South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
by Imani Perry (Ecco, $29)
“Popular culture will tell you Southerners are fat, poor, and uneducated. History will tell you they are racist and violent,” said Suzanne Van Atten in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Few voices, however, make the case that the South is less a backward corner of America than it is the very soul of the nation—a multifaceted region whose history as the seat of Black slavery in this land continues to make it singularly influential in shaping American society and culture. That’s precisely what Imani Perry does in her “compelling, thought-provoking” tour of the region in which she was born. Now a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, Perry has tried to capture the South’s complex character by writing essays that focus on one city, state, or subregion at a time.
“The book’s pleasures are many,” said Hamilton Cain in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Perry shines when she’s present in the narrative,” and her vignettes “spark off the page,” whether she’s revisiting the 1921 Tulsa race riot or analyzing Southern colloquialisms. But amid her stops in Appalachia, Alabama, South Carolina’s Low Country, New Orleans, and Miami, the compelling quiet moments are often overwhelmed by “a strident op-ed voice” that fails in the end to cohere into the type of portrait of the South craved by those of us who were born there and raised on its “scorching” contradictions. “Ever Sphinx-like, the South has once again eluded a writer’s penetrating gaze.”
To me, “the most insightful moments occur when Perry is less a frenetic traveler than a thoughtful essayist,” said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. She’s outraged, understandably, that she and all other Black Americans are asked to accept that the manifest racism of the nation’s founders was a passing, forgivable flaw. Elsewhere, as when addressing mass incarceration, she “skillfully, sometimes brutally, draws out the links between past struggles and current injustices.” When Perry is on the move, her observations “can feel scattered,” resulting in a portrait of the South that’s like an incomplete puzzle. Even so, “if you squint just a little, South to America helps fill in the picture.”