Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing,1920-1945

2. A WHITE BLACK WRITER: Julia Mood Peterkin

The negroes have no books, they cannot read and they know nothing of how to write. Yet by word of mouth they have handed down through generations strange and beautiful myths. They sit over their fires and talk about them, tell them to their children. . . . It’s such a pity they don’t know how to preserve them. When these old plantations are all gone, broken up and civilized , and the life of the people changed, they’ll soon lose faith in their myths and superstitions and songs, and try to believe in the things of white people. —Julia Mood Peterkin, On a Plantation There is confusion over why On a Plantation,1 one of a handful of Julia Peterkin’s fiction focused through a white character, was never published . Susan Williams claims that Peterkin ambitiously sought to publish the would-be novel, submitting revisions of it to H. L. Mencken even after he advised her to abandon the project, because, as Williams maintains, Peterkin really preferred to write “about white people, especially white people like herself. But when she tried,” concludes Williams, “her vision dimmed and the strong, sure voice turned pompous” (Devil xv). In addition , Williams believes that Mencken’s condemnation of the preoccupation with “petty, self-absorbed white people” in On a Plantation and his approval of her more pointed emphasis on black culture in her early short stories, further discouraged Peterkin from adopting an overtly white perspective .2 Whatever the case, Peterkin neither completed nor released any versions of On a Plantation. And though her papers include drafts of at least one other (undated and untitled) story from a white woman’s point of view, and though “Boy-Chillen” (1932), her sole attempt at dramatic writing , includes a central white character, the greater part of Peterkin’s literary repertoire, particularly her acclaimed novels Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin, focuses on and through black characters. When read in juxtaposition with these three novels, in the specific context of Peterkin ’s status as mistress of Lang Syne Plantation, On a Plantation o≠ers A WHITE BLACK WRITER Julia Mood Peterkin 2 J j 22 Julia Mood Peterkin | 23 J critical insight into the issues at the center of this chapter, namely, the intricacies of Julia Peterkin’s aesthetic politics and her enduring reputation as a white “black” writer. Helen West, the character speaking in the opening passage from On a Plantation, is white; but her subjects are black people and black culture and her specific conclusions about both being caught in the undertow of encroaching modernity. Helen West can be read as an alter ego through which Peterkin projects an image of “blackness” that is at once intelligible, inspirational, inferior, and obsolescent. Nostalgic, mystical, and mythological imagery converge in the passage to thematize black power and subjugation while privileging white prophecy and progress. It is the very discursive process by which, I maintain, Peterkin used narrative to oppose modern forces impinging on her cultural subjectivity and ushering in a new era of promise and progress for black Americans. Groping at Lang Syne Scholarly assessment of the sequence of events that launched Peterkin’s literary career in 1921 follows a single line of development that forks at the moment Henry Bellaman, dean of the School of Fine Arts at Chicora College , with whom Peterkin studied piano, allegedly encouraged her to record the black experiences she narrated to him. In 1921 Peterkin invited both Carl Sandburg and H. L. Mencken to visit Lang Syne.3 Attached to the invitations were copies of several of her fictional pieces that engaged black life. From this gesture, scholars have accurately deduced Peterkin’s desire to secure a “more severe critic” of her work than Bellaman was or could be (Montgomery 11). But as late as 1992, critics were taking Peterkin at her word, which attributed her introduction to the literary world to serendipity. According to Peterkin, Bellaman not only coerced her into writing; he also instructed her to show her work to Carl Sandburg. Sandburg in turn encouraged her to submit her work to Mencken, who forwarded her name and sketches to Emily Clark, chief editor at the Reviewer, a journal out of Richmond, Virginia, where Peterkin eventually placed many of her early sketches and short stories. Peterkin’s account deserves exact quoting: j 24 | A White Black Writer Before I came [for another piano lesson...