community and there's no better way to bring ideas to a group than through reading great books. and so thank you for organizing this festival and bringing it to fau your home now for the palm beach book festival this next the first author is really exciting to me all our authors connect to the college's mission and different ways this one especially to we have a african-american studies program here. just launching in our college. and of course, we have a creative writing program a master's of fine arts and creative writing a lot of those folks do memoir writing this book kind of bends genres interesting ways, but it certainly is the kind of book we want to be talking about here at fau. so we're so excited for this first author and lois is now going to introduce her. thank you. lee haber is a friend and a board member to our festival. she's the moderator today as well as the books editor for o the ober magazine and oprahmag.com and the the curator of oprah's book club. has got big job there. lee chose south to america for this year's oprah pick we all think we know the south the civil war gone with the win the ku klux klan plantations slavery football. but in south to america amani perry shows that the meaning of being american is linked to the south and that our understanding in its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation in its entirety. amani perry is the hughes rogers professor of african-american studies at princeton university. she is the author of many award-winning books as well as awards including the 2019 biography prize from the penn american foundation. dr. perry a native of birmingham alabama grew up in cambridge, massachusetts in chicago and currently lives in philadelphia, please welcome lee haber and dr. amani perry. welcome, so please to be here. and i'm going to put my books down over here. so thank you everybody for coming. first of all, it's it's just, you know a pleasure to be here and to speak to us about wonderful book today. so i guess the first thing is that we sent out we tweeted something. yeah about whether florida is considered part of the deep south and it started a thread that was really interesting. it was so imani. what would you say in answer to that question? absolutely, absolutely and for a couple of reasons i first saw i loved that you post that question. we talked about this because i think you know our image of florida tends to be south florida and it tends to be miami and disney and you know the first sentence of the florida chapter is florida is a pistol. i was gonna i was gonna cite that yeah, and it's a double entender because it's about the shape and part of the point is that the panhandle is certainly the deep south it is as much alabama and georgia and the the like is anything else but the double entender is also that it's an epistle. in the biblical sense. it is an instructive letter. it's an argumentative letter. florida is in some ways like, texas and nation unto itself. but it also teaches us a great deal about the history of this country. it's where you remember that spain was here first in terms of european encounters. it's where you were meant your you are aware of the incredible diversity of indigenous people of people of african descent over multiple generations as well as multiple groups of europeans. it's a deep south because you know you can you can point to very clear things right orange county the highest rate of lynching anywhere where disney it was done by that statistic in your book. it's written but it's important because highest rate of lynchings in the country in the country. yeah. yeah. and that disney world lies a topic. is in some ways representative of what we do with history, right? we we run and i think this across the board. we tend to sanitize history all nations do this right they want their histories to be tidy. and prettier than they are and part of what's interesting about the south. is that people sort of make the south the sort of you know the country cousin in other regions so is not to deal because you can't deny the ugliness such a good point, right? so it's like so just gonna pretend that that's not at the center. when of course it is because it was the place where well was produced. well detail that for us elaborate on that. yeah, so, i mean one of the things i keep saying is, you know in the book i talk about they're all these dates that it could be beginnings of the nation, right? but we're at all of them are in the south right like all of the beginnings right so you can start, you know, six sixteen nineteen is one date that is compelling for jamestown or you could do the roanoke colony earlier, but also you could do you could do the 16th century you you could do 1,500 15 20 because florida is a part of the united states. and the reason that you had european encounters with the set with the south first is because this is a land of incredible abundance. right? and so this desire to figure what can we do with this inside of a fountain of you the gold of look at maybe not those things but prosperity you can bind that with unfree labor right of africans and so much wealth is produced and so, you know, once you get there's malt there's six there's sugar there's tobacco once you get to king cotton builds the wealth of this country it is what enables the united states to become a global power even you know, and i think this is really important. the reason washington dc is in the south and i know that's another place we can argue about but is because the southern colonies had to pay the revolutionary war debt because they were that's where the prosperity was. and then the way that our government is organized the electoral college the separation of powers combined with federalism these have to do with southern interest. so the south has moved the nation about the bread basket. historically, right so the whole nation is indebted. to what the set for better and worse. well, i think it's fascinating. i never thought about it that way, you know, i thought about the backward cousin sort of thing, but not as the engine, you know the engine the architect in many ways of the country, but let's step back a little bit. i'll return to the florida chapter later and i love how the book is divided for those of you who haven't read it. it's so rich in every nugget, you know in every nook and cranny with interesting facts that i haven't read before in many cases and mining his organized the book by region. she doesn't cover every region of the country but focuses on a few and their their fascinating but the book opens with a scene in 1804 in new orleans at a ball where people are dancing the quadril and it struck me you felt as if you were there reading that chapter and that scene in particular. so, where did you get that detail because it felt like real on the ground. i was at the party. was at the ball. yeah. i mean, i'm an archive junkie, right? i mean i just love to and is that a thing? i've never heard anyone say that before. i know i think i made it up, but it's true. and i love newspapers. so much of the detail the historic detail comes from newspapers i love but and it's incredible because people in new in historic newspapers, you can find the colors of people's dresses the scent what i mean, it's it's so you know for me the the real task for as a writer now is to combine, you know, the scholar the researchers, you know digging. with wanting to get the sense of the sensory the emotional right? it's almost novelist effect. yeah. thank you. i mean that's that that's the aspiration because there's something about sort of be inside history. i think that is not just like being transported, but i actually do think it helps us understand ourselves, right? you know that once you get past like the way we tell heroic narratives right the sort of noble story to actually think about people living and feeling and breathing. i think that actually is is especially useful now for those who haven't cracked the book yet in what are you trying to convey in that section? i'm trying to convey. the the fact i want to okay, so part of the argument is i want us to get out of the british inclination of telling history as a kind of straightforward narrative, right? so i'm talking about the quadrills are actually a metaphor, but they're real about this is moment when the louisiana purchases taking place. there's all this tension between the americans and the french creals, right the european french creals and and the quad they wind up having this physical battle over the dance because the quadril french quadril and the british they're different dances and the way the english did it took longer and so there was this conflict over it was the time for a french song, but the english weren't done with their dance yet and this actually turns bloody right and so it's a metaphor, but it's actually real there were real tensions cultural tensions that that and that language of a quadra was also used to talk about politics the political quadril right the different interests the competing desires for accumulation and power and control of land and empire all those things. so it's a moment that actually captures so much about you know, the 19th century and i think we forget that there's still these conflicts over what's going on globally in the 19th century and this country's in the center of that in so many ways. well, it also conveys the kind of multiculturalism. oh, yeah the country and from the beginning talk about that. yeah, i mean, so i think that you know, there are places in florida's one of them and louisiana where it's a parent right because there's like multiple language communities, but there's a multiculturalism that exists all the way through multiculturalism amongst indigenous groups which we often for we forget and that's part of what i try to get in the florida chapter with talking about the different politics of different indigenous groups amongst africans and all students you well. yes, right well and that's really important because one of my part of why the book goes all the way down to the caribbean is it's important understand this was it was all considered one region. florida is a place where you remember that more than other parts of the country, but the caribbean and the southern united states before all of the sort of global powers settled on to sort of who who what belonged to whom this was all a single region and there was a lot of movement. i had a lyft driver yesterday. i just have to say this quickly because lyft drivers are really important to this book and i left driver yesterday. i was trying to get here which was a whole saga but from new orleans and he says and you know, so he we're talking and i said are you from belize or honduras? he's a black man and he laughed and he said i'm from honduras. my grandmother was from belize. and i guess i could hear you know speech pattern and then he tells me this story of a fought as grandmother's from belize. she moves to savannah. his father is a savannah and he's in the military. he goes to honduras. he falls in love with the honduran woman, and it was one. it's one there's moments when you feel like i'm vindicated with a book and i was like because these movements have happened for so long we talk about them like they're new. but they happened all i mean, this is the history and it's important to tell so when we see like more recently lots of central americans coming to the united states, that's not new. it's also the case that lots of you know, people from what is now the united states went there right? lots of the sort of political history of central america's based in new orleans business. right, so well, one of the things that really struck me about the book also is that it's a mixture of exploring figures people. we've known from the past but coming at them from a different point of view, but also as you were just talking about with the lyft driver talking to you know, everyday people and sprinkling their stories throughout. so, how did you arrive at that notion? what i wanted it to have this i wanted to kind of break the genre of the travel narrative and i wanted as opposed to saying okay. i'm going to go to these important historic sites. i wanted it to feel like an a set of encounters so that you might move you move through these places. i'm asking readers to come with me travel with me. you don't necessarily have to agree with me, but i want to point some things out that you would probably find interesting and so we're and and we're as we're traveling in the encounters the encounters are with people. the encounters are with the landscape with artifacts and then i want to dig a little deeper right and also. capture some of the cultures and disabilities of the south indian counters, right? so when i talk to somebody that conversation is so shaped by the culture of the local place and that is part of the truth of the place. well, let's go to harpers ferry. yes, so it's interesting because you went to harpers ferry because if it's important in our country's history as you can recount for our audience in case they don't know but in the meantime you had this whole dialogue internal dialogue going on in your head thinking about tony horwitz this book confederates and in the attic and then you encounter someone who is a reenactor. yes of the civil war. so yes, so i okay so i i have this internal dialogue because tony who always was just an absolutely lovely person, but i hadn't read confederates in the attic when he was living and then i read it and i was so frustrated with him. like you're so sympathetic to confederate reenactors, right? and i'm frustrated with them and he has one conflict in the book with someone and it's actually my friend's mom. and so i was like or you know kind of grumpy about that. but i was also thinking but he was able to access something that i wouldn't be able to access as a black woman. i thought i wouldn't be able to have those kind of conversations with confederate reenactors and it was virginia in west virginia. and yet i get to west virginia and that's the first conversation. so the confederate actor is one of these sort of moments of kismet and this is a man who is an archivist by profession. and we bonded over that. yes. yes, and he is a confused. he's a reenactor for marilyn regiment and he spends his leisure time working volunteering at harpers ferry, which is the site of john brown's raid. that was an he intended to emancipate africans. he wanted to sort he sort of and tried to start a civil war that would free black people before the civil war actually happened, but in some ways he failed like in almost immediately they were defeated and some people thought it was a suicide mission right like frederick douglass right was like, yeah. i'm not very good called in sick right here was like, i'm not feeling well and so, you know, we don't know if she actually was not feeling well, she was like that. it was just it was not a very well thought out plan arguably but a passionate. one, you know driven by a deep sense of justice, right? so that's where i started in west virginia partially because everybody was like you're going to west virginia by yourself like black lady. you should be afraid right and so, you know, but i went and we had this conversation. i called him bob in the book. that's not his name. but it was so interesting because part of me was like i i'm not going to confront him about being a confederate reenactor and i have been socialized. as a man born in alabama, you know socialized as a southern black woman and girl that that you don't start this stuff right because it could explode but i was fascinated. and he's and i realized we're so similar. because his passion is to live inside history as is mine. and yet i couldn't figure out why he wanted to live inside that part of history and you couldn't ask him and i couldn't ask him. but he told me this story about glasses. so the first time so for reenactors you have to be and if you've read confederates in the attic, you also know this and it helped me because i knew lots of questions to ask him because i read that book, right? so he tells me he goes out into a field and they're like you got to take off those glasses because you have to everything has to be authentic and accurate right up for the time period they got fine if yes. so he's like, okay i have to get glasses from the 19th century. so they were super expensive and they took a long time and then he gets him and he said i couldn't see out of the darn things anyway, right because they're so thick back then but for me i was it was such a poetic moment. you know, you look through the confederacies lens. there's a lot you can't see. so we were looking we are looking and fixated on much of the same historical terrain, but we have a different lens. if you were to do a list of write a list of the pros and cons of the deep south i mean you talk about some of the businesses the industries the companies that have originated from here talk about that aspect a little bit. well, yeah, i mean so much of our culture emerges from the deep south certainly all of our soda all of it. and it's part of why i get i'm sorry. i said this aside because i and i wrote about in the book, but i get irritated when you when you take those quizzes. those are you southern quizzes and they say do you call so, you know, do you call soda coca-cola or pop and they're like if you say coca cola southern and i'm like, that's really like a georgia thing and also texas thing but lots of other places because there's so much carbonated beverages like, you know everywhere and and coca cola is not the favorite everywhere. that's anyway that's an aside. but and so there's there's food culture. there's walmart culture. there's the fact that amazon comes from a person. native of houston the grocery store is a southern concept and so much so there's this drive to convenience the fact that we're a car culture is everything to do with houston and oil right and so there's a there's a convenience thing. there's an innovation part and that's always the matched with. a real experience of exploitation and and hard living for poor folks or for marginalized folks and so i want it so that part of who we are so much of who we are is is rooted in the south but the hardscrabble living is also what gives birth to another part of southern culture that shapes so much which is our music culture american music of southern music. and its southern music from the underside. and it's music that is built that comes out of people's encounter with the land and labor country music blues music jazz, right? and i guess that's the that's the pro part. you know, this is incredible and also the beauty the beauty and you thinking about the florida chapter again. yeah, and how you especially in zoro neil hurston's area of florida. so talk about that about this oriental hurst and yeah both in terms of its beauty and what she saw there. right, i mean so join our student is really important and i just have to say really quickly. she claimed eatonville, florida. she was born in alabama like me. but she which i'm sorry. i just have to because she knows she's sort of denied, alabama. but what was so interesting is that she won was interested in this is a woman who is a natively eatonville. she goes to high school at florida baptist academy in jacksonville and eventually howard university morgan state university in colombia is trained as an anthropologist and spends much of her life both writing fiction, but also doing anthropological discovery of the of the of the history of african culture that sort of across the americas and the caribbean and she traces their african retentions folktale. she's a folklorist, but she really is also you know a keeper of culture as it were and she's a participant observer right? and so she's very invested in the story of her independent, blacktown, eatonville. but first independent the first independent blacktown, yes, thank you, and she's not she is also kind of ornery and harassable and outspoken and a brilliant storyteller, but she's but part of what i find so important about her is for me. that's the thread like in some ways what we were talking about before. the reality of all of the multiculturalism of southern history that gets flattened into you know, many ways a black white binary. she's she's tracking that in the 1920s and 30s amazing journalist amazing journalist and telling stories about race both in terms of the violence and in terms of the intimacy. yeah, she reaches the true contemporary way. she does. yeah, it's pretty incredible and in fact there was a new book. unearthed right and just came out recently. but yeah, you don't know us --. yeah, which was edited by my advisor from graduate school. yeah. yeah. and skip gates were at the fort that's good. yeah. yeah. um you write in the book that a nation an imagined community. and then you say that in our in our country that community is difficult to sustain. why is that? well, i think there is this fundamental tension. queen, you know our narrative of an ever more perfect union a multiracial inclusive democracy, you know sort of ellis island narrative. give us your poor, right? here the history of from the beginning pushing people off of their land grinding down people's lives into virtually nothing but labor and the heterogeneity that resulted and the heterogeneity that was well and and the designed the heterogeneity that resulted and the designed though, exclusive exclusivity of citizens. right right. so i tell this story of an ancestor named easter esther who by some documentary accounts was born in 1769 in maryland. and i thought about her a lot as this woman. parents were born in maryland too. so early, you know early 1700s at the very least. my ancestry goes back in this country. to for them to or for her to be born and lived and died and see the country built 1776 established without her being considered as a member. right that is not anomalous in our history. that part makes it very hard to have the other aspirational part. well, i'm thinking again to the harpers ferry chapter. i can't remember the name of the guy who was executed. shields green yeah green and you point out he was executed on the basis of being, you know opposing the country proposing the government. mm-hmm and yet you know, he was not a citizen right? how could he be? right right. he wasn't considered a citizen. so how how could he give committed treason? yeah, so that's the i want to i want to ask something that i hear a lot of people saying and i don't agree with it, but i just want your take on it. yeah, you know, i think some of it is the outgrowth of the 1619 project, you know and and asserting that as the true. date our country was born so but there's a lot of talk now about critical race theory and aren't we just like going into this too much, you know isn't there too much emphasis on everyone, you know, so yeah what i guess my question to you is how do you refute that? yeah. well, i would say first of all it was very disorienting when first people first started talking about critical race theory because in a previous life, i was a law professor. i taught critical race theory. and they weren't talking about critical race theory does everyone know what critical race theory is? i just can i just say really quickly so critical race theory is a sub. genre of legal scholarship on race that focuses on the idea that in the context of anti-discrimination law it was possible to actually still have discriminatory practices while saying you were colorblind, right and so to how to think about how do you have how do you remedy racial inequality in the context where there is no explicit reference to race? that's sort of a shorthand right? so it's a kind of rarefied feel. i mean, it's like it's not even central to study on race and i mean and it's it's but it has been influential and in ways and thinkers that thinkers have helped people think in new ways about inequality, but what's happening in schools was much more people teaching about the history of racial inequality, right? that was that felt disturbing to people and and my reaction in part was this. i think that by not teaching the history of racial inequality of slavery. of jim crow, you know the various forms of experiences of indigenous people of of latino people of asian-americans. you actually stifle the moral imaginations of our children and there and when there's sort of these formulations and we'll we'll white children feel bad. it's it's sort of alarming to me because i don't ever have this idea that white children can't identify with the suffering of others. i don't think we should ever think in that way. i think all of us have a capacity to have the kind of moral imagination where we can identify with the suffering of others, but also that we can see ourselves and people don't belong to our same categorical group. well and also, how can we reconcile our differences if we have an acknowledged the truth, right? oh, yeah, that is the core of it and i think this question around kids. for me is so potent because you know when you have children and they find someone that they think of as heroic they don't think well that person is not categorically like me so i can't imagine my you know, myself being moved by them. and so yes, and i but i want to say this too. we're in the midst of arguments over the dominant narrative of the of the country, right and there's it and one of them is kind of a lost cause narrative right? i think that we're going to have to because meaning oh the of the confederacy right instead of kind of a championing of the confederacy, right? but i think we're gonna have to sort of let go of this idea that there's a single narrative. we're actually going to have to understand our history as a history of debates around this questions about who ought to be a citizen who what what role should different people play? what does democracy mean in its detail, detail, right what is representation? i don't think that we have a single narrative because these conflicts they you know, they ebb and flow, but they're always there well, and we don't really have a single founding moment. we don't and you know, you point out, you know in terms of florida how many different? founders, you know there were and it doesn't diminish our quote founding fathers by admitting that there are other beginnings other foundings. i think that's absolutely right and the founding fathers. this is really and this is really important when people talk about originalism with the constitution. they didn't agree exactly. they had very different so they were making compromises. so when you take those documents as though they were deeply held, you know, passionate beliefs. they had to make compromises because they didn't agree there's not and so again, there's always these negotiations so to sort of enshrine them and so they were single person agreements ended in duels, right? so yes. hated things were you know, i i have a wonderful job i am i've been with oprah for 10 years and i curate oprah's book club. i run the books coverage for oprah daily.com and our new oak quarterly one of the you know one of the privileges of the job is to get to talk to people like you to read books like this, you know, not only for professional reasons, but because i love them personally and one of the things i think that was your aim with this book was to quote pull aside the bail. mm-hmm. and so talk to us a little bit about what pulling aside the veil means and what your intention was. ultimately what you wanted people to take from the book. yeah, well, first of all, i just want to thank you so much. not just with this book, but you're you're supportive me as a writer and thinker has meant just so much. and i love that you can read what i am trying to do the pulling aside. the veil is actually. it's it's asking questions. it's an invitation. i'm not this is not a book. that is a coined that phrase hmm who coined that phrase. well the veil as a metaphor and one of the there's a there's a series of people who have shaped previous books have shaped this books and one of them is wb du bois who was the was the most prominent black intellectual? of the 20th century intellectual intellectual writer founder of the n-double-a-cp and then niagara movement just an incredible. i mean there's wrote novels and scholarship and founded the field of american sociology. i mean just this incredible person the first black man to get a phd from harvard and in 1903. he published the souls of black focus started as a series of articles in the atlantic. and he pub and he published it as a book and he used he introduces this metaphor of the veil and the veil is really a metaphor that is based in it's it represents the color line the space between black and white communities in that time period because of jim crow and the thing about avail, is that those who live behind the veil can see out but those outside of availing if you think about a veil at a funeral service can't really see the face of the person suffering, but it's also a metaphor about african american folk beliefs, which is if a baby is born with a call veil over their face and membrane that they're gifted with second sight. they can see ghosts. they can see the other side. they can understand the complexity of the this world the world beyond. and so to pull aside the veil is in many ways to is an invitation to the world. of the kind of knowledge from those from behind the veil of various sorts. right, so i'm taking it out of the experience of southern african americans, but actually trying to open it up for those of us who are behind the veil and so many different ways because it's a way of rethinking it's an invitation to reordering a conception of who we are and i'm so thrilled that there are people who are who are willing to sort of travel with me to do that. are most esteemed moderator mark thompson his face faithfully been on standby for two years for our festival through the cancellations in this darn pandemic. as i said at the opening of the show today, it's been both terrifying and boring this pandemic. it's done a number on our festival. we are humbled to finally have

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