If the idea of “place” can be defined by the give and take between nature and culture, then the American South is our strongest example of what happens with culture rigs the game. Hundreds of years of leveling forests and fields at the ends of a workforce in bondage has created a land dominated by its history.

For people like me born outside of the South, it’s near impossible to travel through it without the coloring filter of its past. To move through it is to exist in one world living on top of, alongside, in shadow of another, waiting to be found if you’re brave or naive enough to go find it, like a traveling German businessman that I befriended found when we took the red-eye Greyhound bus through the south to Mobile, AL en route to New Orleans, where every passenger except the two of us were black. The almost European richness of coastal bell-cities like Charleston SC and Savannah GA have made idyllic squares of color and cobblestone on top of the mass graves of witches and slaves.

America’s blackest city, which has helped define the culture for an entire generation, feels like an urban island in a tense sea of gun stores and Confederate monuments. Seeking out the finest bourbon in the land requires stopping at four-way intersections in towns that don’t sell liquor on Sundays. I felt a near-equal spiritual weight between the many baptist churches as I did the near-as-popular Waffle House.