South to the Midwest: Race, Region, and the National Imaginary
Imani Perry | South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation | Ecco | 2022 | 432 Pages
Adolph Reed | The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives | Verso | 2022 | 176 Pages
Writing about the South, as distinguished from Southern literature, predates the founding of the U.S. In the intervening two-and-a-half centuries since Letter IX of Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, chronicling a trip by “Farmer James” to “Charles Town,” writers have seized upon the contradictions of the region and its contested place in the U.S. to offer explanations of why the South is the way it is. Much of this writing ranges from forgettable to bad, weighed down with ideological defenses of the Southern way of life, or content to gawk at the freaks who live there, or tied to long-dead debates. But as the region continues to haunt and perplex the nation, books reckoning with it continue to emerge. The last decade has seen a pair of remarkable memoirs from Southern Black writers, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir. Two books published in the past year—though not strictly memoir—take their place alongside them as reconsiderations of a region too often explained and too little understood: Imani Perry’s National Book Award-winning South to America and Adolph Reed’s The South.
While both Perry and Reed emerged from Southern childhoods to find themselves ensconced in the Ivy League academy, neither are beholden to “common sense” thought about either the region they come from or their eventual destinations. Informed by earlier literary efforts but responsive to contemporary developments, both books take a literary return to the region in order to make sense of its slippery relationship to the nation’s self-conception and the enduring power of regionality and race as a key to understanding the U.S.
Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has in her five previous books covered phenomena such as the life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the history of the Negro National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the aesthetic and political dimensions of hip-hop. Unsurprisingly for an interdisciplinary scholar and a writer with a significant public profile, South to America ranges across the region higgledy-piggledy at one moment, and with a stunning inner logic owing to her varied interests the next. Perry’s work proves greater than the sum of its parts: while individual chapters focusing on specific locales ground the work in a sense of place and region, the thematic material works contrapuntally, like a good call-and-response musical motif, to illuminate a more detailed profile of the region’s significance than the accretion of site-specific reportage might suggest at first glance.
South to America is animated by Perry’s sense that the South is specific but not unique; explicitly eschewing American exceptionalism, Perry also avoids the temptation to do the same to the region. Instead, she understands that even the North has a little bit of the South in it, and not just because of the Great Migration of the first decades of the twentieth century that brought African Americans North in great numbers. As she observes, that demographic shift also involved moving from the rural to the urban within the South. Furthermore, as she writes at the beginning of her chapter on Nashville, remarking upon the unusual connections many of her colleagues in Princeton’s African American Studies department have to that city, “Princeton retains an echo of the plantation South,” not just because the Virginian James Madison was its first graduate student, or the slave-owning Jonathan Edwards was once its president and is buried in the town, but because of the deeply intertwined and symbiotic relationship between the centers of Northern power and the plantocracy of the South.
South to America, like the book Perry models it on, Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place, sits at the crossroads of memoir, travelogue, history, literary criticism, and music writing. That does not make it an imitation or even a Murray-for-the-twenty-first-century; Perry is too canny for that, too much her own person. Leaving aside the impossibility of imitating Murray’s idiosyncratic approach, Perry gives herself a different remit: while both are mindful of the past, as opposed to Murray’s personal touches in his prologue, Perry takes a decidedly didactic approach, as shown in her introduction:
Paying attention to the South—its past, its dance, its present, its threatening future, and most of all how it moves the rest of the country about—allows us to understand much more about our nation, and about how our people, land, and commerce work in relation to one another, often cruelly, and about how our tastes and ways flow from our habits.
This is a quest of a different sort from Murray’s, as suggested by the book’s subtitle, A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. South to a Very Old Place reflects the author’s unease at the time of its publication in 1971 with the orthodoxies of both Black Power and the liberal championing of the Civil Rights movement. The latter helped push through the remarkable flurry of bills in the 1960s that began to finally extend some of the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution to Black citizens; the former advanced the cause of Black self-determination through organization and armed defense. Murray’s unease seems quaint in retrospect. Perry, writing in the third decade of the twenty-first century, displays no such unease; there can be no more doubt about the failure to secure the equality that was promised at mid-century, and South to America reflects that.
Perry’s realism is not born from naïve disenchantment, but honest reckoning with history. Writing of Wilmington, North Carolina’s so-called “race riot” of 1898, which destroyed both the Fusion government and thriving Black community then ascendant in that city, Perry observes that the “broken oasis is a motif in the post-emancipation South.” The cities that dared to amass Black power and wealth—Wilmington, Tulsa, Rosewood—“were destroyed by the habits of White supremacy.” Behind the legally codified apartheid regime of Jim Crow, behind the illegal but tacitly approved “race riots” that destroyed Black wealth and power, lies the plantation and slavery: “To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, it’s self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.” Perry’s language strains to take in all that is Southern and American at the same time, the phrases piling on one another like so many historical wrecks piling up at the feet of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.
For Adolph Reed, the situation is simpler, which is not to say simplistic. His slim volume, The South (published by Verso), reveals just as Perry’s does its chief concerns in its subtitle: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. Reed, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has become a lightning rod for intra-left debates around race and class, particularly in the social media spaces so hospitable to such discourse. Whatever an affiliation with a magazine like Jacobin might mean to the type of people drawn to interminable online debates, Reed’s book offers a thesis of unimpeachable clarity, informed by but not beholden to the reconsideration of slavery as an institution spearheaded by the 1619 Project, among others:
This is indeed one of the smaller ironies of the current attention to recuperating slavery as the essentially formative black American experience; it is Jim Crow—the regime of codified, rigorously, and unambiguously enforced racism and white supremacy—that has had the most immediate consequences for contemporary life and the connections between race and politics in the South and, less directly, the rest of the country.
One might fault Reed for soft-pedaling the continued significance of slavery, but his authority as one of the members of the last cohort who possess living memory of Jim Crow—a view he avers could be characterized as “self-serving”—tempers his reading of the region. If Reed has become known, reductively, as a “class over race” thinker, The South even in its brevity belies such distortions of his thought to instead reveal nuanced insights into race and region.
Reed offers his own moments of memoir in The South: his multiracial childhood street in New Orleans; a strange encounter with a state trooper in the 1970s who, having pulled Reed over out of curiosity about his “Boycott Gulf” bumper sticker, ends up receiving an impromptu lecture about Portuguese neo-colonialism in Africa; Reed’s time spent in the sparsely populated North Carolinian Warren County, working as an activist while also encountering the unusual Native American group calling itself the Haliwa-Saponi, recognized as an official tribe by the state but not the federal government (the latter from which they have never sought recognition). This experience inspires some of Reed’s most cogent writing about race in the book: “The harder earnest race scientists tried and failed to specify criteria defining and distinguishing ‘races,’ the more they exposed the notion’s essential incoherence and arbitrariness[.]” If the Haliwa-Saponi represent to some people a complicated knot of questions about racial and indigenous identity, to Reed their continued existence only points to the absurdity of race as a modern, scientific discourse. Instead, he draws attention to the “ambiguous and fluid relation between ‘race’ and ‘culture’ and equally fluid and ambiguous notions of ‘heritage’” that, to his thinking, better capture the dynamics of the color line than racial essentialism.
Here lies one of the signal points of departure for Reed and Perry: not the biological fictiveness of race, which they agree upon, but the influence of history and culture on racial formation. The great scholar of African American literature and culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr. writes in his 2001 book Turning South Again: “Black slavery’s formulation in a specific body of slave law—from the seventeenth century onward through its functional, if not nominal manifestations in southern agriculture, industry, commerce, and labor well into the twentieth century—is critical [to understanding the South].” This viewpoint animates a large swath of contemporary writing from Perry to the 1619 Project to Ibram X. Kendi and beyond, the differences amongst them notwithstanding. Reed’s adoption of Jim Crow as the operative framework for understanding race in the U.S. and the South places emphasis on an account of historical contingency that maintains that “[s]egregation was enforced on whites and well as blacks,” and that seeks to undo a “perspective that compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle… against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South[.]” Whatever correspondences between Reed’s and Perry’s perspectives, any attempt to harmonize them flounders on the basic incommensurability in their operative historical frameworks.
Perry organizes her book into three major sections, “Origin Stories,” “The Solidified South,” and “Water People,” but in spite of the attempt to impose order on her sprawling narrative, like the region it seeks to grapple with, the book refuses containment. Far from a backhanded way to accuse Perry of disorganization, she demonstrates keen control: to evoke across hundreds of pages the region’s refusal to be easily delineated, to be reduced to a set of maxims or simplistic lessons, is an undertaking worthy of her literary model Albert Murray. Her final chapter, which recounts her time in the Bahamas and Cuba, affords a chance to see just how southern the South really is; as she writes, the way “the so-called Global South [is] characterized [as] literally very close to what we mean when we say ‘the South.’” The South is a region, a culture, a state of being and mind, but it also captures a polis, a particular arrangement of social power, that stretches beyond boundaries imposed either by custom or the laws of the nation-state.
One of Toni Morrison’s critiques of Murray’s South to a Very Old Place, Perry recounts, lies in his refusal “to think about the larger landscape of Blackness beyond the borders of the nation,” a criticism Perry takes seriously, as she should. A similar charge could be leveled at Reed; while not neglectful of the global dimensions of U.S. hegemony elsewhere in his work, in The South he rarely strays from national borders. To fault him for this would be to distort his project, just as faulting Perry for the sprawl of her book would be to default hers. At the risk of offering a simplistic attempt at rapprochement between the two, we need the stereoscopic perspective offered by reading these two books side-by-side. While they cannot be harmonized except in the most facile way, together they offer an antidote to a mistaken strain of thought about the formative power of region that dominates contemporary political imagination.
I say “region” and not “the South” because the regional borders are porous, not just in those liminal zones that separate the South from Appalachia and Appalachia from the Midwest, but in our national self-conception as well. A figure like J.D. Vance, who in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy straddles an Appalachian childhood he didn’t have with the Rust Belt upbringing he did, parlayed his regional identity into a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in Ohio by appealing to those who, rightly or wrongly, perceive themselves as victims of downward mobility. (Helped, it should be noted, by generous influxes of Peter Thiel’s money.) If the denizens of the postindustrial Midwest now keenly feel their disenfranchisement and neglect, such realizations are old hat to Southerners of all colors.
If the South is the region in which we can find the soul of the nation, as Perry maintains, the average Midwesterner might step in to assert that in fact, here is the soul you seek. I say “average” deliberately because the Midwest prides itself upon its averageness. Reductive? Surely. Normatively white? Absolutely. Politically salient? Always. Phil Christman, author of a collection of essays called How to Be Normal, chronicles the normality, the averageness, the all-Americanness of the Midwest in his earlier volume, Midwest Futures. That normality has always had a coating of whiteness, as he writes:
The way we talk about Midwestern whiteness—a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head, as thought we were discussing May snowstorms—risks turning this long dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, which can be changed, into a metaphysical fact that can’t… Their traits and virtues are simply those of people, of Americans. When they look at themselves, they see anyone.
The dime-store southernness that expresses itself through whiteness goes for the median Midwesterner as well; it is the distortive capacity they share to reduce the normative American identity to whiteness that speaks to the continued power of the region in the national imaginary.
That function of whiteness to declare itself as normative, thereby setting the parameters of what is American, is not unique to any region in the U.S. No one segment of the country is truly lily-white, but the virtue of Perry and Reed’s books is that, whatever the differences of their historical frameworks, they write of a region whose leaders for decades deliberately obscured its multiracial reality in order to achieve reintegration into the nation-state following the failure of Reconstruction. In a political sense, they succeeded, but as Perry and Reed demonstrate, not without denying the truth of the region: that the fault lines of race and class that animate and bedevil the efforts of both our technocrats and demagogues fail to be contained at the line of the borders we choose to erect, whether symbolic or actual.