Reviving Julia Peterkin as a Trickster Writer

Southern writer Julia Mood Peterkin (1880-1961) preserves a distinct insular American community in her novels as she chronicles the lives of rural South Carolinian African American farmers known as Gullah. During the 1920s and 1930s, her work was highly acclaimed and extremely controversial because it crossed sensitive racial borders; however, in recent decades, Peterkin's fiction has been neglected because she was an AngloAmerican writing of a rural Afro-American community, concentrating on folk life. Until now the terms "regionalist" and "primitivist" have diminished Peterkin's reputation and damaged chances for a revival of her important literary works. However, when viewed in the context of trickster literary theory, Peterkin's fiction secures a legitimate and unique place in American literary history due to its revolutionary depiction of African Americans. During her twelve-year career, Peterkin produced four novels: Green Thursday (1924), Black April (1927), Pulitzer Prize-winner Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), and Bright Skin (1932). Additionally, she authored A Plantation Christmas (1935), and numerous articles, short stories, and literary reviews. Her collaboration with photographer Doris Ulmann resulted in Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), a rare collector's item currently fetching over $6,500 US for a first edition, jacketed trade issue and up to $50,000 US for a deluxe edition. Each of the 350 signed, numbered deluxe copies includes ninety copperplate photogravures of Gullah residents from Peterkin's plantation "depicting various customs and practices that, like basketmaking, can be linked to West and Central Africa, such as river baptism, grave ornamentation and carrying heavy loads on top of the head" (Collins 55). The "fine designed type, handmade wove paper and binding materials, and photogravure prints" account for its desirability and soaring value (Jacobs 131). For a woman with no literary connections, who began writing at age forty from a rural farm in an era with few technological conveniences, her accomplishments are impressive. Reversing earlier literary trends, Peterkin avoids working out the sticky issue of racism by portraying complex, diverse characters of African heritage in an insular Gullah community without AngloAmerican presence. She once wrote, "I mean to present these [black] people in a patient struggle with fate, and not in any race conflict at all" (qtd. in Robeson 785). During her career, she successfully presented American cultural diversity to white, middle-class Americans, sans the "moonlight and magnolia" sentimentality or stereotypical racial caricatures previous Southern writers used to sugarcoat issues such as class, race, and gender. Speaking through an improvised spelling of Gullah dialect, Peterkin offers a rare literary example of the master using the slave's language. She is one of the earliest and most successful Anglo-American writers to cross racial borders by writing from the minority perspective, particularly Gullah. Peterkin created a fictional setting, Blue Brook Plantation, basing her narratives on the intimate life stories of Gullah servants living on her husband's farm, Lang Syne Plantation, during the 1920s. Susan Williams describes the Gullah culture as "remote settlements of black people who no longer seemed bound by the ritual relationships of paternalism" (Devil 17). The area where Gullah culture thrived, also known as the Sea Islands, extends "200 miles from northeast of Charleston, South Carolina to south of Brunswick, Georgia ... surrounded by tidal swamps [that] sometimes extend 50 miles inland" (Smith 289). Because Gullah slave descendants were geographically isolated, they were able to retain aspects of African culture in their creolized community; therefore, Peterkin's record of Gullah culture is invaluable to American cultural studies. Authors may be considered trickster writers if their lives and work cross cultural boundaries and confuse the distinctions set by the presiding dominant institutions. …