Weaving magic into a staggering story of enslavement (North Carolina and New Orleans, West Africa spiritually; 1800s before the Civil War): Can literature set us free?

“Let us descend into the blind world” could have been penned by poetic, literary genius Jesmyn Ward. But it comes from Dante’s epic 14^th century poem, Inferno, inspiring the title and hellish journey depicted in Ward’s new historical novel, Let Us Descend. Of epic proportions.

An NPR story, Remembering New Orleans’ Overlooked Ties to Slavery, inspired the setting and ethos of 19th century slavery, centered at the virulent hotbed of America’s slave market in New Orleans.

“Grief and sorrow” are embedded into this deeply felt story told by a teenage narrator, Annis. It’s Ward’s grief and sorrow too. For her brother, ancestors, community, while composed in the rawness of tremendous personal loss: her husband suddenly died right before COVID had a public name. While millions were grieving too.

What happens when you’re hit with so many unbearable losses? Ward contemplated stopping writing. We’re grateful she found a way to pour her emotions into an intense story aimed at engendering empathy.

Ward’s intention isn’t to focus on historical details. Rather, on the history of a culture that dehumanized black people, women the focus, in every way possible.

We know that even before we open the pages. The exceptionally moving book cover isn’t the typical image. Let Us Descend rightfully draws from Ward’s affecting words, printed like a poem, excerpted from an interview with former President Barack Obama in Vanity Fair. On the front cover, Ward beckons us:

      “Sit with me.

            Let me tell you a story . . .

          It feels as if I have been in the dark,

      journeying with this character,

                                            for a long time.

“It is difficult to walk south with Annis.

      Her narrative descends from one

hellscape to another,

            but I promise that if you come

      with me, you will rise.

                      It will be worth the work,

               worth the walking.”

Those words depict how the words inside move us.

Quoted on the back cover is Ward’s writerly purpose: to “get readers to feel with and feel for the people I’m writing about.” The former president understood what she was after: “The power of empathy . . . that we need to “see somebody’s backstory” or else “we end up reinforcing our prejudices, our biases, our fears.”

Let Us Descend is powerful, but can it change deep-rooted hatred? Can any book, or volumes of books, have that kind of power?

Ward is one of those exceptional writers who can take us further than we’ve been. Far deeper into darkness, far longer than we care to go. If you’ve read any of her work, such as her 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing, recognized for the second time for the National Book Award, you still remember those ghosts of Mississippi and trust she’ll lead us into the light. Don’t expect that, though, to happen soon. To tell truths based on history she can’t. 

The otherworldly spirits in this novel expand to many more. They stretch us.

These spirits are a way of transcending being “owned” and “bound” to earth’s inhumanity, to be unbound by a spiritual world. But not all the spirits are good. Some are evil. Annis must learn to tell the difference. How do you when they set traps? How do we learn whom to trust?

When life on earth descends so brutally, when Annis descends alone from the Upper South to the Deep South, the spirits arrive. Historically, this movement reflects what happened after 1808 when America banned bringing anymore slaves into our country, like Annis’ grandmother Aza who came over from West Africa. Aza was one of hundreds of thousands of slaves raped on our shores. Aza’s Mama is the product of that violence. Annis, from the rape of her Mama.

Aza’s true spirit stands out from the rest. She’s the one Annis and her Mama trust seeking to protect. She’s the kind of fighting spirit that strengthens them both. Annis’ mother is called a “warrior,” teaching Annis some of the fundamentals of how to fight, or not – “a part of fighting too” – when they find fleeting moments to flee into the woods.

The other spirits that flow through this extraordinarily soulful novel appear when Annis is desperate to free herself from the “unbearable same.” These spirits have many symbolic meanings – biblical, mythological, cultural, psychological, literary. Some are named like the Wind Spirit, Water, Those Who Foretell, Those Who Take and Give, She Who Remembers. Some we understand, others we guess at.

Opening when Annis and her Mama are slaves on a rice plantation in North Carolina. They don’t call the plantation owner master. He’s only the “sire” – sired like animals. Ward shows us she’s a master of finding words that tug at our hearts. Reaching down to find the right word that calls out penetrating, harsh truths.

On earth, Annis’ story becomes more hellish, taking her on a long, burning, rope-chained walk. The walk she imagines Annis taking. The walk her Mama likely took. It winds south through the sweltering heat, drowning rivers, dark infested swamps from the North Carolina plantation to a Louisiana sugarcane one. In front and back of Annis, tied to a rope that “eats” at her skin, are women she doesn’t know, nor want to. It’s on this harrowing, death-defying walk that Annis learns “what it means to be alone.” “To know only grief in this new world.”

We can wish all we want for only the benevolent spirits to descend onto Annis’ starved life. Starving for tenderness and touch, from brutality and literally a paucity of food. But that wouldn’t be telling hard truths either.

Annis surpasses any humane concept of vulnerability. Yet there’s something about her that also surpasses our concept of resilience.

Hers is a life that, “ain’t living.” “Everywhere, hot knives of pain. When: “There is no one to carry us back.” That’s told: “Tell them who you are. You more than laying on your back.”

Annis, though, tells herself: “I tried to remember that I still had plenty inside he couldn’t take.” And also told be a wise plantation cook: “Most people can’t see all the layers in a person, just like they can’t taste all that goes into a pot.” “You got to know the taste of what heals you.”

Ward’s prose sears and soars. By the time we understand to “fight for it all” also means know what you’re fighting for, we feel the weight of lost love and kindness. Memories can though, eventually, be a propelling force.

But to rise you must first descend. Count on these “farseeing women” to help us ascend.

Lorraine

Humanizing the dehumanization of asylum seekers (US-Mexico borders, especially Tijuana-San Diego 2016-2019 immigration activist experiences): What does it feel like to hold someone’s life in your hands?

In 2016, when Mexican-American Alejandra Oliva volunteered to use her bilingual translation skills to help Spanish-speaking asylum seekers cross into America “the right way” as “enshrined in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” she felt her activist work “a matter of life or death.”

The dream of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration is to change minds, even a little, on the humanitarian crisis on our southern borders. What’s remarkable about this eloquent, piercing, candid, poignant memoir – a personal story embedded with the stories of seekers of freedom from oppression, torture, death – is Oliva’s inner strength despite becoming “wrapped up in a grief for a world I thought existed but doesn’t; for a country I feel still has to be good but isn’t at all. I am horrified by my own safety and comfort; I am in danger of flying apart at any moment.”

Whatever you think of Oliva’s razor-sharp critique of our immigration system – she coming from a position that it’s “fundamentally unjust” – you have to admire the courage it takes to tell it like it is based on real experiences on a hot button issue Americans have hard-core opinions about. She clear-eyed that:

“Fixing the immigration system means fixing everything else in this country that is tired of living up to its promises or never did, means transforming this country, and the reach it has across the world, into one that does not take resources – including people – rapaciously for capital while leaving those it considers disposable by the wayside. Any work you do to improve the world is work that can be done to improve it for everyone.”

Oliva tells us her last name means “a call to watch over and guard peace.” It’s hard not to be affected by Rivermouth IF you keep an open mind to this highly controversial issue. Perhaps approach it like sitting in the jury box having sworn you can when presented with the evidence?

How do you translate someone’s trauma and fears into a mere 140 words permissible on the form an immigration judge uses to decide whether an asylum seeker can stay in America or be deported? Should we really be shocked how badly the odds are stacked against them? (80% of immigrants we’re told are sent back to their country of origin.) Even pulling out all the stops, seen as applying a richly expanded, interdisciplinary approach to our concept of translators of the “written word,” the memoirist still feels “utter powerlessness” of the “bureaucratic violence” (a lawyer’s words) perpetuated on human rights victims.

Oliva feels gratitude she can use her bilingualism for social justice. Preparing immigrants for the all-mighty Credible Fears Interview during the “worst moments in their lives,” perhaps more than anything she brings to bear is an act of the Faith in the subtitle. You may assume that’s the secret to her fortitude. You’d be right and wrong. She admits to a “complicated relationship” with Christianity, although she was a student in divinity school who stopped to do G0d’s work (now graduated). “The closest I’ve come to finding God is in the rivers.”

Rivermouth is a book with an aching soul. Rather, many aching souls in “deep grief.”

Trained by a social justice activist group in NYC, the New Sanctuary Coalition, Oliva calls asylum seekers “friend.” Her ability to walk in someone else’s shoes gives new meaning to the definition of empathy. Writing out of pain and love, she’s the best friend an asylum seeker can have when she may be the only person standing by his/her side in the courtroom. How cruel the legal seeker of “a better life” is locked up in abysmal detention centers and doesn’t even have the money to make urgent calls looking for a pro bono attorney to defend their life is worth saving.

The do-or-die form cited above is known in immigration circles as I-589: Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal. Chilling how even the word removal conjures up treating humans as trash.

This manifesto bears witness to horrific stories of migrants, particularly from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and South America, who wait endlessly in long lines hoping to hear their names called on a mystifying list so they can cross the border and a “border river” that nurtures lives or destroys them: the Rio Grande River that runs nearly 2,000 miles flowing into our southern borders. The focus is on the Western border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California; Oliva’s parents came from Mexico into Texas.

The biggest, delightful surprise is learning how much grander translation is than we thought. Language, an overriding theme. Translation theory and practice is seen as a holistic, humanistic view of what it means when you’re translating in the real, spoken world, not the literary one. Drawing on inspiration and guidance from literature, poetry, art, philosophy, history, mythology, biblical references, psychology, body language, and political/social/cultural insight, we’re presented with an intelligent, vivid, disturbing, complex discussion that lets us see what “in-between” people are willing to do when they “start walking across a continent.” What must it feel like to suffer a “both-and-none identity crisis”?

Spanish is the language of “tenderness” spoken at Oliva’s home with her family and friends, notably when lingering after dinnertime in the Spanish tradition of “sobremesa” (English translation roughly “over the table”); English, the language of education and cultural assimilation.

“Spanish speakers of the United States have little in common as a group” despite so many of us thinking they’re homogenous. “They are of different races, religions, nationalities, political alignments, economic classes, immigration statuses.” What they do have in common is a “shared language and the shared misfortune of proximity to a world superpower.”

It’s this shared language that acts as a “bridge” enabling Oliva to do the heroic work she describes – even more than being a translator and interpreter. She’s a social worker, counselor, therapist too. And like the workers in those professions, she has the emotional scars to prove it. Which is why she doesn’t come across as looking down on us or preachy. Especially when you learn why she became personally invested. Could no longer bear to “look away.” Her plea: “Don’t Look Away.”

Rivermouth is not a scathing partisan rebuke. While it begins in the 2016/2017 era when a Republican President “systematically dismantled” our immigration system, Oliva is an equal opportunity critic. Words aren’t minced for Democratic presidents either, nor America’s historic role in stirring up the immigration crisis in Central and Latin America. This is an American critique, not a polarized one.

Expect more Spanish words than usual. Many translated in a sentence or more afterwards so you can figure out enough of the meaning not to disturb the flow. A couple of chapters are loaded with Spanish conversations you may or may not want to stop to google. You’ll get the gist. Search, you’ll easily find the English translation. Like everything else in this book, it’s intentional. To show how language is a critical tool for feeling welcomed or excluded.

The “real work” turned out to be “very different than what I expected,” Oliva says. You’ll feel the same about this searing, award-winning read that calls upon us “to step into the river.”

Lorraine

A literary artist paints big themes of America’s West and other frontiers through an FDR New Deal visual artist (fictional town in Wyoming, also Seattle, San Francisco, Florida; 1937): “We don’t know how any minute of history will play out,” says Val, the WPA New Deal muralist narrator-protagonist of Charles Frazier’s intriguingly told new historical novel.

Capturing the majesty of the American frontier landscape when America was limping through depressing economic times, The Trackers is living history America is still contending with. The prose is old-fashioned storytelling: muscular dialogue, jawboning, tall tales, legendary stories. It wraps art and adventure with economic, cultural, political, and moral themes into a mystery.

In 1997, judges of the National Book Award called Frazier’s debut mega-bestselling novel Cold Mountain “a vastly compelling narrative, and a useful mirror in which to witness ourselves and our perplexities.” The same can be said of The Trackers, Frazier’s fifth American history novel.

A fuller description might add how art critics described Val’s iconic heroes – painter and muralist Diego Rivera who left his mark on Thomas Hart Benton, depicting America’s grit and industrial engine – as: “socially and politically wide aesthetic vision, storytelling focus, and utilization of symbolism.”

The Trackers – a brilliant title since it has multiple meanings – begins and returns to Wyoming when it was still a wild frontier although historically the Wild West ended in the early 1900s. The standout prose isn’t a romanticized version of America’s Old West, even though twenty-seven-year-old artist Valentine Montgomery Welch III, Val, is a dreamer. A do-gooder who also needs money. The power of money is a big, conflicted theme: its role in America’s expansion, greediness, politics, relationships. 

Val’s coming-of-age evolves from idealist to realist. The art plot embraces aspiration and optimism. Thanks to a former art professor, Hutch, Val landed a New Deal art commission to paint a mural in a small Wyoming town’s post office (one of 1,400 painted around the country). Val can’t put into words what he’ll end up painting, but he has a mental image of “the energy of America” that should reflect the region’s culture and hopefully lift the community up. The value of public art at a time when dreams were crashed is another thread.

Val’s progression spins-off the initial plot. The subplot consumes a chunk of the novel, turning Val into a detective.

Both storylines originate from Val’s benefactor: John Long, a wealthy cattle rancher who owns hundreds-of-acres and was recently married to younger wife Eve, with movie-star looks and mystique. Val’s plum deal comes with the perk of Long’s hosting him on his “enormous log-and-stone cabin” ranch property, complete with rustic cabins, horse barn, and that classy red convertible Packer on the cover resembling National Park WPA Poster Art.

Page one hints at whether Val’s stay will be as lucky as he feels with his first impression of the Long Shot ranch “hunkered against the world . . . As architecture, it made me wonder who it was afraid of or, conversely, who its anger was aimed at.” Prescient, because the more time Val spends with the couple, the more curious he gets about their relationship as tensions are exposed but not discussed. Eve is not the emotional kind, Long has his own agenda, and Val is in over his head. 

Eve is a mystery. Once a cowgirl singer in a traveling band, she has a vagabond’s soul. Jaded, she believes most of life is a business transaction, except for dreaming. Val will come to question whether his dreams were worth the risks of doing business with Long.

Old Faro, Long’s longtime ranch hand cowboy comes across as scary, gun-toting. Don’t be fooled by his machismo as he’s a horse whisperer who keeps his sensitivities to himself. 

Long has strong political ambitions, aiming for Governor, preferably US Senator. How Eve feels about that sets off alarm bells today on how far people will go for political power.

What Val has going for him is he’s cynical enough, and catches on reasonably quickly. Long, the guy with all the money, calls all the shots. Val, then, is willing to do his dirty work.

The mural will be painted fresco-style in the tradition of Mexico’s Rivera. The fictional Wyoming town Dawes might be a nod to former US Senator Henry L. Dawes and The Dawes Act of 1887, which impacted the Wind River Reservation. Long’s ranch “stretched west across sage hills to distant blue-black pine mountains in front of ghostly snow peaks flat as drawing paper against the sky, the Wind River Range.”

Historically and symbolically, Dawes represents power land grabs and injustice. The legislation deceived, billed as more land for American Indians but intended to get that land into the hands of White opportunists. Long, an art collector, owns some paintings by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) known for “celebrating Indigenous cultures . . . while his art is considered historical, his spirit is timeless,” the C.M. Russell Museum states. Likewise, the novel‘s spirit feels timeless, and subtly makes a statement about America’s shameful treatment of Native Americans.

From the first sentence – “A Muddy Black-and-White Newspaper Photograph” – Frazier’s prose hooks us. Whether you view the novel from the standpoint of Art (each of its five Parts are named for the colors of Val’s palette: “Ten Thousand-Foot Blue”; “Charcoal and Umber”; “Rust and Chartreuse”; “Cinnabar and Azure”; “Indelible Black”), or as a detective story almost doesn’t matter. Honestly, we’re happy to go wherever Frazier wants to take us.

His prose sings – grandly, nostalgically, shadowy, sultry. It conveys Western ruggedness, breathtaking landscapes, the freedom of wide-open spaces and endless skies. Also looming is “whether the heaviness could overwhelm our desire to lift and fly to a better place.” Frazier isn’t just writing about a bygone era, but pointedly for today. Evidence includes: 1) Faro speaking of America’s future as he “how bad it’s gonna get . . . that’s how you’ll know the world has gone to hell”; 2) Hutch telling Val their world is a “different, harder world we were living in after the giddy” Roaring Twenties; 3) The Dust Bowl symbolizing the climate-change world we’re living in today: “drought conditions,” “front-page apocalyptic photographs,” “black blizzards,” “flooding rivers”; 4) Billy the Kid and other outlaw storytelling bringing out America’s increasingly violent culture; 5) and citing bad Supreme Court decisions.

Eve’s singing evokes a “mood more than a song.” Like Frazier’s prose that evokes moods contrasting the Depression against new feats of architecture Val found “oddly hopeful.” “Hope can sometimes be a sad thing, that or embarrassingly unhip, but I couldn’t help myself,” he says.

“Love and rejection and retaliation” are other moods coloring the prose. Whose love? Rejection? Retaliation?

Do you believe as Eve also does? “There’s not but one true trail through the world, and all the truth you can say of it is it’s there. Everything else is a guess.” 

What about Val, who wants to have faith in public art to “elevate the country, maybe by only an inch, but every upward movement, however small accumulates”? One of the questions we guess at is whether today’s America would endorse a revitalized WPA art deal for the public good and struggling artists if it weren’t a money-making proposition?

Frazier wants us to reflect on what we could gain from the lessons of the past.

Lorraine

How everyday objects can mean so much (Northeast Poland, Odessa Ukraine, Lower East Side of Manhattan, Brooklyn’s East New York, & Deerfield Park, Florida; 1920s – 2015): If “our lives are a dance with history,” then Objects of Love and Regret leaps off its 300 evocative pages.

One of America’s “leading public historians” Richard Rabinowitz has taken an unusual perspective on “survivors and strivers” in his stirring, multifaceted memoir. Doing what he does professionally, curating American museum exhibitions, he uses ordinary objects to tell extraordinarily meaningful stories on the complex forces and psychological consequences of history, trauma, economics, cultural values, and societal norms that profoundly shaped his family over the 20^th century.

This is, and is not solely, a Jewish immigrant story. It’s a book that has something that resonates for everyone. Surprising in scope, memories, and takeaways.

Rabinowitz’s search to better understand what his East European Jewish parents went through coming to America in the late 1920s is especially focused on the “singularity” of his mother Sarah. Having survived Soviet “pograms” that killed “nearly a hundred thousand Jews” in Poland and Ukraine, the book is both a heartbreaking, terrifying story of anti-Semitism from a 100 years ago that alarms us today as bigotry towards Jews is surging. It’s also a Jewish immigrant story seeking “freedom and independence,” enduring tremendous poverty and hardships that more broadly applies to all immigrants when they come to America to escape persecution. Which is why Rabinowitz has the greatest admiration for Sarah as the “bedrock” for his family who nurtured a “House of Hugs.” 

The objects that trigger and organize the chapters mean these dances are “touchstones of love,” not just “loss [that] leaves us with lifelong regrets.” One of the biggest takeaways, beautiful and poignant in light of the pandemic, is the concept of “Enoughness.” Sarah embraced it in everything she did. It’s a Count Your Blessings attitude. Gratitude for the things we have. Clichéd, but when you feel and see how life-affirming this positive mindset can be it causes you to reflect. 

Calling himself a “microhistorian,” Rabinowitz shows himself to be a mensch: “a generous and thoughtful adult.” One of many Yiddish words that pepper the narrative that add richness to the prose. A literary dance. There’s something about Yiddish words that deepen the meaning of English ones, particularly when the author translates most of them. Which speaks to how much Rabinowitz wants us to take in the deepness and power of emotions.

As Rabinowitz digs into the emotional meaning of the stories behind the objects, he acts like a psychotherapist. In fact, four psychologists were consulted and acknowledged. 

Arriving in America from a Polish ghetto or shtetl – a Yiddish word that refers to a village and a ghetto, in this case Wysokie–Mazowieckie, to live in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City was a different type of ghettoization. Is it any wonder then that one of Rabinowitz’s human rights exhibitions was designing the Tenement Museum in Lower Manhattan? Today, an emotionally affecting reminder of life primarily for early Jewish immigrants (Italians and others too) in the US.

Is it any surprise that there was no room in Rabinowitz’s house for racism? Or, that he also designed museum exhibitions like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio?

Sarah was a balabusta. A “highly competent homemaker” who “ritualized” cooking to the point of it becoming “holy.” Her “lifelong distrust of rabbis, born of a close familiarity with the domestic lives of the religious authorities in the shtetl,” symbolic of how impoverished, discriminated, and segregated people preached to by people of privilege felt, she devoutly practiced a form of secular religion preserving her cultural heritage through cooking, with her mother Shenka nearly literally tied to her apron’s strings. The kitchen and comforting meals the center of the life they made makes this also a moving generational story of motherhood. A joined-at-the-hip dance about the meaning of Home. 

So when Rabinowitz discovered in 2015 a faded, green-painted bottle opener Sarah bought for Shenka from a pushcart peddler on the Lower East Side for twenty cents, haggling from 25c, in 1934, the simple tool that could easily have been tossed away made him realize this wasn’t “really about kitchen work” but “about the bond” between mother-and-daughter. “What had produced this closeness?” Rabinowitz explores.

Particularly poignant when contrasted against Rabinowitz’s father David, who went from one job to another and cycles of unemployment, worsened since he saw his life’s purpose as providing for his family. For decades, he suffered from a low sense-of-self.

Sarah is the “Empress of Empathy,” steadfast in weathering an intricate dance of economies spanning years of lows, some highs, and everything in-between. Good times came when David worked for the war effort as an electrician, and then a jeweler in the Diamond District of Manhattan.

Examples of some of the objects’ storytelling: “Papa Doesn’t Know from Ice Cream” is about “one of the first battlefields for the clash of old and new cultures” when Sarah eats her first ice cream cone costing 3 cents at twelve, newly arrived in America in 1928. “Isaac Guss Finds an Artillery Shell” is about Rabinowitz’s maternal great grandfather who perished during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920, which even the historian “knew nothing about.” A cigar box tells the story of tenement life. How you could have so little and yet stored inside this cardboard box you saved small things as if you had a lot.

A cobalt-blue bottle of perfume romantically named Evening in Paris depicts a very different side of Rabinowitz’s father. “Dave Splurges” when he has so little money is about a twenty-year-old in love, who despite being poor, did so elegantly; his nineteen-year-old bride always attentive to how she dressed. No matter how poor they “did not feel themselves excluded from the better things in life.” A dance of pride.

By 1948, the family saved up enough money ($13,000) to buy a two-story rowhouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York near Jamaica Bay. Under 1,000 square feet, it represented the “American dream.” Though they still lived a fairly insular life, shared with Italian immigrants, really knowing your neighbors who looked out for each other meant you didn’t feel isolated anymore. The once ubiquitous aluminum folding “beach chair” isn’t about beaches but about grabbing a chair and parking yourself on the sidewalk in front of your home chatting with a dozen other families. Tight-knit neighborhoods, when mothers stayed at home and your neighbors’ children were in and out of each other’s houses, shows us what was lost.

Many other objects summon nostalgic and sad dances. Like the creamy Charlotte Russe New Yorkers loved versus the mailman’s whistle alerting a loved one died during the war.

Objects of Love and Regret is and isn’t just A Brooklyn Story or a New York story. It’s America’s story too, transforming over the last century. Transforming today, right before our eyes. Sending a timeless message: Remember what you have, and what you’ve lost.

Lorraine

The realities of an America for all (US states in the South, also the Bahamas and Cuba; past and present): “Race remains the most dramatic light switch of the country,” says African American Studies Hughes-Rogers Professor at Princeton University Imani Perry. A “vicious undertow” of what’s happened and happening throughout America – not just relegated to the South, she forcefully argues. Intended to be a lightning rod, in her eloquence, Perry doesn’t mince words.

Impassioned and superbly informed, after reading Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, reaching across and interconnecting disciplines, genres, events, and travels, you’ll see why it’s been nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction for 2022. (Winner announced November 16^th.)

Perry’s sixth nonfiction book is a call to action from the biracial daughter of parents who were both civil rights activists in Alabama, the State she’s deeply rooted to as she was born in Birmingham and five generations of her ancestors were slaves. Perry’s words, research, and historical/memoirist/cultural/sociological/political/and travel commentaries exalt black achievements and splendor while deploring institutional racism that rips at the idealized Soul of America. By inviting us on her journey through the “South,” she wants us to see more clearly the origins, history, and culture of racism in order to recognize and accept racism as having no boundaries. Hers is a “critical eye” telling hard, “ugly truths” but to make real progress we cannot afford to look away. Perry takes a deep dive into the anguish and “shame” of race, slavery, wealth/power, and White Supremacy.

Not everything is gut-searing. There’s beauty in achievements overcome; her love of family and traditions; her infectious joy for Black artistry – musicians, dancers, painters, quilters, writers; and her pride in “stately and unflinching” HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) as a “gathering place, one of those precious ones, for Black people, American and beyond,” wanting us to know that Black people from the South are highly-educated if given the opportunity. Perry exemplifies that with three university degrees, two Ivy-league, including a law degree from Harvard.

This book is full of soul.

Organized as a travel journey from the North where Perry lives and works, she winds her way state-by-state through America’s South, creating an unusual travel guide of sorts. Within chapters and paragraphs, stories are told from multiple perspectives. Her insight, impressions, conversations, and anecdotes often read as poignant essays.

How do you define America’s soul? In terms of fighting for justice and freedoms, Perry’s conceptualization echoes President Biden’s campaign to “restore the soul of America,” inspired by Presidential historian Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, who was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s “The Better Angels of our Nature,” inaugural speech.

Yet Perry’s Soul doesn’t have the same meaning when “race is at the heart of the South” and also “at the heart of the nation.” “There is no resolution of unjust relations without a structural and ethical change,” she argues. Advocating for transformative change, Perry recognizes “moments of transcendence,” but fiercely calls out false thinking that “possibility” can be realized if we continue to regard racial injustices, inequalities, as the South’s problem not America’s.

Perry is rightfully proud of the civil rights organizing accomplishments by both her black mother from the South and her White, Jewish “father who raised me” from the North. He came down to Alabama to be a force to move America to a better place. It’s an example of how the personal mixes with the historical and cultural as Perry points out White and Black Southerners ignited the civil rights movement. SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee we associate most famously with the March on Washington, DC in the early 60s, was actually founded in the South.

Brimming with illuminating truths, many intentionally hidden or invisible, deceptive, falsified, unknown. Some you may disagree with or want to turn away from but Perry won’t let you. When she speaks of the slaves who were the drivers of America’s economic engine (cotton, steel, coal), her prose is furious but dignified.

The book’s soul overflows with American contradictions and hypocrisies. Virginia is the State with the most Founding Fathers philosophically against slavery, yet even they didn’t practice what they preached as members of the “planter elite.” Here too is the heart of the White Christian evangelical movement that rose up in the sixties with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Perry traces religious right and political extremist movements all the way to the Capitol Insurrection.

Interestingly, West Virginia became a state to succeed from Virginia’s “foundationally anti-slavery.” Harper’s Ferry is where “one of the greatest White allies to the cause of Black freedom” John Brown staged an abolitionist raid. Yet West Virginia is also where Appalachian Black coal miners made corporations rich while they labored in dangerous conditions, dire poverty, and formed unions, and yet they were “neglected by the rest of the nation.” This pattern of the “face-off between the haves and the laboring have nots” is shown repeatedly over and over all around the country. “Trauma repeats.”

Kentucky’s story is similarly contradictory. The Kentucky Derby, a symbol of wealth and privilege versus the murder of endeavoring Breonna Taylor in Louisville. “The crudest enforcement arm of White Supremacy.”

Alabama, the birthplace of Perry’s beloved grandparents, is the home of the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that decided “black people were not and could not become citizens of the United States.” The early 1900s Scottsboro case another “example of the racism of the American justice system and social order.” Perry attributes her multiple autoimmune diseases to coal and steel mining pollution in her native birthplace that has the “highest rates of mental illness and the lowest rates of medical care” in the country. Mobile with all its Gulf Coast mobile homes a place of devastation again and again, contrasted by its magnolias and ancient oaks. “There is no easy resolution between beauty and terror.” 

Mississippi, home to the notorious State prison Parchman Farm, shockingly still enslaves Black men. And yet this is the state with the “most extensive Black political representation in America.” 

Georgia: Atlanta, the “birthplace of a King, the iconic hero of civil rights,” and the “center of Black music production” with more than half of its population Black. Still, the “unbearable Whiteness of its being . . . leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable.” 

More states, more indignation. Specific yet race is consistently a “top and bottom approach.”

Perry’s literary influences are all over these pages too. Albert Murray’s 1971 Alabaman memoir, South to a Very Old Place, appears to be inspiration for this book. W. E. B. Dubois’ 1900s classic The Souls of Black Folk expresses a sentiment Perry also embraces: it’s not enough to be a Black. You must bear a “double consciousness” of being Black on the inside, American outside, which takes “remarkable grace.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Perry’s graduate school advisor, who elevated “the way Black authors get read and the way history gets told,” another major influence.

“The dance speaks to everyone” is the epigraph quoted from Alvin Ailey. Followed by an Introduction involving a French Louisiana dance, a Quadrille, it sets the all-embracing message that South to America speaks to all of us.

Lorraine