By Suroor Alikhan
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South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
by Imani Perry
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.
Buy the book on Amazon or on Better World Books
Amy Field seems to have it all: a degree from a prestigious liberal arts college and a good job in downtown Los Angeles. But something is missing. She isn’t happy: she often has nightmares of being strangled.
It is time to make a change. She decides to learn Spanish in Latin America and picks Costa Rica at random (there seem to be more books written about it than about other destinations).
The idea is to spend six months in San José, and another six months in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a close friend.
But as a poet once said, the best-laid plans often go awry. Her friend drops out of the trip, and when her year is up, Field isn’t ready to go back. So she stays on in Latin America for two and a half years. It is a life-changing experience: her self-confidence grows and she becomes more comfortable being on her own.
When she first arrives in San José, she can barely speak Spanish. The couple she stays with, Daisy and Pascual, speak no English. They manage to communicate, especially when their son Marco visits and is able to translate.
Field travels around the continent to Panama, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. In Chile, she climbs a volcano almost by mistake (she was fairly sure she would not make it to the top), hikes in the Torres del Paine National Park and goes to the end of the world (Tierra del Fuego, Chile). She goes to the San Blas Islands in Panama, Machu Pichu in Peru, and sleeps in a hammock in the Amazon forest in Brazil (she doesn’t get much sleep—she’s too busy worrying about snakes and other creatures crawling in with her).
But Costa Rica is her centre—specifically, the Hotel Las Tortugas, an ecotourist resort in Playa Grande. The hotel is run by Louis, an American, and his Costa Rican (or Tica) partner, Marienela. He started the hotel so he could save the beach—which is one of the places that the Leatherback sea turtles spawn—from being taken over by developers.
Field eventually gets a job at the hotel, answering emails in return for board and lodging. Louis becomes something of a mentor to her. He provokes her, teaches her to surf and offers her bits of wisdom. One of the first things he tells her when she arrives at the hotel is to take off her watch: “we live on moontime here”.
The chapters about Playa Grande are scattered throughout the book, which can get a little distracting. I was reading about Chile (which I was especially interested in, having spent part of my childhood there), and then suddenly, I was back in Costa Rica in a chapter about the joys of surfing, when I wanted to continue with reading about her trip to Chile. I did enjoy reading about Hotel Las Tortugas and all the people there, but sometimes the chapters felt a bit jarring when they turned up in the middle of another section.
Having said that, I have to take my hat off to Field, arriving in not just in an unfamiliar country but a continent, for a long stay with barely any knowledge of the language. She pushes herself out of her comfort zone. Not only does she survive, but she thrives on a sense of adventure. The trip helps her decide what is really important to her, as opposed to the roles that society expects her, as a woman, to fill. As she writes, the aim of her travel was not the destination: “It had been about opening my eyes. It had been about learning, and moving, and observing, and listening. … It had been about finding out—and believing—that I am more powerful than I ever could have imagined.”
And surely that is the point of travel.
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