![]() ![]() “My grandmother and mother came of age in Jim Crow I came of age in the violent backlash against its undoing.” No fan of so-called Great Man theories of history, Perry prefers to stitch together a “collage of historical meaning,” as she puts it, one that can encompass the experiences of those who “labored in these fields.” When she visits a Maryland tavern where some of the founders had engaged in the slave trade, she is struck by how mundane, untheatrical and “matter-of-fact” the spot appears in North Carolina, she recalls the murderous 1898 riot by White citizens in Wilmington against the multiracial local government that had won power, concluding that “the broken oasis is a motif in the post-Emancipation South” in Georgia, she pegs Atlanta, which once dubbed itself the city too busy to hate, as the city that "makes it obvious that being American is being a trickster.” Perry regrets that history “freezes” her birthplace of Birmingham, Ala., in the strife and tragedy of 1963, as though the present doesn’t count. ![]()
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