South to America

A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

By: Imani Perry

Narrated by: Imani Perry

Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.”

—Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

©2022 Imani Perry (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

It cuts

At the intersection of history and poetry, there is Imani Perry and this book. Thank you.

Required reading

Every American should read this book and be changed by it. I learner much from this book,

Best history lesson ever!

Really enjoyed this in depth journey. I suggest you take your time me and let the history soak in.

Perhaps this isn’t what you expected and that’s the gift.

This book is beautiful, painful, familiar, and vexing, as it should be. As the south, which is my home too, most certainly is. Imani Perry has created an important work, offering us a vital perspective with which we may come to understand more fully ourselves and our history.

Exquisite and exacting

What a beautiful way to tell a tragic tale. The respect for her subject is inspiring.

Enlightening!

This book addresses the lives of people of color throughout the Americas. Very well researched. This was not a book making excuses for those whose ancestors owned people. Thank you

Excellent: 10/10

Absolutely excellent and utterly thought provoking work of history and prose, beauty and art. This is my second time reading it. Imani Perry’s narration is such a loving gift of care and thoughtful research. One of
my favorite audiobooks of all time.

extraordinary

This is another astounding accomplishment by Imani Perry. Perry is a historian who is also poet, a griot who is also a memoirist, our witness through a couple of centuries who is also our 2020 pandemic neighbor. Her voice is both deeply diasporic and deeply rooted in her home. In this layered achievement she perfectly conjures, sentence by sentence, scene by scene, her subject—the Black American South, one anchor of the modern Black world.

National Book Award's Best Book of 2022

The South of United States presented framed in the honest realism of slavery and its evolution to life today in several former Confederate states. Ms. Perry reads her book with clarity and emotions are displayed. Recommend as a textbook about racism in America for high school and college students.

Like a wandering conversation with a friend

Perry’s reflective book is full of powerful insights and useful details. I especially appreciate her honest sharing of what it was like to travel as a well-off Black U.S. Southerner in other places of deep racial conflict. Her willingness to press past romantic interpretations and look for deeper meanings, such as the challenges of socialist Cuba, are important. The book feels like an enjoyable deep and rambling conversation with a good friend; there were points that I wished for a bit more connective tissue between themes and stories, something that can be explored in a conversation, but which is harder in a book. Still, highly recommended.