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

Perry’s mother, Theresa, was a novice in an order of Black nuns in New Orleans, the Sisters of the Holy Family. Established in 1842, the group provided education to enslaved children and provided care for the aging, a tradition that the order continues today. The order’s commitment to social justice informed Perry’s mother’s activism, and she left the order and became a freedom movement organizer. Perry sees the city as another home.

Entering the order of Holy Familys provided Black women in New Orleans a way out of the exploitation they faced in the Jim Crow South. For example, the ballroom of the Bourbon Orleans Hotel acted as a center for plaçage, a legacy of French colonialism. There, women of mixed race entertained white men: “It was an arrangement that was less violent than plantation rape, but wholly predicated on White supremacy and patriarchy, so only somewhat less violent” (322). The Holy Familys eventually turned the ballroom into a convent.

Some people deem New Orleans “the most African and most European of American cities” because the intersections of cultural influences and identities that appear there provide a sense of the “exotic” for tourists (323).