Published by HarperCollins, 2022, 432 pages

To understand the United States, you need to understand the South, its history and its legacy. That is the premise of this book by Imani Perry, a Black scholar from Birmingham, Alabama, who has lived outside her state for many years.

South to America is a mix of travelogue, history and memoir. Perry sees the South—and the US—through the prism of its past, especially through race: “Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation. Like the conquest of indigenous people, the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country.”

Perry travels around the South to Appalachia, Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Washington DC, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas. She also goes to the Bahamas and Havana, Cuba, because of the strong links between the US and the Caribbean.

What is striking throughout this book is the continuing reverberations of history, in particular the history of race and slavery. The past, Perry says, “is ever present”.

In Maryland, slaves, including children, would be sent to work on tobacco farms, inhaling the poison from the plants. One of Perry’s ancestors may have been among them. Today, slavery may not exist but people—including children—still work on tobacco farms, except that now they are more likely to be Mexican or Central American. 

The wealth and power of the nation came from the takeover of indigenous land and the access to cheap labor. She quotes writer Sven Beckert about the enormous political power wielded by cotton plantation owners, with their “unlimited supplies of land, labor and capital”. These shaped the policies of the country.

The book is full of stories about people, those who were exploited, the exploiters and those who resisted. Oakwood University in Alabama, founded by the Seventh-Day Adventists to educate freed people, sat on 380 acres of land that was once a plantation. The university, although conservative, became a center for student organizing, especially in 1931 when the students went on strike to protest the fate of nine Black men falsely accused of raping two White women. 

In Appalachia, where “the Black-White binary of race has never been as permanent and fixed as people like to claim, not when you live up real close”, she introduces us to three women who came from nothing but defied expectations, living life on their own terms.

Doris Payne from West Virginia was a Black international jewel thief, known as Diamond Doris. She remade herself as genteel woman with “perfected polish” (and lots of social security numbers). Linda Taylor from Tennessee was another self-created woman, identifying as White, Black, Latina, Asian and Jewish, and known as the “welfare queen”. Finally, a White woman whom we are all familiar with: Dolly Parton, who remade herself as the queen of country. 

These are just some of the stories that Perry tells. Because she has such a wide canvas, you can see the patterns, the way the present echoes the past and the way events repeat themselves. The brutality of slavery is one of these patterns, one that recurs throughout.

This is often not an easy read, but accounts of the viciousness of slavery and segregation never are. She does, however, have enough positive stories and memories to prevent it being unrelenting. Although I do know a fair bit about US history, because of the way Perry pulled several elements together, I found this book gave me a deeper understanding of it.

The point she makes in the book is that the South should not be dismissed, as it often is, as an exotic region that is unlike the rest of the country. It is not only very much as part of America but one that holds the key to understanding what makes it the way it is today. 

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.