South to America by Imani Perry
Imani Perry
- 23 minutes read - 4896 wordsAuthor: Imani Perry
Rating: ★★★
I’ll readily grant that this book might not be for me: I’m neither Black, nor woman, and my genealogy doesn’t run out at the historical Mason-Dixon line where my people suddenly return to being nameless property. Nevertheless, to be Southern-born and dwelling in the North is a kinship of sorts. I find the same recipe my grandmother made in Texas in Harlem: a gastronomic treasure borne North in the Great Migration. In some ways all exiles need each others' stories to remember the good that is there as it slowly becomes a memory, a ghost’s whisper of an era whose ever-more primary purpose is to be the part before here.
Perry tells tales and metes our historical accounts of various places she visits in the south. Far less a “And here’s what (usually awful thing) happened here” enumeration and more a mixed, less-easy to pigeon-hole description of being in the South, I found it dream-like and elegiac and historically brutal all at the same time. On top of all that, Perry’s skill with the English phrase made some of the reflections of an exile’s fate ring with beauty and shimmer with the humidity of there whence I came.
A sampling of her voice and her notes can be found in this post’s notes section. I laughed out loud thinking of my Southeastern grandmother, the first woman from whom I ever learned that “Common” was an insult.
{
"title": "South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation",
"author": "Imani Perry",
"highlightCount": 120,
"noteCount": 6,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "I think maybe reenactment should be described as a performance art, even if I am still uneasy about the pleasure it provides.",
"location": 272,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Being a Black American requires double consciousness, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, the habit of seeing from inside the logic of race and the lives of the racialized, and from the external superego of what it means to be American,",
"location": 363,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "So many people live in the ruins of the American drive for prosperity.",
"location": 367,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Kill them, throw them away, dig them up, repeat. Remember that choreography.",
"location": 411,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "White Americans were taught that if they expressed solidarity with Black people, also exploited, also laboring hard, they’d lose what Du Bois termed “the wages of whiteness,” those benefits that went along with not being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.",
"location": 422,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "poor and working-class White people have hoped to gain something from Whiteness—and yet also have a complaint with the way it excludes them from all the status it promised.",
"location": 424,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And now, when politicians use “working class” to mean White people rather than the whole working class, they extend a terrible distortion.",
"location": 426,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This has given rise to legislatures creating newly defined crimes. Keep in mind “crimes” are created.",
"location": 448,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Foragers steal to provide what will heal others, and that same bounty circulates to palliate their own pains with chemicals that eat away at them.",
"location": 460,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Slave labor, barely free labor, and the land itself were all worked to their limits. Something sweet gives you a little piece. Or peace.",
"location": 473,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And the nasty trick with opioids is that they ease both physical pain and a hurting heart. Both are in abundance in mountain living.",
"location": 479,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In Colored People, there are two simultaneous and tension-filled motifs: the tight-knit cultural mélange of Black, White, and everything in between, and the forces of segregation in the itty-bitty place.",
"location": 495,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "values are never necessities. They are priorities, choices, modes of self-creation. Whatever the intentions, this is the world the founders made.",
"location": 645,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Common” is a Southern insult. I do not know when it became so, broadly speaking, but I know that here in this letter is a twinge of evidence of its root.",
"location": 681,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Three of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore, idolatry knifed into the Lakota Sioux’s Six Grandfathers holy site, are Southerners.",
"location": 690,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "read, “Don’t act ugly.” I chuckled. Yes, there was something I know of the South, where ugly isn’t an appearance but rather an attitude, one that is especially unwarranted for (White) ladies and girls who are expected to be gracious and composed even if not smiling, but of course smiling is better.",
"location": 724,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "when the deadly violence happened in Charlottesville, the Southern habit of attributing it to outside agitators fell out of the mouths of locals so quickly.",
"location": 757,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "But there’s something to be said about outsiders thinking that your place could be a place for their hate to bloom.",
"location": 759,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The White religious right rest their theology on an ideal of moral “cleanliness” that is, if challenged, to be defended violently.",
"location": 779,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The veneration of the fetus and the degradation of the poor baby once born is cruel to the living and the dead.",
"location": 785,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In the Northeast, “we,” that two-letter word, provides an alchemy of domestic partnership.",
"location": 788,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In the South you are more likely to hear “me ’n’”:",
"location": 791,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This is the language of people who are used to thinking of family as a sprawl.",
"location": 794,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "However intolerable a family member found their rigid ways, how could they extricate themselves if such an act required losing not just a parent or two, but one’s whole network of affection?",
"location": 799,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Those women are not alone in the expectation that they will endure for the sake of the larger unit.",
"location": 802,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the bigger question for me was this: Who did she plan to rule like kings and queens over? Nonbelievers? Sinners?",
"location": 844,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This God of which she spoke, it struck me, was the God of masters. It was the God that dictated that it was righteous to slaughter the Indigenous and enslave the heathens,",
"location": 846,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The repository for her despair was the God of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Homegrown right here in Virginia, this God is reaped with the Christian Coalition and its backlash against hippies and women’s libbers and civil rights. This God could look favorably upon Donald Trump no matter how many sins were found on his moral ledger because he hated the right (or rather left) folks. This is the God of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who with dramatic tears and lashes asked the public to hitch onto their ride to salvation (and pay an ample fare for the honor) until they got unhitched and exposed as sinners like the rest of us. Still the promise has remained alluring enough that all kinds of sins by their own calculus will be forgiven as long as you’re a politician or a pastor who will hold this vision aloft even in the moments of deepest shame.",
"location": 853,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The God I was taught to believe in, a God rendered by the enslaved, was and remains at odds with that God.",
"location": 859,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The American fantasy of fantastic wealth and power lies on one side, and the passionate defense of the ideals of democracy and liberty on the other.",
"location": 867,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves. That God is far more tender than the one she praises, even to women like her.",
"location": 876,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Everybody in the South (I say that with the regional habit of linguistic excess)",
"location": 955,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "There’s a lot of delight in the pomp of the American South, and if you can take the ugliness out of the equation, not just historically but conceptually, there’s a lot of fun to be had.",
"location": 992,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "as I was digging around in stories of Maryland, and I wanted to get to it in order to figure out what I was looking for here. I’d read that there was a pub where founding fathers used to drink, carouse, and sell Black people. And it is still open.",
"location": 1067,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "auction blocks are more theatrical than the reality often was. Regular places were sites of the trade in people. The everydayness of disaster was a feature of slave society.",
"location": 1073,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "your knowing self and emotional self don’t always match up.",
"location": 1093,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "there is a consensus that the South is supposed to bear the brunt of the shame, and that the nation’s sins are disposed upon it.",
"location": 1361,
"annotation": "This is a pretty subtle streak. To the extent the South let’s itself be tarred as slavery was done HERE, Wall Street and Delaware don’t reckon with it."
},
{
"highlight": "The distinction between country and Southern is a fine one. Southern is regional and cultural; country is a disposition.",
"location": 1512,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "maybe it simply indicated that anything, absolutely anything, could be justified for empire.",
"location": 1578,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Von Braun, making himself into an American, told the people in Alabama to pronounce his name “Brown.” And he was fully immersed.",
"location": 1581,
"annotation": "A nazi could achieve integration and respect in a way no black skin ever could."
},
{
"highlight": "There is simultaneously a jealously guarded color line and an ease between Black and White in the South.",
"location": 1671,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "but instead to realize that they are layered. The rules of manhood and the rules of race grow into a monstrous beast, begging for our destruction in dozens of different ways.",
"location": 1742,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The religious right makes a virtue of White supremacy. And perhaps the best evidence of that is the combination of scapegoating and sexual scandal in their ranks.",
"location": 1809,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I’ve described the God of masters and the God of slaves. They each are the product of impassioned beliefs, but theology is also a product of the distribution of power and politics.",
"location": 1814,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "As a young adult, he witnessed an enslaved man forced to beat his wife to death.",
"location": 1818,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The deeds of the rioters of Wilmington were illegal. But they went unpunished because the de facto law of the land had always been the respect of White grievance and the destruction of Black flourishing.",
"location": 1876,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Perhaps an outspoken Jordan would have broken the spell of his widespread mainstream popularity and everyone would have remembered he was just a country Black boy who first balled on the land where his forefathers felt the lash.",
"location": 1970,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "PTSD returns us to the time and place of a life-shattering moment or moments.",
"location": 1972,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Benjamin once distinguished between two types of storytellers: one is a keeper of the traditions; another is the one who has journeyed afar and tells stories of other places. But there is a third, and that is the exile.",
"location": 1994,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The exile, with a gaze that is obscured by distance and time, may not always be precise in terms of information. Details get outdated. But if the exile can tell a story that gets to a fundamental truth and also tell you something about two core human feelings, loneliness and homesickness, along with a yearning for a place where they once belonged and/or a reality that has evaporated, then they have acquired an essential wisdom, earning them the title of storyteller.",
"location": 1995,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Julian Shakespeare Carr",
"location": 2000,
"annotation": "Fuck this guy"
},
{
"highlight": "As if anyone was punished for wounding and humiliating Black women.",
"location": 2016,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“As I looked at Silent Sam, face down in the dirt, all I could think was that it was the end of another battle in a war we just can’t quit fighting, because we can’t tell the truth about why it started.”",
"location": 2020,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Refuge from White supremacy remains elusive in North Carolina. Refuge for White supremacists seems to be always available.",
"location": 2026,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "They remind you that the state was made, in a particular way on particular terms, out of nature but not according to nature. Therefore, it might be remade.",
"location": 2080,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Magic City, which is probably the most famous strip club in the world.",
"location": 2245,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Hotlanta, ATL, ATLiens, ALANNA . . . the major metropolis of the South doesn’t have a sufficient mass transit system or a polyglot culture yet. What it does have is a lot of really nice shit.",
"location": 2257,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "being American is being a trickster. Fashion a self, hopefully a compelling one, out of the messiness of your life. Hold the things that make you most vulnerable close to the vest unless and until you can control how they are received.",
"location": 2267,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The blood is so deep into the red earth that grief spirals into madness. We Alabamans have the highest rates of mental illness and the lowest rates of medical care. Inside home, terrors happen and repeat. That is what is neatly called trauma.",
"location": 2303,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The way life kills, with unapologetic abandon, is precisely why we hold each other so close.",
"location": 2317,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "in any case, a Black mind built to handle absurdity is a wonderful thing to maintain.",
"location": 2319,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Williams was a social gospel evangelical who struggled for over fifty years to save the soul of the nation, which meant he was beaten and brutalized a lot over the years.",
"location": 2353,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "For all the smug assessments of how poor White Southerners vote against their own interests and hate indiscriminately, how rare it is that we attend to their other stories.",
"location": 2365,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Do you know what surveys of porn searches show? They show interracial desire is deepest where Jim Crow was strongest.",
"location": 2374,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We tend to think moments of pain provide reckoning. But pleasure might tell us even more.",
"location": 2377,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Sex workers will tell you of a queer mix of bloodthirstiness and vulnerability that exists in their most powerful clients. The sexual economy of the plantation persists.",
"location": 2380,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Her secret is knowing that sometimes survival must be chosen over victory even when you know you deserve to win. We endure.",
"location": 2395,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "What makes it a secret is that it cannot be spoken about above a whisper without something breaking.",
"location": 2397,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Much of the South’s conservatism is little more than an effort to zone where we place the yearnings that we don’t know what to do with.",
"location": 2398,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "That toothless smile that could easily accompany either mirth or murderousness, depending on the eyes? This is what Black folks mean when we say we prefer the Southern White person’s honest racism to the Northern liberal’s subterfuge.",
"location": 2505,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Jonathan Edwards is buried. A president of Princeton, father of the Great Awakening, he met his maker after a bad smallpox inoculation. The sarcophagus, heavy gray and stone, bears a few stilted words. It belies the man. Edwards always had a great deal to say. He wrote on everything. And among his possessions, on the other side of a paper that he had cut into quadrants to write four good sermons, was a bill of sale for an African woman named Venus. What a fascinating example of reuse and resourcefulness: a sermon on top of human trafficking. Historians know nothing of the transit of Venus. Just that she was here and some other there, as Edwards preached the imminent destruction of a reprobate American people who yelled “What shall I do to be saved?!” He thought he knew.",
"location": 2645,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "speculated that slaves who worked in the field were darker than those in the house because of the cultural benefits of proximity to masters, rather than evidence of the institutional rape that was central to American slavery.",
"location": 2682,
"annotation": "Fuuuuuuuck"
},
{
"highlight": "W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially.",
"location": 2916,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It was a town through which General Sherman had slashed in his March to the Sea, and the White folks never stopped making Black people pay for that humiliation.",
"location": 3175,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "plenty of folks in the Black Belt found a way to love and transform—the most transformative work of the freedom movement took place there—it is plain to see how it could break a spirit.",
"location": 3179,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This is the place, the core, that we mean when we say “the South” as a historic location. So it must be told.",
"location": 3191,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole were forced out of their national territories in the Southeast because of cotton greed.",
"location": 3195,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The New Deal had been designed, in deference to Southern political authorities, to exclude Black people from the welfare state.",
"location": 3232,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Du Bois explained that in the Redemption South, the White worker was offered Whiteness to set himself apart from the Black worker. And no matter how hungry, how imprisoned by labor, how deprived he was, that was his gift, or grift as the case might be.",
"location": 3242,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Whiteness was an article of faith. It redeemed suffering. And afforded compensation in the ability to feed bloodthirstiness—lynching, burning, beating, raping, humiliating—which also became matters of faith.",
"location": 3245,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He’d argued in the past that in the protracted struggle for civil rights, its most pointed battles were waged on the grounds where Black people had been enslaved and bound to cotton. They taught the rest of the South what it meant to refuse the government in service to the plantation.",
"location": 3252,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "On the one hand, the White Northerner often seeks to find sympathy and common ground with the White Southerner by disappearing the Black Southerner. On the other, the White Northerner seeks to express solidarity with the Black Southerner by turning the White Southerner into a caricatured demon in comparison to his own virtue.",
"location": 3255,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The blues is testimony to the possibility of a laugh, a sweetness in each place. A libation poured for the dead. And joy.",
"location": 3307,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "But it is true that the culture made by enslaved people insisted upon joy. It was not a naive childish satisfaction. No, it was, it is, the joy of a voice that could soar one moment and growl the next, giggle and holler. It’s the joy of dancing in a whip-scarred, food-deprived, achy body. The joy of love, of the binding between souls across the borders of flesh and the rules of society. It was a refusal to be rendered entirely in the image of White Americans, even when completely beaten down.",
"location": 3308,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Informal kinship was created, too, when people lost track of legal connection.",
"location": 3318,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If everyone had departed, no one would have been left to tend the ancestors’ graves.",
"location": 3361,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity: oil, coal, and cotton.",
"location": 3366,
"annotation": "Dirty and tending to exploitation"
},
{
"highlight": "Southern ladyhood entails a high-pitched singsongy way of talking and walking and flirting. The face wrinkles, and the voice still lilts. She was worried for me, after she put the items in my bag. “Let me get you a double bag,” she said, “so folks can’t see all your business.” And I thanked her. She meant it. I meant it, too.",
"location": 3382,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Rape was a ritual of racial terror wielded against the spirits of Black women. Accusations of rape were a tool of racial terror threatening Black men. What remains harder to address is the way sexual violence exists inside Black communities in the United States, although it does in every community in the United States.",
"location": 3492,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The ethics of building a just society begin at the place where you can touch another person, and the moral imagination reaches out further. This is what is meant, as far as I can tell, by the importance of “grassroots.” It is not simply that struggle should not be dictated by elites.",
"location": 3497,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "So I googled, following the mothers’ anxious questions asking how to do this. You cannot buy a plantation kit from anywhere, I’ve found. You perhaps could turn a farm kit into a plantation, by placing Black figurines about.",
"location": 3602,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A sensibility as much as a color, haint blue was traditionally made of indigo, lime, and milk. Of course paint companies have taken up the color, as have the affluent.",
"location": 3761,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The reason for the blue is that ghosts, or haints, as well as insects, are warded off by the tint of water and sky. It’s a warning: Don’t cross over into this world with your wailing, your unsettlement. There’s enough suffering on this side. On the trees you can sometimes still find cobalt-blue milk of magnesia or Blue Nun wine bottles resting on branch tips.",
"location": 3762,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Even acknowledging how important desegregation was, the persistence of American racism alongside the loss of the tight-knit Black world does make one wonder.",
"location": 3892,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The thing about O’Connor, as devoutly Catholic as she was, is that she exposed some of the vulgar innards of the South that most try to ignore.",
"location": 3915,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Janus face of Southern Whiteness—they know what they’ve done wrong, and they know you know; they hate you for it, and hate themselves for it, too—is strange.",
"location": 3922,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "South is home to some of the richest queer culture in the world, and some of the deepest intolerance to any order other than patriarchy.",
"location": 3939,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”",
"location": 3943,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He reminded me then, and again, that there are ways to tell difficult stories about who we are that are tender rather than gothic.",
"location": 3957,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And Dylann Roof is and was the product of an American house eaten out by its choices and built atop the graveyard of what came before. He, too, was called an outsider by locals, rather than an alarming testimony to American violence. This vanity of innocence is like guarding a gate when the warriors are already inside.",
"location": 4065,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Europeanness can be and often is a strongly held and beneficial identity.",
"location": 4105,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "As fertilizer runoff drains into the river, the green blooms grow. Disturbing it, breathing it in, can poison your liver and damage your nervous system permanently. A delightful killer, like a menthol cigarette.",
"location": 4118,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The scene of the Southern porch depends on where you are.",
"location": 4131,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The inevitable awkwardness of a literal rendering, emphasizing ideas and meaning, asks the reader to forget the evocative sonorities of rhythm and rhyme or rather recall their presence in the original as a kind of ennobling excuse for what often appears on the page as a fairly bare-bones, skimpy transmission of thought.",
"location": 4216,
"annotation": "Southerners always have a tendserness for fabrication; rarely malicious"
},
{
"highlight": "They say that Southern speech is songlike, but in fact our songs are language-like. They are better mimics of our living than dictation could ever be.",
"location": 4224,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If there are White people in them, they’re often the White people who other White people put down or mock. They have twangs or drawls or heavy local idiosyncrasies in their speech that remind you that White folks do indeed have a lot of culture when they don’t run away from it for the faceless bounty of being simply “White.”",
"location": 4250,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Miami is Southern because the South extends beyond the borders of the United States. It is the Global South and the American South as one.",
"location": 4461,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "dressed as self-regard, as civility, as grace. Because our bodies were prescribed for toil, used as repositories for rage, like rags for waste, we learned elegance as a way of loving.",
"location": 4585,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The South is so varying that it can seem endless. And yet you will still know “Southern” means something over and against other regions.",
"location": 4596,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "And you have to know that the powers that be were ashamed for that ugliness to be exposed—denying itty-bitty children the joy of an amusement park—so they tried to slap the film out of Black hands.",
"location": 4609,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Faith, here, might claim that God provides, but that doesn’t mean destruction isn’t coming. It means God gave you some knowledge to hold on to, and you better use it.",
"location": 4651,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Trusting the lord is not the same as trusting his land.",
"location": 4653,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The rival souls were essential to the hypocritical relationship between American democracy and its economic domination of other people, which stole their independence as well as autonomy, again and again.",
"location": 4773,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Café Du Monde didn’t knowingly serve Black patrons until July of 1964, in response to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It’s one of those stark reminders that New Orleans was and is very much the US South.",
"location": 4971,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Skepticism is an undercurrent of the proverbial “Southern hospitality.” You’re supposed to be kind to everyone, but that doesn’t mean you trust or are trusted.",
"location": 5170,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "After all, from the bottom, from the depths, from the fields, from the ashes, hope just keeps on rising and radiating off sweat-glowing skin in Southern heat.",
"location": 5541,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It belongs to the ones breathing dirty air. It belongs to the bombed. It belongs to the children wearing lace socks and charred flesh. It belongs to the untended graves. It belongs to George Floyd’s baby, and Breonna Taylor’s mama. And your responsibility to history hasn’t receded, no matter how far from it you travel.",
"location": 5548,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "believe writing can be a moral instrument if it asks you to do more than read.",
"location": 5555,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Art is nothing more and nothing less than the human application of skill and imagination to creation. Homesick and lonely, I still had art at hand.",
"location": 5566,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "But in the land of big dreams and bigger lies, we love greatness anyway. And if we want it, if we aren’t afraid to grab it, we have to look South, to America.",
"location": 5571,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}