Why did I get this book?
Imani Perry always impresses me.
Is it what I thought it was?
I didn’t have any preconceptions except for the impressions I got from a few reviews of the book. It’s a very personal combination of travel narrative, reflective essay, political commentary and diary.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It would be a great book to use in an American Studies or U.S. History class. I could see assigning in Black Studies courses but Perry is fairly careful not to collapse “the South” and “Blackness” into being one and the same thing. It would also make a great book in some kind of series on travel writing and personal narrative.
Quotes
“What should be matters as much as what is. History orients us and magnifies our present circumstance.”
“The tenderness I feel for the descendants of White miners is limited by my own sense of the story of Black folks in Appalachia and how many of their untended dead lie across the landscape.”
“I myself have made the distinction between the sins of the founding fathers and the Confederacy by saying the ‘lost cause’ is worse because they celebrate traitors to the nation. But that is, in a sense, a victor’s skewed logic and not compelling even to me. The Revolutionary War soldiers were traitors to the Crown. We celebrate it otherwise only because they won and we became what followed.”
“Words of precision. These were known people. Called by names.”
“Huntsville’s ghosts have a story that one finds all over, of being suffocated under the weight of ambition. It was true during slavery. It was true afterwards.”
“There is simultaneously a jealously guarded color line and an ease between Black and White in the South.”
“North Carolina has experienced what Amiri Baraka referred to as the ‘changing same’.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This kind of book is such a delicate balance. You spend a lot of time in the author’s head and then looking out on the world through her eyes. Perry has to manage to be interesting company to a reader while remaining true to herself, and all the while seeing familiar scenes and places while working hard to stay alive to the possibility of being surprised by what she sees. I think she manages that balance incredibly well—the book moves along at a steady clip, some chapters long and others short, some themes consistently explored across her destinations but also some localities within the South pop out of the narrative as being very much themselves and nowhere else.
I found myself grappling with my own profound sense that the South is the one place I’d never like to find myself living for an extended period. Some of that is climate—I really dislike the summers in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast too. But a lot of it is that the complicated human and historical and cultural landscape that Perry explores is one that I have bad stereotypes about but also a sense of real emotional distance from when I’ve spent time there. I lived in Atlanta for almost a year, and the South that Perry traverses at its edges—Maryland, West Virginia, Washington D.C., Virginia, are familiar to me. I’ve travelled a fair number of times to Austin, New Orleans, Arkansas, Nashville, Durham and had pleasant enough experiences, but also a sense that beyond the cities and towns where familiar cosmopolitans and migrants are living in numbers, the South is to me terra incognito, where only stereotypes and distant reportage fill in the absences. But then again that’s increasingly true of most of the rural United States. Even when I know it well—central and eastern Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley, rural New England—it’s a landscape that feels far more hostile to my way of being than it once did. From the antiseptic distance of national statistics—education, health, general welfare, you name it—it feels sometimes as if some states of the “Solidified South”, as Perry calls it, have factually seceded: in the numbers they look like another country. Perry’s narrative calls my kind of disdain out; I felt a kind of shame on reading at times, for all that the book is in no way a celebration or hagiography of the South that has been or still is. It is at least in her reading, rightly so, the central generative engine of the country that I and Perry both live in, shaping everything we are and perhaps even what we should or could be.
The chapter “Pearls Before Swine: Princeton to Nashville” is a really interesting tonal shift in the book—her academic life swings hard into focus, but also that sense that the South is found in places commonly accounted as Northerly, like the town and university in Princeton.
Speaking of feeling embarrassment, reading the book also reminded me that among the many started-and-abandoned drafts of manuscripts living somewhere in my hard drives and files was an idea for a book I had tagged as Back East, a kind of travel in the landscape that is “East” in the imaginary geography of America. I wanted to reckon with my youthful sense as a Californian that “East” was where the intellectuals were, where there was a sophisticated literary culture, where there was refinement and history and tradition. In a sense, “East” as the Europe of America. Now that I’ve lived almost 2/3rds of my life “back East”, I am very much aware of what I didn’t know when I held that teenage impression. I haven’t thought much about the twenty-odd pages I wrote on this for years because the first take I had was rather mean-spirited and too attached to my own false impressions, as if I was blaming a place for not being what I stupidly imagined it to be. Perry made me think about this again because she provides such a good model of appreciation and critique, memory and discovery, outside and inside. The book isn’t the product of a single journey. She mixes personal experience, exposition, observations of places and strangers. There are planned destinations and whimsical detours. It’s a good model, but I think hard to follow exactly—and to do it well depends a bit on having an interesting life as well as a lot of knowledge.
I can only go so far with my shift in attitude, I guess. I found myself wondering if there was anywhere that Perry goes in the book that I felt especially motivated to visit myself where I might not have before, and I think the only place that feels that way after reading is Alabama and maybe Memphis. Though in a way, I also had some feeling that maybe I’d want to take another drive through the region in the near-term future—my last one took me through the Ozarks across northern Arkansas to Nashville and then onward to Asheville before heading northward again. It’s less about any one city and more that I have a sense of wanting to see the human and natural topography across a range or area.
It's interesting that Princeton is the place where the north is revealed to be intertwined with the south, since my sense has always been that Princeton was specifically a stronghold of the south in the north.
That's actually precisely how she puts it--Princeton as a kind of outpost of the South, surrounded by the North.