And that self denial allows for a story that doesn't get to the essential tension between freedom and subjugation, democracy and domination, those kinds of things. That is actually a denial of the core of what the country is. There's something about the way that we describe the South, in the nation in general, as somehow backwards. On the South as the heart of the United States And confront the violence of that, but also what it meant that that's the font of American music too incredible creativity emerges, imagination, and also cruelty. And so I turn to Wright and the way that he describes growing up in the Black Belt, in this place with so much incredible beauty, and abundance, and being hungry, to really get what it was like in recent history for people to essentially live in a plantation economy.

One of the people I turned to to think about the Black Belt and what it yielded is Richard Wright – in particular, both his books Black Boy and 12 Million Black Voices – in part because I'm trying to understand something that I don't know inherently. That's the place where King Cotton made the United States one of the most wealthy nations in the world. On why understanding the soul of the South means looking to the Black Belt And so, to get over the romanticism was for me to both hold on to what I think of as these sort of incredibly noble parts of Southern tradition, and also grapple with the fact that it remains the poorest region it remains a region where many, many people are disenfranchised remains a region where people are exploited. It's also the case that it is still a place of profound inequality. But it's also the case that people in my home are still suffering. I carried that everywhere I went as this incredible pride, and it was a motivator. The reality of being born in Birmingham, I'm born into a place that has been transformed from what was known as the most segregated, most violent city in the nation, into a place of Black possibility. On having to let go of her own romantic ideas

And all of it is, I think, as much as truthful as I can be about it, which means that I had to get rid of some of my romantic ideas of the place I call home and really look at it in a stark way, but also still loving. This book is much more an effort to have people dwell in place, space and time, and reconsider their relationships to this place. The discipline of history is based upon argument. Ecco On describing her book not as a history, but a true story Author and Princeton Professor Imani Perry.

South to america imani perry