US and have fed inequality on the island by sending money to their relatives. Meanwhile others have to make do with resources that are limited because of the endless embargo, the ongoing fallout of the end of the Soviet Union, and the steady global erosion of socialist possibility. Even if a nation isn’t capitalist, the global marketplace is (369).

Perry also visits a Black American in exile. The two discuss a range of topics from politics to music, alternating between Spanish and English: “Inside her hearth was a slice of Black life that was distinctly US and diasporic at once” (371). Identifying as a New Afrikan, this woman sees herself as a daughter of the Southern diaspora who is tasked with healing the damage wrought by colonialism and enslavement. She passes the banner of being an elder to Perry.

In 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd when he kneeled on Floyd’s neck for almost 10 minutes. As he suffered at the hands of police, Floyd let out a southern cry for his mother. Though he died in Minneapolis, Floyd was a native of Houston, Texas.

Perry suggests that Houston is integral to the lives of all Americans because it provides us with “mobility” (377); this was a contributing factor in Floyd’s death, since he left Houston seeking a better life in the North. Houston grew and flourished because of oil. This industry and the city’s cotton exchange drew the working class, including Black Southerners, to Houston during the Great Migration. Today, Houston has the largest Black population in the US. Houston’s devotion to oil, however, “also created desires that would become desperation” (378). The US intervenes frequently in the political affairs of foreign powers because of it. Immigrants from Latin America came to the city to fill the labor void during World War I and II, and by the 1980s the modern demographic landscape of the city formed. Houston is now the most diverse city in the US.

Tobe Nwigwe, a Nigerian American and Houstonian rapper, paid tribute to Taylor, Floyd, and other victims of police violence and brought “an earnest and hopeful” note to his 2021 BET Awards appearance (381). Perry asks, “Isn’t that what we want, that irrepressible hope?” (381). She concludes that if Americans want their country to be great, they must look to the South.