At Harpers Ferry, “the defeated are wild-eyed radical abolitionist John Brown and his companions, and not the Confederate dead.”įrom Appalachia, Perry moves to Louisville, Ky., and Washington, D.C. “Harpers Ferry is a monument to the defeated,” she writes-to the Southern way of life, but also to a more radical vision of emancipation. Harpers Ferry was a turning point in American history, but also, Perry reminds us, in Southern history. Beginning with the Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, she focuses her narrative on a man named Shields Green, one of several Black Americans present at the raid and executed by the state of Virginia in its aftermath. Yet Perry’s story of a Black and Southern Appalachia makes perfect sense. As a region, Appalachia is traditionally ignored in narratives of Southern Black history. South to America is broken down by regions, with each area of the Black South given its own nuance, subtlety, and particular understanding. Perry, however, won’t let her readers make that mistake.

Yet both the South and Black America have too often been painted with a single brush. Nor, she takes great pains to explain, are Black Americans. But here Perry makes the South her primary focus, joining a growing number of Black writers-including Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Zandria Robinson-who have forced us to reconsider what the South means in present-day America while also reevaluating what we thought we knew about the South of the past.Īt the heart of Perry’s book is this basic truth: The American South is not a monolith. They also have something in common throughout: a centering of the Black experience and, as a result, of the Southern experience that helped shape Black experience. Her works are radical combinations of history, African American studies, Southern studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and cultural studies. The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Perry has built a career out of writing books that escape easy categorization as one genre or another.

S outh to America crisscrosses genres in much the same way that Perry crisscrossed the South while she was working on it.

Imani perry south