New novel reenvisions a fabled Black kingdom in Henderson County

It is a survival story that refuses to die, finding fresh life with each new telling. In its essentials, it sounds as improbable as it is inspiring: The Kingdom of the Happy Land, a self-sufficient enclave founded by former slaves, was perched high along the state line that separates Henderson County, N.C., and Greenville County, S.C. There, between roughly 1873 and 1919, scores of Black men and women pooled their resources and secured their autonomy, realizing a dream and creating a legend.

They did so under the tutelage of a king and queen, selected from their numbers, seeking safety as newly freed people and vestiges of ancestral realms in Africa. They built their own homes, schools and places of worship, and cultivated the land for both their own sustenance and to generate collective income.

For such a remarkable utopian endeavor, there has been a paucity of historical research on how the kingdom came to be and how it ultimately came undone. In her new novel, Happy Land, Dolen Perkins-Valdez offers a bold interpretation of how the kingdom defied its times — and how its saga holds lessons that resound today.

Perkins-Valdez, the author of previous historical fiction bestsellers rooted in Black experience and an associate professor of literature at American University in Washington, D.C., tells the kingdom’s story from two perspectives from distinct eras. The first is that of Queen Luella, the longtime co-leader of the Happy Land, who dares to craft a new world in the face of both white supremacy and her own community’s patriarchy. The second is that of Luella’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Nikki, who struggles in the 2020s to reconstruct her family’s lost history and reclaim its meaning while family land hangs in the balance.

“Maybe I would’ve done different if I’d known I was descended from royalty,” Nikki laments amid her epiphanies. “Maybe I would have understood that the possibilities for my future were limitless.”

To overcome the limited written history of the kingdom, Perkins-Valdez enlisted allies in Henderson County, which she visited at length. At upcoming  readings from Happy Land, she’ll be joined by two locals she credits with enriching her source material: Ronnie Pepper, a Hendersonville librarian and storyteller who has kept the kingdom’s oral history flame alive; and Suzanne Hale, a retired diplomat and ace researcher.

Xpress spoke with Perkins-Valdez as she prepped for her book-release events in Western North Carolina and throughout the South. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Xpress: What initially sparked your curiosity about the Kingdom of the Happy Land?

Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I had heard about Black intentional communities before. There was the Coe Ridge Colony in Kentucky, there was the Promised Land Community in Tennessee. But I had never heard of the one in Western North Carolina, and the thing that really caught my attention was that they had named a king and a queen and had imagined themselves as a kingdom. The feat of imagination that it would take to do that just piqued my interest. So I started to dig.

What made you think this was a story that would be well served by a work of historical fiction?

Anytime you find a story like this where there are gaps in the historical record, I think that’s where fiction steps in. I knew that it was true — I knew that this kingdom existed. I knew that the kingdom dwellers were a lot of things that we don’t know and that maybe we will never know. So when I write a book, I’m often thinking about the story that the historical record can’t tell.

One of your characters says, “Much as I love the historical record, it doesn’t always have the answers, especially when it comes to our stories.” In crafting this story, how did you deal with this absence in what we know about the Happy Land?

I always approach the historical record with skepticism, as I think any good historian does. We’re always thinking, “The people who previously wrote about this moment, what are some of the things they might have missed?” And I followed my instincts. It didn’t make sense to me that the original kingdom dwellers came up from Mississippi [as a prominent account of the Happy Land published in 1957 had asserted]. … It didn’t take a lot to find out that they actually came up from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which made a lot more sense to me. I think they left South Carolina fleeing terrorist violence. That was a major finding, and then all kinds of other things opened up. I’m really grateful to Suzanne Hale — she was the one who cracked that.

A striking note in your book is that reclaiming land is reclaiming history. At the same time, the possibility that today’s descendants of Happy Land residents could get family land back seems tragically remote. What part of this vital territory can be reclaimed through narratives like the one in Happy Land?

We can get it back, imaginatively. We may not often get the physical land back, but we can take back community, we can claim connection with family members. One of the other things that I hope that people will get out of the book is, let’s get better connected to nature and to the outdoors, in a way that our ancestors were.

The characters in your book, in both the historical setting and the contemporary one, are striving to discover, to recover, their own history. As you share this book now, what are you thinking about how it sits within the recent and ongoing “anti-DEI” push from the federal government?

These stories are not just African American stories, they’re American stories. You can’t talk about the history of America without talking about the history of enslavement, and you can’t talk about that without talking about the Emancipation Proclamation or the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. You can’t talk about the history of private landownership in this country without talking about the ways in which Black folks lost land through the law.

So it’s really baffling to me how someone can expect to exclude Black history from a curriculum; like, what do you teach? There’s never been a time in this country where our lives were not interspersed, for better or for worse. We are fellow Americans with a common history, and all of us can benefit from learning every aspect of that history.

WHAT: Dolen Perkins-Valdez, with Ronnie Pepper
WHERE: Henderson County Public Library, 301 N. Washington St., Hendersonville, avl.mx/eof
WHEN: Monday, April 14, 6 p.m. Free with RSVP