South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Maryland is a site of the Mason-Dixon Line, the line that partitions the state from Pennsylvania and is considered the marker between the North and the South. Perry has ancestry in the state, according to census documents from the late 1800s, but the scant surviving data makes it difficult to know much with any specificity about her family member, probably named Esther, who was once enslaved. This imprecision speaks to the loss of identity that enslavement brought and with which the African American descendants of those enslaved people continue to grapple. Throughout the chapter, Perry wonders about Esther’s life and her place in American history.

Though Maryland is part of the Upper South, “[y]ou’d be hard-pressed to find a Deep Southerner who would EVER call Maryland or Washington, DC, the South” (65). Nevertheless, there are many “Souths,” despite some commonalities that unite the region. Although many view the South as overwhelmingly rural, there is an urban South well beyond the reaches of New Orleans and Atlanta, its most popular metropolitan areas. Perry describes Maryland as the urban South.

Perry visits Annapolis, Maryland’s capital, and tours a historic museum home. In the kitchen, she imagines the enslaved woman who prepared the meals of the elites who lived there and who possessed both skill and knowledge that canonical history long overlooked.