Following the American Civil War, a group of freed people fled violence and bought land in Western North Carolina. In the summer of 1873, these people formed a Black communal society they named “The Kingdom of the Happy Land.” A new novel tells a story set in the kingdom, both in the past and in the present day. It’s titled, “Happy Land.” Host Mason Adams spoke with its author, Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
In the years of Reconstruction following the American Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved people purchased land and formed a Black communal society in western North Carolina.
“The Kingdom of the Happy Land” was founded in the summer of 1873 by freed people escaping violence in South Carolina. A new novel tells a story set in the kingdom, but in the past and in the present day. It’s titled, Happy Land.
Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with its author, Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
Courtesy of Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Adams:Happy Land is a book that speaks to us now in the present day, but it’s framed in the history after the Civil War of a Black kingdom in North Carolina. Do you recall the first time you heard about the Kingdom of the Happy Land?
Perkins-Valdez: Yes, although I don’t know exactly what article it is that I read. It was during the pandemic, and my pandemic hobby was teaching myself the banjo. So, I was looking at western North Carolina old-time musicians, and I stumbled on this story about this kingdom, which was really too incredible to believe, and that was my first time hearing about it. And then I reached out to a man in Hendersonville, North Carolina, librarian by the name of Ronnie Pepper, and he told me, yes, it’s true.
Adams: I think I can recall hearing references to this before, but I didn’t know that much about it before I read your book. Do you mind sharing the story of the kingdom and how it came to be?
Perkins-Valdez: In 1873, a group of about 50 people walked up the mountain from South Carolina. They were from a little town called Cross Anchor, South Carolina in Spartanburg County. They were fleeing Klan violence and trying to start over and make a new life. They had been freed. They had lived in South Carolina, and they were now freed people, and we believe they were members of the same church. They went up that mountain. They made a deal with a woman by the name of Serepta Davis, who owned an inn that was located on the turnpike. She was a widow, and she owned all this acreage, and she had these old slave quarters that nobody was living in anymore. These folks made a deal with her. They would help her in exchange for living on in the old quarters. And that is how the kingdom was begun. They established a community there. They called it the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and they called themselves royalty.
Adams: The story you tell shares the family members and then their descendants, there’s two narrative threads going on at the same time. Can you chart out what that looked like in the Kingdom of the Happy Land in North Carolina, and what’s become of it today?
Perkins-Valdez: Well, of course there are kingdom descendants – there are known kingdom descendants – but my contemporary character, Nikki, is a complete fictional imagining of a descendant, because the question I had was, why does this history still matter? What do we lose when we don’t know our history? And Nikki is my exploration of that question. She’s a contemporary person. She’s almost 40 years old. She’s never even visited her grandmother in western North Carolina, and she goes there for the first time. At the beginning of the book, she goes and learns about this kingdom and thinks her grandmother is just making it up. And soon she’ll learn that it’s indeed true, and it’ll change her life forever. So that’s the question I’m asking. What does it mean for us to know our history, and what do we lose when we don’t know it?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
Photo by Norman E. Jones
Adams: The story you tell in Happy Land is one that was mirrored across the South in the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved. people, freed men and women, purchased land and built a community — but were then dispossessed of the land, often through unethical or even illegal means. How did that shape Black communities and families across the south?
Perkins-Valdez: Well, I knew that if I talked about this communal living experiment in North Carolina, I needed to engage that tremendous land loss that happened over the course of the 20th century. Often when we think about the era of Reconstruction in American history books, specifically for Black people, we often talk about lynching, or we talk about sharecropping — when which someone lived on someone else’s land and farmed — but we don’t talk about the many millions of Black folks who were scrambling to try to buy their own land. They understood that land ownership was not only the vehicle to a more prosperous future, but it was also a vehicle to the full rights of citizenship. And when they lost that land, like you say, due to unethical and nefarious forces, they lost a lot. There was a lot lost. I thought, if I’m going to talk about the kingdom, I have to talk about that too. And you know, one of course, they lost their wealth, right? Land loss is the number one factor contributing to the disproportionate number of impoverished Black folks in this country. And secondly, I thought, well, okay, not only did we lose out financially, we also lost a gathering space for our kinfolk. We lost our connection to rural life and folkways. I’m hopeful that one of the things this book will remind us to do is to get back in touch with our rural and country ancestral connection.
Adams: What do you feel like the history of the Kingdom of Happy Land has to tell us about the world today?
Perkins-Valdez: Well, one of the things it reminds me is the importance of community. These folks really leaned on each other during this difficult period, and they pulled their resources together. They created a self-sustaining community that really inspires me. They were ambitious, they were industrious, they were all of these things. And I think today, one of the things that worries me is that our communities feel so divided. I feel like what we can learn from the kingdom is that we’re stronger when we are together and when we bond together and when we lean on each other. That’s always been true of us as a nation, and I think that’s true of us as global people too, that we do best when we think of our fellow human being as a member of our community.
Adams: Do you have wisdom that you took away from this experience that you’d like to share with our listeners?
Perkins-Valdez: I think the wisdom is that every nook and cranny of this country has a story worth sharing and telling. Every hill, every valley, everybody knows some family story or something about their community that is remarkable, and I don’t think we should dismiss those stories. We should celebrate them. We should share them. And I hope, if I’ve done one little thing with this book, I’ve shined a light on Henderson County, which is just a wonderful, beautiful place in western North Carolina. And I hope that people will visit, and if they do that, they will love that place as much as I do.
Adams: I love that answer. That speaks directly to the heart of this show. I appreciate you talking about that. The “nook and cranny” stuff is so great.
Perkins-Valdez: I think when people lost the land, they lost their connection to the outdoors. We have a world now where everybody’s on their screens all the time. Or if anybody has teenagers like I do, they have AirPods in their ears all the time, and they never hear what I’m saying, and I don’t know that they have the AirPod, and so I think they’re ignoring me. I think that we really need to put all of our electronics down and just get outside. Somebody asked me recently, where do you like to go in [Washington,] DC? Where do you go camping and all? And I said, well, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I just keep a folding chair in the trunk of my car, and sometimes I’ll just pull over and take that chair out and sit. It doesn’t have to be planned. You don’t have to pack a snack. You don’t have to have a water bottle. You can just keep a folding chair in the back of your car. And whenever you see a sky that looks really pretty, if there’s somewhere to park, just pull over and pull that chair out and sit and look at the sky.
Adams: I’m gonna go put a folding chair in my car.
Perkins-Valdez: You should! You should. And I’m gonna tell you something, people take my chair. Sometimes I look at my truck and it’s not there because my husband took it, or my kids took it. Once people see that I do that, they’ll borrow my chair, and then it’s not there when I need it. It’s an amazing feeling to do it, just out of the blue. Especially when you’re feeling stressed, just pull over, take that chair out.
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Dolen Perkins-Valdez is author of Happy Land. The book is available now from Penguin Random House.
This week on Inside Appalachia, the setting for a new novel is a communal society founded by freed people in North Carolina. It was a real place called The Kingdom of the Happy Land. Also, when a West Virginia pastor got assigned to a new church, some folks tried to warn him. And, the online world of Appalachian memes — and what they tell us about folks who live here.
