Poured Over: Imani Perry on South to America

…I read every day. Reading feels like part of my identity…[it] feels essential as a writer to be reading always.” Imani Perry is the acclaimed author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry and Breathe: A Letter to My Sons among other books; her latest, South to America, is an extraordinary blend of personal memoir and American history, and she joins us on the show to talk about her travels around the American South, the people she spoke with and the friendships she made, her own mother’s story, and the writers she holds close, including Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Sarah M. Broom, and Richard Wright. Featured Books: South to America by Imani Perry, The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, and Native Son by Richard Wright. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever you listen to podcasts.

From This Episode:

B&N: Was there a moment that just brought you incredible joy as you were writing?

Imani Perry: There’s a couple of them. One I really loved was my time with Joe Mentor, who is a yard artist in Alabama. Alabama has this extraordinary tradition of yard artists who use found objects, often metal, and these kind of sculpture gardens that make sense because of the steel mills in Birmingham and Bessemer, and he has this vast yard filled with art. It’s history. It’s theology. He’s a black man who wears a helmet all the time and has this house that is this deep, beautiful, saturated blue. And his yard is adjacent to two historic black cemeteries that are guarded by wild dogs. Yeah, it’s like a classic kind of picture of what the South is with its sort of fantastical qualities. He’s recognized in the art world, and has again, no airs about him, no pretense. He really sees the work that he does as a creative person as part of the spiritual mission. So, I just love being able to sort of recount what it was like to be close to him.

There’s moments of memory that I just love. I love going back to remembering how I used to stand behind my grandmother while she drank her coffee in the morning and try to elbow my cousins out of the way, because I wanted to be the one right behind her, and the table that still exists in our home that she bought before I was born. And that as I wrote, I could remember what it feels like to touch the table, the texture of it. The sensory parts that for me connect to the larger story.

B&N: There is a moment in the book where you talk about being directed away from Richard Wright….And I have to say that shocked me I know Wright’s reputation sort of ebbed and flowed like many writers, but you have a JD from Harvard and a PhD in American civilization from Harvard, and you were directed away from Richard Wright. I don’t even know where to start with that.

Imani Perry: And it started in college. I mean, this sort of idea that Native Son as a text failed because Wright wanted to create, in the character Bigger Thomas, a migrant from Mississippi up to Chicago who killed a young white woman and then was on the run, that Wright wanted to create a character for whom one felt no empathy, a character so completely shaped by the social order that he didn’t have an interior life. There was this embedded critique that Wright let his work be destroyed by his political interest in making a point. I had read Wright before and continued to read Wright after. So, I already had an intimate connection with him. And I’m not saying that he’s beyond critique, but my goodness, mastery of sentences, of environment, of the relationship between environment and Black life in the South. He’s just, I think, unparalleled. And so that experience…it’s similar with the way people talked about Tuskegee, which is my family school and Booker T. Washington, as like, yeah, you know, the stories that are being told as like the way I’m supposed to feel things. My own experience is such that I’m going to be skeptical. That skepticism has been really good for me personally, as I move through life.

B&N: But isn’t that also why we read? That healthy skepticism. I mean, admitting I don’t have all of the answers, that in fact, someone might actually know a little more than you.

Imani Perry: This is the thing for me also with Wright because so many people were mad at him. And then I started to think about where he was from, The Black Belt, the place with the whitest cotton and the blackest people… it’s the most brutal part of Southern history, that relationship to land that was home for him. He grew up hungry in a place of incredible abundance. Most of the other writers we read, Black writers of the South, didn’t have that experience. And so, I do think it’s meaningful to listen, to attend to what is he noticing. What is he experiencing? Not that there’s only one way to see anything or that he’s an absolute authority, but there’s a witnessing there that is very profound.

B&N: And an art that makes people uncomfortable…that’s partially the role of art, to make us uncomfortable, whether it’s the visual arts or the written word, or music or what have you, but you have a story about [James] Baldwin…he didn’t think much of Langston Hughes and in fact, said, Langston Hughes talks about things the way my dad did.

Imani Perry: …Part of the point of putting that story in to is that, yes, extraordinary people disagree. That’s really important. But also, that part of what Baldwin was saying, I think, about Hughes is that he wanted his story of racial violence to have some distance. Part of what makes some of the horror, for example, that someone like [Toni] Morrison shares possible to even read is the extraordinary language.  The distance that the language allows you to have was fascinating. I wouldn’t necessarily critique Baldwin for this observation. I just think it’s really interesting. Whereas what someone like Langston Hughes does is that he used the vernacular, but also there was a spareness. So that’s still a device, right? He’s not telling you all of the blood and gore; it’s franker speech but it’s not ornamented. So, you still get a little bit of space so that you can digest it. …I think that this question of how much you do in the vernacular, and how much you do in a kind of more particular authorial voice is always an interesting question. I think we’re still trying out different ways of doing it now. And I think it’s good. I think there’s incredible beauty to like thinking, how do you tell the story and what is your relationship to the spoken word…