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vedespite this to ship that was established, from law, how do [inaudible] vitriol here really is the heart and soul of our mission. you believe it's your hometown public research university that these are the kinds of events that our university should be doing and bringing ideas to both our students as well as the community and there's no better way to bring ideas to a group then 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 author, the first author is really exciting to be. all our authors connect to the college's mission in different ways and this one in and especially to we -- have a new african american studies

program here, just launching in our college, and of course, we have a creative writing program and a masters of fine arts in creative writing. a lot of those folks do memoir writing. this book kind of bends genres in interesting ways, but it certainly, it is the kind of book we want to be talking about here at every. you so we are so excited for this first author and lowers is now going to introduce her. >> >> thank you, lee hepburn as a friend and a board member to our festival, she is the moderator today as well as the books editor for oprah magazine and her website. and, the curator of oprah's book club. she has a big job, there. she chose south to america for this year's oprah pick. we also think we know the south, the civil war, gone with the wind, the cloak looks plan, slavery, plantations, football. but, in south to america the author shows that the meaning of being american is linked to the south. and our understanding of

history and culture is the key to understanding the nation in its entirety. the author is the 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 pan american foundation dr. perry is a native of birmingham alabama who grew up in cambridge massachusetts, and chicago. she currently lives in philadelphia. please welcome ali hepburn and dr. imani perry. >> welcome, so pleased to be here. i will put my box down, here. thank you everybody for coming it, it is just a

pleasure to be here and to speak to you about this wonderful book today. i guess the first thing is that we tweeted something about whether florida is considered part of the deep south. it started a thread that was very interesting. so, sam imani what would you say an answer to that question? >> absolutely, absolutely. i love that you posed that question. i think our image of florida tends to be sells florida and it tends to be miami and disney. and, the first sentence of the florida chapter is florida's a pistol. >> i was going to cite that. >> it is a double entendre because it is about the shape, part of a point is that the panhandle is certainly the deep south. it is as much

alabama, georgia, and the like as anything else. but, they double entendre is also that it is in a pistol in the biblical sense, it is an instructive letter. it is an argumentative letter, florida is in many ways like texas and nation onto itself. it also teaches us a great deal about the history of this country. you remember that spain was here first in terms of european encounters. it is where you are aware of the incredible diversity of indigenous people, people of african descent over multiple generations. as well as multiple groups of europeans. it is a deep south because you can point to a very clear things. orange county, the highest rate of lynching anywhere, where disney world is. >> >> i was stunned by that statistic in your book. i was >> stunned by that statistic

but it's important -- >> the highest rate of lynchings in the country. >> in the country, yeah. and that disney world lies atop it is, in some ways, representative of what we do with history. right? we ate, i think this is across the board, we tend to sanitize history. all nations do this, 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 save the country cousin in other regions, so as not to deal. because you can't deny the ugly -- >> such a good point. >> so you have to pretend that's not of the center, one of course it is, because that's the place where wealth was produced for the entire nation. >> details of that for us, elaborate on that. >> yeah, one of the things i keep saying is, you know, in the book i keep saying that they're all these days that could be beginnings of the nation. but all of them are in the south, all of the

beginnings. so, you could start at 60 19, which is one day that it is compelling for jamestown, or the roanoke colony. or you could do the 16th century, 15, hundred 15 20. because florida is a part of the united states. the reason you had european encounters with the south first is because this is a land of incredible abundance. right? so, this desire to figure, what can we do with this? it's like a fountain of youth, of gold. maybe not those things, but prosperity. you combine that with an free labor. of africans. and so much wealth is produced. once again, their sugar, there's tobacco. once you get to king cotton, it builds a wealth of this country, it is what enables the united states to become a global power. even, and i think this is really important, the reason washington, d. c. is in the

south, i know that's another place we can argue about, is because that southern colonies had to pay the revolutionary war debt. because that is 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 a southern interests. so, the south has moved the nation about, it's a bread basket historically. so, the whole nation is indebted to the south, for better and worse. >> i think it's fascinating, and i never thought about it that way. you, know i thought about the backward cousin sort of thing, but not as the engine. the, enjoy the architect of many ways of the country. but let's step back a little bit, or return to the florida chapter later. i love how the book is divided. for those of you haven't read it, it's so rich in every nugget, in every nook and cranny, with interesting facts that i haven't read before in many

cases. imani organize a book by region, she doesn't cover every region of the country about focuses on a few and they are fascinating. but the book opens with a scene in 1804, in new orleans, at a ball. where people are dancing the quadruple, and it struck me. you felt as though you are there reading that chapter, that is seen a particular. so, where did you get that detail? because it felt like real on the ground, i was at the, party i was at the ball. >> yeah, i'm an archive junkie. right? i just love to -- >> is that a thing? i've never heard anyone say the 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, and it's incredible, because people in historic newspapers you can find the colors of peoples dresses, the scent. we so, for

me, the real task as a writer now is to combine the scholar, the researchers digging with wanting to get the sensory, the emotional -- >> it's almost novelist stick. >> thank you. that's the aspiration. that is something about wanting to be inside history, i think, that is not just being transported but i actually do think it helps us understand ourselves, right? once you get past the way we tell historic narratives, right, the noble story. to actually think about people living and feeling and breathing. i think that, actually, is especially useful now. >> for those who haven't cracked the book yet, what are you trying to convey in that section? >> i'm trying to convey the in fact -- a part of the argument is i want us to

get out of the british inclination of telling history as a kind of straightforward narrative. i'm talking about the quadrangles, they're metaphor but they're actually real. there is this moment when the louisiana purchase has taken place and this is happening between the creole's. they end up having this physical battles over the dances, because the french quadrille and the british quadrille are different dances. the way the english did it, it took longer. and so, there was this conflict over how it was the time for a french song but the english weren't done with their dance yet. and it actually turns bloody. so, it's a metaphor but it's actually real. there were real tensions, cultural tensions. and that language of a quadrille was used to talk about politics,

the political quadrille. the different interest, the competing desires for accumulation and power and control of land and empire, all of those things. so, it's a moment that captured so much about the 19th century. and i think we forget that there is still these conflicts about what was going on globally in the 19th century. and as countries at the center of that, in so many ways. >> it also conveys the kind of multiculturalism of the country. >> from the beginning. >> talk about that. >> yeah, so, i think that there are places, and florida is one of them, and louisiana, where it's a parrot. because there is multiple language communities. but there is a multiculturalism that exists all the way through. multiculturalism amongst indigenous groups, which we often forget, and that is part of what i try to get out of the

florida chapter. talking about the politics of different indigenous groups amongst africans. >> cubans, puerto ricans. >> yes, right. and that's really important, because a part of why the book goes all the way down to the caribbean is it's important to understand this 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 global powers settled on to what's belong to whom, this was all a single region and there is a lot of movement. i had a lyft driver yesterday, i have to say this, because what's drivers are part of the book. airlift driver yesterday, while trying to get here, which is a whole saga. >> from new orleans. >> from new orleans. we're talking and i said, are you from belize or honduras? he's a black man. he laughed, said i've from honduras, my grandmother was

from believes. because i could hear in a speech pattern. then he tells me the story about his grandmothers from believes, she moved to savannah, as fathers of savannah and. he's in the military, he goes to onshore, as falls on top of the honduran women. and it was one of those moments where you feel like i'm vindicated with a book. but it is because these movements have happened for so long, we talk about them like they're new. but this is the history. and it's important to tell. when we see 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 political history of central america is based in new orleans business. right? so -- well, one of the things that really struck me about the book is that it is a mixture of

exploring figures, people we have known from the past. but, coming at them from a different point of view, also, as you were just talking about as a lyft driver, talking to every day people and sprinkling their stories through out. how did you arrive at that notion? >> i want to to kind of break the genre of the travel narrative, i want to add, as opposed to saying okay i am going to go to these important historic sites i wanted it to feel like a set of encounters. you move through these places, i am asking readers to come with me, travel with me. you do not necessarily have to agree with me but i want to point some things out that you might find interesting. as we are traveling and the encounters, the encounters are with people. they encounters are with the landscape, artifacts, and then i want to dig a little deeper.

and also, capture some of the cultures and stability of the south india indians. when i talk to somebody that culture is shaped like by the local place. that is part of the truth of the place. >> let's go to harpers ferry, it is interesting because you want to harpers ferry because of its importance in our country's history, which you can recount for our audience in case they do not know, in the meantime you had this whole internal dialogue going on in your head, thinking about tony horowitz's book of confederates in the attic. and then you encounter someone who is a reenactor of the civil war. >> yes, i have this internal dialogue because tony horowitz was an absolutely lovely person. i had not read confederate in the attic when he was living. and then i read

it and i was so frustrated with him. i was like here you are so confederate reenactor's sympathetic. i am frustrated with him. he has one conflict in the book with someone and it is my friends mom. i was grumpy about that. i was also thinking he was able to access something that i would not be able to access as a black woman. i would not be able to access those kind of conversations with confederate reactors. >> in west virginia. >> in west virginia, and yet, i get to west virginia and that is the first conversation i have with a confederate reenactor is one of these moments of kismet. and this is a man who is an archivist by profession -- >> you responded over, that right? >> yes, yes. and he is is -- it's a reenactor from maryland regiment and he spent he's leisure time working, volunteering at harpers ferry, which is the site of john

brown's rate, which he intended to emancipate africans he, wanted to, he sort of tried to start a civil war that free black people before the civil war actually happened, but in some ways he failed, like, almost immediately they were defeated. >> and some people thought it was a suicide mission. >> right. like frederick douglass. >> and harry a. >> herman. >> causes a. >> kara dublin was, like, i'm not feeling well. we don't know if she was actually not feeling well. it was not a very well thought out arguably but a passionate one driven by a deep sense of justice, right? so, that's where i started in west virginia. partially because everybody was, like, you are 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 but

caused part of me was like i'm not going to confront him about being a confederate reenactor. and i have been socialized as i'm born in alabama, socialized as a southern black woman and girl, that you don't start this stuff, right? because it can explode. but i was fascinated, and he was, and i realized we are so similar. because he is the passion is to live inside history as it 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 reenactor's, you have to be -- and if you read confederates idiotic, you also notice -- and it helped him because i had a lot of questions to ask him because i read that book, right? so he tells me, he goes edgy into a field and they are like, you've got to take over those

glasses, because you have to, everything has to be authentic and accurate, right, for the time period in. >> they got fined 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 them, and he said, i couldn't see out of the darn things anyway, right? because they are so thick back then. but for me i was it was such a poetic moment. you look through the can federally see's lens there's a lot you can see. so we were looking, we are looking at fixated on much of the same historical terrain, but we have a different lens. >> if you were to do a list of or write a list of the pros and collins of the deep south, i mean, you talk about some of the businesses, the industry, 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 just this side, i put it up in the book, but i get irritated when you take those quizzes, there's our you [inaudible] quizzes, and they say, do you call so -- do you call soda coca-cola or pop? and they are like if you say coca-cola, it's a southerner. and guys like, it's really a georgia thing, and also a texas thing, and others, because it's so much carbonated beverage, you know, everywhere. and coca-cola is not a favorite everywhere. anyway, that's an aside. but and so there's food culture, there's walmart culture, there's the fact that amazon comes from a person who is a native of houston. the grocery store is 1000 concept. and so much, so there's this drive to convenience. the fact that we are a car culture is everything to do

with hoist houston and oil, right? so there's a convenience thing, there's an innovation part, and that's always them then matched with a real's experience of exploitation and hard living for poor folks or for marginalized folks. so that part of who we are, so much of who we are, is rooted in the south. but the hard scrap of living is also what gives birth to a northern part of southern culture that shapes so much of us, which is our music culture. american music's southern music. and it's something music from the underside. and it's music that is built, that comes out of peoples encounter with the land and labor country music, whose music, jazz, right? and i guess that's the pro-part you. no, this incredible and -- >> also the beauty of the. >> beauty. >> i'm thinking about the

florida chapter again. >> yeah! >> and how you, it especially in zora neale hurston this area of florida. talk about zora neale hurston. >> yeah, zora zora neale hurston -- but what's interesting is that, she won, was interested in -- this is a woman who is a native of eatonville. she goes to high school at florida baptist academy in jacksonville, and eventually at howard university, morgan state university, and. colombians trained as an anthropologist and spends much of his life was writing fiction but also doing anthropological discovery of the history of african culture, sort of across

the americas and in the caribbean. and she teaches there african retention's, folk tales. she's a folklorist, but she really is also you know, it keeper of culture, as it were. and she's a participant observer so she's a very invested in the story of her independent like town, even fell. >> the first independent like them. >> the first independent black tone, yes, thank you. and she's not, she's also kind of ordinary and irascible, and outspoken and a brilliant storyteller but she's. part of what i find so important about her is for me that's the threat. looks some ways, what we were talking about before, the reality of all the multiculturalism of southern history that gets flattened into, you know, in many ways a black white binary, 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 [inaudible] she really [inaudible] in a very contemporary. >> she does. >> it's a pretty incredible. there was a new book a north, the just came out recently by. >> yeah, you've got no ice negros, yeah. which was ended by my pfizer front graduate school. yeah. >> and skip gates toward the forward, right? >> yeah, yeah. >> you write in the book that a nation is an immigrant community. and then you say that in our country, that community is difficult to sustain. why is that? >> well i think if there's this fundamental tension between you, , know our narrative of an ever more perfect union, a multi racial, inclusive democracy, you know, sort of ellis island narrative, because your poor,

right [inaudible] and the history of from the beginning, pushing people off of their land, grinding down peoples lives into virtually nothing but labor. >> and the heterogeneity that resulted. >> and they heterogeneity that was -- well, and the designed, the heterogeneity that resulted and the designed exclusive, exclusivity of citizenship. >> right. >> right? so i tell the story of an and sister named easter or esther who by some documentary accounts was born in 1769 in maryland. and i thought her about a lot as this woman -- and her parents were born in maryland too -- so on lee, the early 1700s at the very least, my ancestry goes back in this country. for them to prefer to be born

and lived and died and see the country built, 1776 establish, 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. can't remember the name of the guy who was executed in. >> oh, shields the queen. >> shields green. you pointed out that he was executed on the basis of being, you know a pushing the country and are pushing the government and. yet, you know he was not a citizen so how could he be. >> right. he wasn't a citizen, how could he have committed treason? >> jason. yeah. 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. >> i think some of it is the growth of the 16 19 project. you know, 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? isn't there too much emphasis on everyone, so 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 people first started talking about critical race syria because in my previous life i was a professor, i taught critical race theory and a [inaudible] critical research. >> does everybody know what critical race theory is? >> i'm just going to 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 are color blind, right? and so to how to think about, how do you remedy racial inequality in the context where there is no explicit reference to race? that's short of a sort of a shorthand, right? so it's kind of a rarefied field. it's like it's not even central to study on race. i mean, but it has been influential in ways 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 or that we felt disturbing to people 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 latino people, of asian americans, we actually stifle the moral imaginations of our children. and when there are sort of these formulations, we'll, will white children feel bad? it's sort of alarming to be, 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 it that way. i think all of us have a capacity to have the kind of a moral imagination where we can identify with the suffering of others, but also that we can see ourselves in people who don't belong to our same categorical group. >> well, and also, how can we reconcile our differences if we haven't 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, right, myself being moved by them. and so, yes. but i want to say, this too. we're in the midst of arguments over the dominant narrative of the country, right? and there's one of them is a kind of a lost cause narrative. i think that we are going to have to -- >> lost cause meaning? >> oh, think in fantasy. a kind of championing of the confederacy. but i think we have to get low of this idea that there's a single narrative. we're going to have to understand our history has a history of debates around this question. it's about who ought to be a citizen, what roles should different people play, what does democracy mean in its detail? right, what is representation? i don't think that we have a single narrative cause these

conflicts, you know, they appoint flow, but they are always there, right? >> >> that is absolutely right, and, the founding fathers, and this is very important when we talk about the originalism with the constitution. they did not agree. they were making compromises, when you take those documents as though they were deeply hauled passionate believes they had to make compromises because they did not agree. so, again, there is always these negotiations. to enshrine them so that they were a single person. >> some of those disagreements ended in duels. >> yes, absolutely! >> that is how highly debated things were. i have a wonderful

job, i have been with oprah for ten years and i curate oprah's book club, i run the books coverage for oprah daily. com and our new quarterly magazine. one of the privileges of the job is getting to talk to people like you, to read books like this, not only for professional reasons but because i love them personally. one of the things i think was your aim with this book was to pull aside evil. and so, talk to us a little bit about what's pulling aside the veil means and what your intention was also bentley. what you want people to take away from the book. >> yes, first of all i just want to thank you so much. not just with this book but with your support of me as a writer and thinker, it has meant so much. i love that you can read what i am trying to do. they pulling aside the veil,

it is asking questions, it is an invitation. this is not a book. >> who coined that phrase? >> the veil as a metaphor, there is a series of people who have shaped, previous books have shaped these books. one of them is w. e. beta boys, who was the most prominent black intellectual of the 20th century. >> intellectual? >> intellectual, writer, founder of the naacp and the niagara movement. just an incredible, i mean, wrote novels and scholarship. and, founded the field of american sociology. just an incredible person. the first black man to get a ph. d. from harvard. in 1903 he published the souls of black

folk, it started as a series of articles in the atlantic. and, he published it as a book. it introduces this metaphor of the veil. the veil is really a metaphor that is based am and represents the color line. they space between black and white communities in that time period. because of jim crow. the thing about avail is that those who live behind the veil come see out. but, those outside of a veil, even if you think about a fail at a funeral service cannot really see the face of the person suffering. it is also a metaphor about african american folk beliefs. which is, if a baby is born with a veil over their face, a membrane, they are gifted with second sight, can see ghosts and the other side. they can understand the complexity of this world and the world beyond. and so, to pull aside the veil is, in many ways, an

invitation to the world of the kind of knowledge from those behind the veil. of various sorts. right? i am taking it out of the experience of southern african americans but trying to open it up for those of us who are behind the veil in so many different ways. because it is a way of rethinking, an invitation to the conception of who we are. i am so thrilled there are people who are willing to travel with me to do that. [inaudible]

watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. i'd