South To America by Imani Perry

The subtitle of this book is A Journey Below The Mason-Dixon Line To Understand The Soul Of A Nation. The author is black, southern born and northern raised, so when she goes about exploring the south, town by town, and region by region, she does so with a different perspective than some and with an eye to telling a story of what the past, present, and the potential future that each place has, and how it all fits together. She starts in Appalachia, the remote mountainous region that spans from Mississippi to New York, and touches 10 Southern states. She visits Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where white abolitionist John Brown attempted a slave revolt in 1859 and paid for it with his life. She has a mixed mission, the first to experience and portray each place at it is today and to provide the historical perspective, but also to take these and look at where the near future will be, which is nowhere near the same as she moves from place to place, and she struggles to try and tie it all together. It is more textured a portrayal than lumping everything below the Mason Dixon line together. Northern popular opinion has it that Southerners are fat, poor, and uneducated. Statistics will tell you they are politically conservative and reactionary. History has it that they are racist and violent. While there is some truth to those assessments, they don’t come close to painting an accurate or helpful picture of the South, which is much more complex, multifaceted, and contradictory--and she posits that we had better figure it out or we too are doomed to repeat the past.