MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: It's a story you may have heard from your elders about a caravan of formerly enslaved people who made their way to the mountains of Appalachia, where they founded a secret territory where they could make their own rules and live their own way, free of the heavy hand of former enslavers. What was this place, this happy kingdom, and what happened to it? That's the story at the center of a new historical novel titled "Happy Land" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and she's here with us now to tell us more about it. Welcome.
DOLEN PERKINS-VALDEZ: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: OK. So fact or fiction?
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Both.
MARTIN: Both.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: But there's a lot of fact in this novel. I thought I was making up more than I was. And then, one of the women who helped me research read the early copy and said, you used a lot from the archives, and I realized there's a lot of fact here.
MARTIN: So tell me about this because, honestly, this is a story that I was never taught in school. I mean, some of us know about autonomous, you know, Black communities like the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina, or many people may have heard about places that people wanted to set up sort of utopian Black communities. But the idea that this actually existed, how do we know this?
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Well, when I first discovered it, I didn't know whether or not it was true. I wondered if it was local lore, because it was so fantastical. Like you mentioned, there were these Black intentional communities. But in this one, they called themselves royalty. They called themselves a king and a queen, and that part of it was what ignited my imagination.
MARTIN: How did you hear about this to begin with?
PERKINS-VALDEZ: My pandemic hobby, Michel, was learning how to play the banjo, and I was researching Western North Carolina. There was this pamphlet by a local historian, Sadie Smathers Patton that had been published in 1957, and that was considered the sort of document that verified the account and that gave us everything that we knew about the kingdom. Well, the pamphlet said that they came up from Mississippi after slavery ended, looking for a better life and that they established this community on the mountain where they could be free from, you know, the nation's ills. But what she got wrong - and it didn't sound right to me when I first read it - they didn't come all the way from Mississippi. They came right down from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and they were fleeing Klan violence, I believe.
MARTIN: Wow. Tell us about the story that you tell in your novel.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: I decided first thing I want to do is correct some of the things that have been assumed to be true for over, you know, 60 years. And then the second thing I wanted to do was to ask myself and to ask my reader, what did it mean for these people to be property owners in North Carolina in the 1870s and 1880s? What did it mean both symbolically, metaphorically, spiritually, emotionally? What did it mean for them?
MARTIN: Your contemporary narrator is Veronica - Nikki - who goes to reconnect with her grandma. And then you alternate that with chapters told by Luella, who is...
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Luella was the Queen of the Happy Land, and she married William Montgomery, who was named king. Nikki goes to North Carolina to visit her grandmother. Her grandmother says to her, do you know that you're descended from royalty? She thinks her grandma is crazy, and later, she'll find out it's true.
MARTIN: There's a couple passages that I - really struck me. This is Nikki. That's the contemporary character who's gone to North Carolina she thinks to help her grandma, but it turns out she has a larger mission. Could you just read that paragraph, please?
PERKINS-VALDEZ: (Reading) All my life, I've been part of a small family circle. By the time my daddy was 20, both of his parents had passed away. He and Mama, with their desire to build a family out of nothing, were a perfect match for each other in that way. The two of them against the world. For me, not having a sibling or even a cousin has been the only existence I've ever known. Now here I am, walking beside my grandmother on acres and acres of land that my people have inhabited for over a hundred years. It's hard to put how I'm feeling into words other than to say I'm dizzy with grief. I didn't know you could mourn something you never had.
MARTIN: OK, that, to me, is a very poignant message there because I think it says a lot of things about a lot of people, and not just this moment in this novel, but it also, I think, speaks to a larger longing.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Yes, I felt like one of the things that's happening with Nikki is this idea that the land is hers. And we don't just mean in terms of a property deed, right? We're not just talking about land ownership. We're talking about believing that America belongs to you, believing that this land is our land, right? It's a sense not only of individual property ownership but also a sense of community.
MARTIN: The book really describes kind of the work and the day-to-day labor and the commitment that all these people have, but there's still this kind of shadow of menace just on the edges of their story, right? So tell me what happened to the community here.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: It's impossible to write this story without menace because of the time in which this happened. But in real life, the land stayed in the hands of kingdom descendants until 1919, and then they sold it. And I think, even though in real life, that wasn't the case, I think that the comparison to Black land loss still matters.
MARTIN: There's estrangement in this novel that relationships are rendered, and I feel like there is a lesson there, which is to say that there's - history is being lost every day.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Absolutely. Because the main question of the book is, what happens when we don't have our history? And my hope is that, you know, people will be inspired to just ask their elders questions while their elders are here.
MARTIN: Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the new novel "Happy Land." Dolen, thanks so much for coming by.
PERKINS-VALDEZ: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
