Growing up in North Carolina, with ties on my mother’s side stretching back several centuries and ties on my father’s side dating back to when my Sappony ancestors arrived in the High Plains Indian Settlement, I was not raised to be ashamed of the place I called home. The South, like all places, is complicated, flawed, and beautiful. It is a wellspring of deep, blood-stained evil and irreplaceable creative talent; the birthplace of this country’s fundamental sins of Indigenous genocide and slavery and home to the revered minds that sought to deconstruct the systems that stood in the way of progress. To many Americans, the South remains vexing. But for those who listen to it, who see it for all that it is, the South provides direction and, Imani Perry would argue, hope.
An author, scholar, and butter-in-her-grits Southerner, Perry understands the South’s dichotomies, the nation’s misplaced guilt, and the shifting direction of the region as well as anyone. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Perry moved to Massachusetts with her parents at the age of five, but the South never stopped being home. It’s where her people are, a place her family returns to regularly. She now takes her two sons there every year. Through regular features in The New York Times and The Atlantic and eight books—South to America, her 2022 memoir/travelogue/historical examination of the region, won a National Book Award—Perry actively continues to highlight the lessons that the South can still teach us. In 2023 she received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” for “giving fresh context to African American social conditions and experiences along dimensions of race, gender, and politics.”
Perry lives in Philadelphia and travels between there and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor at Harvard University, teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and African and African American studies. As a Southerner who has lived in New York and now lives in Washington, DC—which, it can be argued, is at least partially the South—I found it refreshing, and often humbling, to explore the meaning of home with a fellow transplant. “What I’m trying to do is haunt the past,” she told me. “And really what I mean there is I want to look in the past and actually be troublesome to where our attention historically has been, or the people we treated most favorably in the past, and to turn our gaze elsewhere; think about what matters in refreshed ways.”
I met Perry at the Barnes Foundation, on what can only be described as a perfect July day. The Philly Parkway was bustling with tourists taking their obligatory Rocky run up the art-museum steps as ice-cream trucks emitted their siren songs. For two hours Perry and I talked about the uncertain future that lies ahead for the South, the complex history that makes it such a compelling and conflicting place to call home, and how to make a proper bowl of grits.
[Not all conversations are as linear and succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.]
Imani Perry
© Kevin Peragine
Martin: Where I was raised in North Carolina, there was always a sense that, say, fifty years ago, we all had shared values, but now we don’t anymore. My thought was What were those values? And who actually shared them? I don’t think my experience is that unique. I’m reminded of this today when I hear people say that the country has lost its way or that we’ve gone astray.
Perry: We don’t want to go back to the way it was. That idea of “shared values” historically is not only false, but to the extent that it was true for some sectors, those were often terrible values predicated on excluding and dominating people. I’m interested in how we repair those wounds now. For example, in early 2024 I went on what was called a sojourn in North Carolina to the site where Harriet Jacobs was enslaved; she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this extraordinary slave narrative. [Jacobs’s autobiography, published in 1861, documented the physical and sexual abuse that she experienced as a servant to a white household in North Carolina before she escaped to the North.—Ed.] Around seventy other women were on this trip, organized and curated by Michele Lanier and Johnica Rivers, and we retraced Jacobs’s steps in the community and went to the site where she had been in hiding after she’d escaped from slavery. We went to a historic graveyard where people who had been enslaved were buried. And I was reminded of this detail from history: because there were no headstones for the enslaved, people would plant periwinkle flowers to mark the burial sites. There are some headstones in this graveyard, but it’s also full of periwinkles, and I assume they were for people whose graves weren’t marked. Knowing that is a kind of repair. The lack of headstones is a reflection of values in the past that determined who did and didn’t matter. For me, I don’t just want to recognize this history; I want to say something about what it meant that some people were seen as not worthy of being recorded, that some people were completely erased from documentation and yet found a way to make a space for themselves.
There was this moment on the retreat—and these were women from all different parts of the country and the world—when people just started weeping. It was a spiritual moment but also a silent recognition of the people who not only had not been recorded, but had been misrecorded and subjected to violence and injustice. Understanding that can help us conduct ourselves with better values now. People are sometimes like, “Why do you always want to go back and rehash the past?” We do it because we want to be better now and in the future.
Martin: When I go home to the High Plains community where my tribe, the Sappony, are located, along the North Carolina–Virginia border, I go to Calvary Baptist. We’re one of the oldest Native congregations of Southern Baptists. This ties back to a lengthy history of the Christianization of our tribe. But because we have the church, we have the graveyard, and that’s all our people from the last two generations buried there. You go a mile and a half down the road and turn onto this dirt road for a bit, and you’ll find where the old church used to be. There you have another graveyard that goes a few more generations back. And if you go through the woods, there’s a third graveyard dating back to at least the mid-1800s. There’s a power to these spaces. Post-integration, our people steadily started to spread out, but each year the tribe puts on a camp for our youth, and we take the kids to these graveyards. A number of other Native communities don’t have this same privilege. The idea and policy of paper genocide is very real—a destruction not just of the physical being but of the record of a person.
Perry: There’s something profound about trying to think through the different modes of violence and erasure together. In June 2024 I went back to my grandparents’ hometown, which is Huntsville, Alabama. Usually I’m in Birmingham when I go back, but Huntsville is one of those places where Black and European and Native history are all visible. The cycles of violence and displacement are evident in the names of streets and land formations. For me, that’s part of why the South can actually tell the story of the entire country. And now there’s another cycle underway as Indigenous people from South and Central America move in. There are these constant movements of peoples who are displaced and replaced and in various ways leave threads but are also deemed less consequential.
Martin: There remains an incredibly strained tension within some Native communities around attitudes toward Black or Afro-Indigenous peoples. I’m thinking of the videos of Native citizens in Pembroke, North Carolina, hurling slurs at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 or the ongoing fight in some of the Oklahoma tribal nations over whether to fully enroll and recognize freedmen as tribal citizens and community members. [Several tribes in what was then Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma participated in the system of slavery, with the tribes splitting into factions during the Civil War.—Ed.] It’s one of those messy parts of American and of Southern history and contemporary life that’s often elided because of its complexity, but it’s an important one to directly confront.
Perry: Yes, there are what we think of as the classic hierarchies of racialization in this country, with white at the top, Black at the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in between, while Indigenous people are treated as invisible or mythical—but there are also the different ways in which various tribes are recognized, which adds a layer to that. And then the idea of citizenship or tribal membership, as well as blood-quantum measures of who counts as Native, which all add other layers of complexity. There were Black cowboys and Native slaveholders, and also Afro-Indigenous communities.
So it’s incredibly difficult to talk about Black and Native relationships in general ways. Even tracing family history within Black communities results in these hierarchies of status that are associated with multiracial identities. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has explored some of this in his genealogical work and talks about the mythos around all these Black people who think they have Native ancestry. Now, I, like many of my friends, can show you the literal Native documentation in my family. But that is not actually a deep engagement with the communities themselves. That doesn’t make me Native; it is just a dimension of being a Black American from Alabama.
In the classroom, when I first taught Race in American Legal History, I avoided Federal Indian Law, because it was so complicated. Then I realized it wasn’t actually possible to talk about how race was created in North America without the history of Native people. So I shifted from talking about the “color line” to also talking about categories like citizen, noncitizen, up-and-down stratification, different forms of being considered outside, settler colonialism, sovereignty, and recognition. All of this was part of racialization from the beginning, and Native history under settler colonialism has been shaped by racialization. For me, to think about race has been an effort to think through what the different racialized positions are and then theorize through that position in each given instance: So is this person considered part of this nation, and where do they sit in the stratification? Is their nation or group fully recognized and respected?
There’s a particular story about what this country takes itself to be, and then what it actually is—in contrast—that the South just never stops telling.
Martin: In my limited travels around the US, I still find the elegant surfaces of the South the most important to prune back, because of how deeply the South reveals the systems our country was built upon. For instance, to me the West still isn’t old enough, and thus its frontier cosplay remains shallow. Do you think the South is a place where we can ask these deeper, soul-defining questions about our country in a way we can’t quite do elsewhere?
Perry: I think every place you go in the world can in fact tell a global story because we are so deeply connected. But there’s a particular story about what this country takes itself to be, and then what it actually is—in contrast—that the South just never stops telling. It’s federalism. It’s the promise of the Constitution and its destruction by undemocratic forces. It’s the destructiveness of the Constitution toward the lives of people it doesn’t protect. But it’s also the way people who lived really hardscrabble lives actually figured out how to make things that are beautiful, and the way they teach us all to make meaningful lives. That is very present in the vitality of the rural landscape. So the beginnings are actually . . . I don’t know what word I would use, but they’re present in the South, because the people are still present in the places where it began, living close to the earth. When you encounter just how sublime so many of the landscapes are, and then you think about what violence was done to try to harness these landscapes, it’s clarifying. Someone decided that they were going to possess this at all costs, and they were willing to kill, to push people out, to force other people to come here, to grind their lives down to harness this land, and then to destroy it and make this abundant land sick, all trying to produce wealth from it.
Martin: On a trip to New York in my college years, I met a classmate’s wealthy—truly wealthy—parents, and they spoke with a brazen, bone-deep disdain for the South. They asked me questions about my home as though they’d been above the place since the day they were born, as though it were a place I should know to sprint from at the first opportunity. I’d never experienced that before. Of course, it’s one thing for Southerners to say what we don’t like about our home, to wish for change and progress. But it’s another for someone who has no connection to the South at all to speak of it as this doomed place. And this is something I’ve heard since from white folks from California and Colorado too: an assumed stance of better-than. No other region of the country has to contend with this the way the South does. Why is that?
Perry: Part of what’s happening is that the South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest, and I think it earns—perhaps ironically—disdain from lots of elites on the coasts for both reasons.
New York is fascinating to me in this regard. There’s so much New York wealth that came from the South through the slave trade and particularly the history of Wall Street. There’s a Lehman Brothers play on Broadway [The Lehman Trilogy—Ed.], and it’s a story about the collapse of this huge investment bank, and the time that the play spends on the fact that they started as cotton traders in Alabama is literally a matter of seconds. But it was the foundation of the whole Lehman Brothers enterprise.
Martin: In my last undergraduate semester at Duke in Durham, North Carolina—I graduated in 2016, so this was right around the Republican primary—I remember another classmate, also from New York, saying, “I just can’t believe how people around here are buying Trump’s bullshit.” I moved to New York that summer, and I heard a lot of the same sentiments from coworkers, especially leading up to the election. The county I grew up in ultimately went for Trump 233 to 67. I felt like I’d known this was going to happen. But in the wake of the election, it felt as though a lot of the responsibility was put on the South.
Perry: My kids were born and raised here in Philly, and my younger son played soccer on a travel team. He once played against a team where all the kids had on Trump socks—in the middle of Pennsylvania. I think that whoever came up with the map of red and blue states really did a disservice to our understanding of US politics. If you go county by county, it looks very different, especially in Pennsylvania. They call the part between Philly and Pittsburgh Pennsyltucky—which is a way to suggest that it’s Southern. But in reality this is a national phenomenon. And, of course, the story of why the South politically looks the way it does has to do with the way power is constructed, and with federalism and gerrymandering. But our national political landscape is not a regional binary. It’s funny, though, because I feel like, in the South, when you say, “the North,” that means everything that’s not the South.
Martin: Are there myths about the South you’ve found yourself surprised to have to debunk, or even unlearn yourself?
Perry: Yeah! The idea that all Southerners eat grits with salt and not with sugar. Many Texans put sugar in their grits.
Martin: Oh, no.
Perry: There are many cultural exceptions like that. I met someone from Port Arthur, Texas, who was talking about speaking French Creole—but not the kind they speak in New Orleans—growing up. There are unique local communities throughout the South. We think of Alabama and Mississippi as sort of the quintessentially Deep South states, but even they are incredibly diverse culturally and geographically. For me, to write about the South required a deepened understanding of how vast and complex the region itself is. I didn’t quite grasp it before, even though I had been all over the South. I had this deep familiarity, but once you decide you’re going to write about something, you realize, This is much bigger than I recognized.
I’m committed to saying the South is not static—no place is static. Yet sometimes even Southerners want to imagine it as static or fixed. That said, I do think it’s a region where tradition is held in very high regard. So people want to hold on to old ways of doing things perhaps more than most, even as the culture is constantly changing. That, I think, is something distinctive about the South that is worth paying attention to.
One of the things that people have really ignored about the South . . . is that it has been so culturally mixed from the very beginning. All of these new elements are constantly being absorbed and reconfigured.
Martin: I want to back up for a moment: Can you please tell folks the proper way to fix grits?
Perry: Yes, the water should be salted, and it should be boiling. And then you pour them in, and you stir and stir and stir. Then you turn the heat down, put the top on, and you cook them for a long time, put some butter in. I’m OK with a little milk to make them creamier—that’s a little bit more Gulf Coast-y than what I’m used to, but that’s an OK way to fix them. But I like salt and butter. I don’t do cheese. One of the things that I’m deeply committed to is that there’s no such thing as quick grits. They have to be cooked down to be good. But I’m becoming more open-minded. Some of the best grits I’ve ever had have been made by Amish folks in Pennsylvania.
Martin: Last year I had the opportunity to edit a magazine piece focused on Native mental-health-care providers who work with adult survivors of the US federal Indian boarding school system, wherein children were forcibly assimilated, physically assaulted, and worse. One of the topics that came up frequently in my conversations with the writer was the way that blood memory holds on so dearly. Removing children from their homes is such a vicious way of destabilizing families and community, and is so endemic to the way that communities of color and poverty throughout America have come to define and understand their relationship to the federal government. This can manifest as fear of systems that ostensibly are there to support families, but it also—at least, in my community—has resulted in the broadening of communal child-rearing responsibility. Your kids weren’t just your kids where I grew up; they were our kids, and we had to keep them within the community, even if that meant raising kids who weren’t your own. In your experience, does that approach to child-rearing remain as strong in the South today as it was in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations?
Perry: I don’t know if it’s as strong today, but I think it’s absolutely a core part of cultural practice that I value enormously. I’m always interested in how people who are subject to injustice create something beautiful at the site of the wound. It’s not just beautiful; it’s necessary. And injustice persists, whether we’re talking about the current practices of the welfare state and child removal or about deportation and detention. It’s remarkable to me how we can look historically at the selling of children during slavery, or at the Native American boarding schools, and not see what’s happening today as a horrific extension of that. It’s part of why we’re remiss if we just study our own particular histories, because then we don’t see the threads of connection and the repetitions across other people’s experiences.
Martin: Your parents moved you from the South at a young age, but they ensured you maintained a strong connection to your roots via family, community, and friends. As a parent, how have you helped your kids maintain a relationship to these roots?
Perry: Except during the pandemic, there has never been a year when my children did not spend time in the South. I do it to tell them the story of who they are, and to ensure they don’t take on some of the geographic bigotries we’ve talked about. So we have ongoing conversations about our Southern roots. It’s immensely important to me. And my younger son is now in college in Atlanta, so he’s living that connection.
Martin: As someone who moved to Brooklyn for seven years, after growing up in North Carolina, I’m curious if you ever feel that connection fading after being away for too long. I never felt any less a Southerner in New York, but when too many months went by, when I hadn’t stepped barefoot on the grass in High Plains, I could feel something important inside me fading a bit, and when I went back, it was a replenishment.
Perry: I absolutely feel that. I grew up with a kind of grief about not being in the South. That was complicated emotional terrain for me as a young person, partially because that’s where my extended family was and is. I don’t come from a Great Migration family. Sometimes people will say, “Oh, do you ever get back to the South?” Well, I couldn’t see my people if I didn’t get back. It really is home, and I’m there multiple times each year, sometimes each month. I return for the love, the sensory experience, but also because I always have the feeling of having missed what happened and is happening. If you’re gone too long, you don’t know what’s going on; you feel disoriented. I have often said my personality is different in the South. I’m not shy when I’m there. I feel much less social anxiety. I know that each day I go out in the world, somebody’s gonna smile at me, or say hello to me, or think I’m worth acknowledging. I was in Boston for the last two weeks, and the number of people I said hello to who didn’t speak back reminded me, Right, this is where I am now.
Martin: While acknowledging the immense regional diversity that exists within the South, there still seems to remain a sense of shared identity among the people who call the South home, and not just for the Black, white, and Native people who have called it home for centuries, but also for the immigrants who have arrived there more recently and contributed to a steady shift in demographics. To your mind, how has the meaning of being Southern changed in the last hundred years? In the last fifty? In the last ten?
Perry: Without question, the shifting demographics have made it more complex. Racial and ethnic identity are not as tightly tethered to the notion of what it means to be Southern. I mean that not just in terms of how individuals define themselves, but in terms of communities. There is a growing population of Vietnamese American Southerners, and Korean American Southerners, and Central American Southerners who are very much embedded in communities and have become part of what I think of as the old norms, particularly the idea of sharing: people who are living hand to mouth and sharing. There’s something about that habit of sharing that is not political, but also it is. Not political in the sense of electoral politics, but as a way of being present with other human beings that I cherish.
Martin: When pockets of the South don’t look the way they used to, does place still hold the power to dictate values?
Perry: There’s always been this fundamental tension in the South around values, even though those who tell the official story don’t acknowledge it often. On the one hand, there’s the long history of freedom dreams; on the other, a deep commitment to exploitation and exclusion. I think the conflict remains. One of the things that people have really ignored about the South, however, is that it has been so culturally mixed from the very beginning. All of these new elements are constantly being absorbed and reconfigured, because that is how it always was. Languages, for instance. What people say about New York being a melting pot is actually true of the South. Yes, in New York there are a lot of extraordinary mixtures, but the South is really a hybrid, creolized place. And that continues as new folks come in and become part of the complex mix.
I don’t have a really sophisticated analysis, but I’m gonna say it anyway: I’ve been following the conversation about roots music as opposed to “country,” especially with Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album. Country music has been racialized as white and is marketed as such. And then there’s roots music, which is the result of so many admixtures of people who live close to the land and the music they write: a tradition that has all of these elements coursing through it, and right now there are all these interesting artists consciously claiming that tradition. Roots music is as Southern as country, and it also reaches beyond the borders of the region. So there’s always a narrative about what’s the official form of the region—i.e., country—and then there’s the reality, which is much richer.
Martin: I never stop thinking about my grandparents. I hear them all the time, even when I go too long without calling them. I think of what it means, just in my dad’s ancestral line, to have gone from this long stretch of tenant farmers dating back to our first exposure to the English, to integration and spreading down the I-85 corridor, to me, a magazine editor and writer. My identity feels wound around these memories that belong to my grandparents and my great-aunts and -uncles, how their vision of the South and of High Plains feels indelible to my understanding of the world. Could you share a bit about what shape your grandparents’ experience took for you and the way those memories inform your reality?
Perry: A lot of this is now newly informed by my trip to Huntsville, where my grandparents were from. My South and my mother’s South were the urban South: Birmingham. And “urban” is relative; we still woke up to the sound of a rooster crowing next door when I was small. But it’s different to be in Huntsville and see streets bearing my family names, and to go into pre–Civil War graveyards and see those family names, and to feel a sense of responsibility to the land and its people and their stories. And to read the census records, and see documentation of the stories I know. This also has compelled me to recommit to thinking about land; to actually being in my yard and being connected to the earth; to try to think about how the sensory experience has an impact on how we understand the world. But I also think about what it must have been like for my grandmother in particular, with whom I was very close, to go from five hundred acres to a rooming house in Birmingham, and then to the projects in Birmingham and a much more constrained life, where segregation was much more immediate and violent. That transition is recent history. So I feel an immense responsibility to record that. I sat with my grandmother late into the night and listened to her stories. I have a responsibility to tell them and to think about that transition from the rural to the urban. But also now that rural place—Huntsville—is more urban and bigger than Birmingham. These are living places.
Martin: My grandmother on my dad’s side passed in 2009. And my granddad, he passed about two months ago. He was ninety-seven, still lived in his house. People came and checked in on him, but he was independent. I went back home for Thanksgiving last year, and I remember sitting with him and talking for hours. It’s something I’ve done for a long time. I felt that same responsibility to hear the stories and sometimes to record them, but also just to engage with them. Sometimes they would be as innocuous as him telling me, “This is how we used to make turtle stew.” But other times they would be very heavy stories about his time in the Second World War, or how my great-grandfather had a really hard experience dealing with the owners of the property he worked as a tenant farmer. When you sat down with my granddad, you didn’t know what he was going to want to talk about; you just knew that, whatever it was, it was important, because he was telling about a place that doesn’t exist anymore. The power of elders is real in that way.
How do you see your parents’ lived experience informing that of your kids? My grandparents grew up in the Native version of the Jim Crow South, and then my aunts and uncles and my dad lived through integration. If and when I have kids, integration will be the memories I share most, because they’ll be firsthand. So as we lose the ability to transmit firsthand stories of my grandparents’ past, I do worry sometimes whether the memories of what came before will fade and allow us to repeat those cycles of violence and displacement we’ve been talking about.
Perry: I have an answer to that, and then I have a question. First the answer: For my children, both of their grandmothers desegregated in distinct ways. Their paternal grandfather was also one of the young people who experienced desegregation in Kentucky, but he passed away before they were old enough to hear from him. I was thinking, because I went to integrated schools and private schools, that my kids’ experience was going to be similar to my own. But since they are coming up in the age of Black Lives Matter and Trump, I feel like there is a lot from their grandmothers’ experience that shapes their understanding of how they occupy this world. In some ways their experience is more akin to their grandmothers’ than to mine. There was a lot of hope in the seventies and eighties when I was coming up, even in the midst of deindustrialization and such. And the country today has felt more dangerous, in many ways, for them than it felt to me at their age. That period that their grandmothers—who are in their early eighties—came of age in feels very prescient to their young-adult life. Which I would not have anticipated at all.
The question I was going to ask: There’s this fine artist, Adebunmi Gbadebo, who does work about the True Blue Plantation in South Carolina and is trying to buy back parts of the plantation for the descendants of enslaved people. For my family, I’ve been contemplating whether my children or future descendants can have that land from which we descend. Could it become a way of enshrining an understanding of their family story?
Martin: I think so. My great-grandparents’ house is called the Big House. It is not a big house—I bump my head on the doorways—but it’s the place we have our Coleman family reunion every year. The tribe is made up of seven core families. The Coleman family was the one my grandma was from, and my granddad was a Martin. After the war, my granddad and my great-uncle went into business together, and they bought the farmland that their families had previously worked as tenant farmers. So the families that spill down from this union pooled their money together, and we collectively put a roof on the Big House; we put in insulation. We go back every fall to keep the yard up. In the backyard there are these massive trees, and the roots were just splitting the earth where we’d set up long tables for the yearly reunion and put food out and roll the grills up behind them. Eventually some folks realized we had too many roots back there tripping up elders, and that because we hold the reunion the last weekend of July, it was just getting too hot. So we came together during the pandemic and built a pavilion back there—laid down concrete, put in ceiling fans.
So this house is one of the focal points for my part of the tribe. I’m giving you all this context to say: I think there’s power in that place. But there’s power because I know the history. It’s not just the land as a possession. I guess it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the children of the community being not your kids, but our kids. The reason that sense of community exists is because there is an external threat. And, in this case, there is also a historical wound. How do we heal from this while still acknowledging it? Part of our sense of pride lies somewhere in that pain.
Folks who study or research racial politics in the South know there is this cyclical nature to progress and the retraction of progress, to the development and dissolution of coalitions. As someone who has spent the amount of time you have with these systems and cycles, how much hope do you have for the future of equality and equity in the South?
Perry: As the activist Mariame Kaba says, hope is a discipline. It is a practice. It’s a commitment. I’m hopeful because I think that’s what we’re supposed to be. And I am hopeful because, as bad as things are, a huge amount has changed. So there’s the possibility of building coalition. For me, the question is: What disrupts the possibility of coalition? And I think the greatest disrupter is what W.E.B. Du Bois described as a kind of psychological wage of whiteness in his classic 1935 text Black Reconstruction in America, which became the foundation of whiteness studies generations later. That little bit of benefit granted to anyone designated as white. And oftentimes it’s tiny, especially in the South, but for a lot of poor white Southern folks, that little bit of advantage seduces them away from banding together with people of color who share much of their condition. And so I don’t know what will break that mythology of race, but I do believe it can be broken. And examples of when it has been broken are precious.
All our fates are linked, especially with the environmental crises. Southerners of different backgrounds already share a lot of culture, but they’re also sharing huge amounts of vulnerability. The goal is to keep investing and telling stories that actually remind people of how deeply bound together we all are, and to pay attention when those coalitions emerge, especially for young people. Many of them don’t have the stories. They don’t even know that it’s possible.
All our fates are linked, especially with the environmental crises. Southerners of different backgrounds already share a lot of culture, but they’re also sharing huge amounts of vulnerability.
Martin: You’ve written about the way that the Duke family molded Durham and the state of North Carolina, and how the family turned its wealth, in part, into a university. Almost all of the Ivy League schools up North also have a deep-rooted connection to the legacy of slavery. But with these elite institutions in the South, it does feel as though there’s a difference in the presentation of that legacy. When I was a student there, Duke existed within this hypersegregated city—segregated in part by the family that had helped develop the university. I haven’t visited Vanderbilt, so I don’t know if it’s the same in Tennessee. But kids from across the country and the world want to come to Durham for the academic experience, but they don’t want to come to the real South.
Perry: In some ways Southern universities are kind of the same. But, no, at Vanderbilt or even Emory, you can’t ignore the history because it’s so close. I have four generations of people in my family who had some connection to Vanderbilt, but only the last one, my cousin, graduated from there. The block that my grandmother lived on when she was living with family members who had worked at Vanderbilt—that block has been taken over by the university. So the houses are no longer there. But there’s the echo. Then when I spoke to a class there, I just asked by happenstance, “How many of you-all are from the Northeast?” Almost the whole class raised their hands. That cycle of stratification—calling Princeton the Southern Ivy—the way the elites have moved around is not new. It’s hard for these universities to acknowledge their relationship to the people who are doing the work of making it possible for them to be elite. At Yale you can’t deny it, because New Haven is largely Black. At Princeton the history becomes invisible. I remember visiting Duke; I was sure I was gonna go there for graduate school, but then the students in the literature program dressed like hip Europeans, and they were erudite and fancy; they were talking about cheese that I had never heard of, and I felt completely intimidated and alienated. It was disorienting, because it was not the South as I knew it.
Martin: In my class at Duke there might have been seven to ten Native kids. Although I was going to this university just down the road from home, I felt like I’d entered a world of wealth and customs that I had never seen in my life.
Perry: I remember when I was a faculty member at Princeton, one winter it was extremely cold. And I noticed all these students had Canada Goose coats: a coat I’d always wanted but could not fathom buying because of the price. There are those moments of being in but not completely of the place.
As you were speaking, I thought about how there’s an incredible visibility to Black kids on these campuses. It takes so much more for us to get into these places, because the hurdles are both academic and psychological. As a Black person born in the South, I felt invisible in those environments as a student. Most of the other Black students were not African American; they were from the Caribbean or Africa. Or, if they were American, they were from the Northeast. So I had a different experience of invisibility. How do you get anchored in an institution that doesn’t even acknowledge your existence, that has not prioritized your presence?
Martin: Do we still walk in the shadows of Confederate statues, even after Lee came down in Richmond and Silent Sam was removed in Chapel Hill? Has that presence really left us?
Perry: It’s absolutely still present. The monuments came down, but they’ll go back up in different forms. They’re enshrined in law, if not in concrete. The idea of a linear path toward progress does not make sense given how this country was founded. As long as the US exists, we’re going to have to grapple with the fundamental tension between the idea of liberty and equality and the domination of nonwhite people that led to the country’s wealth. Even if everybody was like, “The Confederacy was bad,” the ideology behind it, that some people ought to be able to exploit others—that’s not going away.
Martin: This is a big question to end on, and, like so many of these, it’s just as much about America as it is the South, but here goes: Is the South worth saving or fixing or fighting for? And whose responsibility is it to do that work?
Perry: We Southerners are worth fighting for. I’m going to try not to get emotional. People who work hard and love their families and try to make a way in the world and try to be decent and have these fraught, complicated histories—they are worth caring for. What shape that will take, I have no idea. I sort of find myself thinking that we’re at the end of an empire, as so much falls apart. The experience of COVID and lockdown, I think, raised real questions about what’s happening in our nation. But there’s something that comes from the Southern people and our region, and how people there still make a way out of very little, that I think is extraordinary and beautiful and worth trying to sustain and learn from and invest in. The freedom dreams matter.
