13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Black Americans founded a utopian society. It lives on in a new novel.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez used to say that she would never write a story with a cellphone in it. Some people can plug instantly into the current moment; she felt much more attuned to the past. Her first three novels all explored different periods of Black history, from 1850s Ohio to 1970s Alabama.
'When I am in the archives, I feel a sense of connection. It's almost spiritual,' she said. 'It rises up around me. And I just think that this is what I was born to do. I think I was born to listen.'
Her latest novel, 'Happy Land,' about a real-life utopian community of emancipated Black people, called for a different approach. Viewed from one angle, the story of Luella, the elected queen of what was known as the Kingdom of the Happy Land, could be seen as a story of loss: Founded in the late 19th century on 205 acres spanning the border of North and South Carolina, the kingdom reached a population of about 200 at its height and then dwindled over the decades, until the last remaining parcel was sold in 1919. By adding a present-day character — Nikki, a D.C. real estate agent who learns of the kingdom from her estranged grandmother — Perkins-Valdez could also tell a story of renewal.
Perkins-Valdez, who teaches creative writing at American University, stumbled on the kingdom by chance. During the pandemic, she took up the banjo ('I'm still not very good at it, and my family hates me because it's so loud!') and began learning more about old-time music. Her research centered on the Henderson County area in North Carolina. References to the kingdom started popping up, she said, 'and I thought: What is this? Is this a made-up story?'
She connected with two local historians: Ronnie Pepper, a librarian and storyteller, and Suzanne Hale, a retired Foreign Service officer now working with the county's Black History Research Committee. 'We hit it off right away,' Perkins-Valdez said, and the trio made it their mission to find out as much as they could about the kingdom, poring through archives and taking drives together down narrow country roads.
Most of the lore stemmed from a much-cited pamphlet by Sadie Smathers Patton, which published in 1957 and is based on interviews with the kingdom dwellers' descendants. 'When we found out that some of it was erroneous — that was a huge deal,' Perkins-Valdez said. Patton had claimed the founders were freedmen who had traveled all the way from Mississippi. Hale, tracing names from the property deeds and historical maps, and comparing the results with 1850 and 1860 census data about enslaved people, determined that they'd come from someplace much nearer: Spartanburg County, South Carolina.
Once they started looking in those county archives, Perkins-Valdez said, 'we found everybody. We found them in newspaper articles. We found them on voting rolls. We found all those original kingdom dwellers.' She added: 'It was no longer speculation. You could actually see them in print.'
'I was just amazed by how many records there were,' Hale said in a recent Zoom interview. These included hundreds of pages of testimony from congressional hearings about Klan violence in Spartanburg County; records indicating that Luella's father had been publicly whipped for voting in an election; and other documents showing that the founders had sold their livestock and tools very cheaply. This gave a clearer idea of what had compelled the Black settlers to flee into the mountains and form a semi-isolated, self-sustaining community. There, the kingdom dwellers made a living by farming and selling tinctures in town, contributing the proceeds to a communal treasury.
Flying back from one of her research trips, Perkins-Valdez sketched out possible plots in a notebook. At first, she toyed with the idea of a betrayal leading to the kingdom's downfall. 'But I realized, that never happened, to my knowledge,' she said. 'It was actually a really successful communal experiment, as far as I could tell.' All the available evidence suggested that the settlers' descendants had simply drifted away over time, finding work in nearby mines and resorts. 'The young people wanted to be elsewhere,' she said.
She thought about an experience far closer to home: that of her own father, who had fought to keep his property in Memphis from being taken over via eminent domain. (The city had wanted to develop the neighborhood around the sports arena on Beale Street; her father ultimately prevailed.)
'I began to think about what land meant. What it meant to my dad, what it meant to these recently freed people,' she said. Coming up with Nikki — who may understand contracts and title searches but not the emotional meaning of land ownership — helped clinch the story: 'I wanted to show how young people became disconnected from the land, and there was something lost with that that was more than just generational wealth. You became unrooted. And that rootlessness manifested itself in a lot of different ways.'
She, Hale and Pepper hope to help connect more people to their roots via a new website that tells the real story of the kingdom dwellers. 'History means different things to different people at different times,' said Hale, reflecting on the experience of reading Patton's pamphlet more than a half-century after it was written. She hopes that future generations will be similarly inspired to investigate the past: 'I think it's important to be taking a fresh look at history — if somebody looks at it 50 years from now, they may find different lessons,' she said.
For Perkins-Valdez, perhaps the biggest challenge with any book is accepting that there may be some things about history we'll never know for sure. But as she drove with Hale and Pepper to Spartanburg County, as they walked the land of the kingdom together, and as they visited the ruins of the schoolhouse the kingdom dwellers had built and the cemeteries where they and their relations were buried, 'I felt so close to the spirit of this story that — the things we don't know, and that we'll never know …' Perkins-Valdez briefly trailed off. 'I'm hopeful that my intuition got it right.'
