Touring one of the city’s well-preserved homes, she is caught off guard when the docent guides her group to the staged kitchen. In the chapter on Maryland, she describes Annapolis as a historically minded, picturesque city that boasts sites like the Banneker-Douglass Museum along with cobblestone streets. There, she hoped to see something that would connect her to her Upper South roots. Perry traveled to Annapolis, while writing the book, after discovering an ancestor who was born in Maryland in 1769 - something she found emotionally jarring to her sense of regional identity as an Alabaman. “It was important to me that readers could understand both something about the Upper South and about why, when we talk about the South, usually we mean the Deep South: We think about the Black Belt because of the history of cotton,” Perry said, referring to what she describes in the book as a crescent-shaped stretch of land from Virginia to Louisiana and Arkansas.

That’s why she chose the Mason-Dixon as a starting point: “It’s important to understand that, at least culturally speaking, there are ‘Souths,’ plural.”

Can the capital city, which sits well below the Mason-Dixon Line, be considered Southern? When she asks a Lyft driver, he replies, almost hysterical: “South? Compared to what, MAINE?”Īs someone who was born in Alabama, in the uncontested South, Perry said she felt her own regional bias when she began writing the book and looking deeper into her American roots. In Washington, D.C., during a visit that coincides with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she returns to the idea of what makes something, like a certain preparation of grits, authentically Southern. Image: Dr Imani Perry (HarperCollins Publishers via Dr Imani Perry)

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