I MET BESTSELLING HISTORICAL NOVELIST Dolen Perkins-Valdez in 2023 at the inaugural Freedom Writers Retreat sponsored by the beneficent owners of the Great Oak Manor, a stately Black-owned hotel in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The mission of the retreat was, and remains, for Black female mid-career writers to have the gift of time and community to work on a literary project in a place of beauty and leisure.

There were eight of us in that cohort and many of us had left children at home to focus on progressing with our books. We were well-fed and cared for at the hotel. Before breakfast, Dolen and I made a habit of doing yoga together in the solarium overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. She sometimes wore a t-shirt that said: SHE FROM MEMPHIS, a proud nod to her upbringing in the South, where all of her fiction is set. Because our cohort would meet after dinner to share our works in-progress, I had the pleasure of hearing Dolen read from a draft of her enthralling fourth novel, an intergenerational story about Black land ownership inspired by a true-life utopian community in the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina. That book was Happy Land, fiction winner of the 2026 Southern Book Prize, just out in paperback. I was delighted to talk to the author about its environmental themes.

– Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau: Congratulations on the paperback publication of Happy Land, Dolen! 

Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Thank you, Emily!

ER: Your book has two expertly interwoven alternating timelines. In the present day timeline, a real estate agent named Nikki is summoned for mysterious reasons by her estranged grandmother, Mother Rita, to the family seat in Hendersonville, NC. In the past timeline, their formerly enslaved ancestor Luella responds to abolition by helping to establish an autonomous Black community called “The Kingdom of the Happy Land” and winds up becoming its queen. Happy Land is rooted in a real life place. I’ve written about Black utopias myself, but I’d never heard about the one your novel is based on. Like Nikki, I was in the dark about this history. When did you first learn about the kingdom, what sets it apart from similar intentional African American communities, why did it take hold of your imagination, and how did you go about your research?

DPV: When I first discovered this story, I hadn’t heard of the Kingdom either. During the pandemic, like many people, I was trying to occupy a lot of unexpected free time. Inspired by Rhiannon Giddens and the old-time musical history carved out by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, I decided to teach myself clawhammer banjo. While researching North Carolina musicians in the summer of 2021, I stumbled on this story. I thought it was unreal at first, some kind of local legend. What stood out wasn’t just that it was a nineteenth-century Black intentional community, it was also that they modeled themselves after an African kingdom and named a king and queen. I reached out to a local librarian in Hendersonville, Ronnie Pepper, and he assured me that the story was, indeed, true. I knew I had to write about it.

ER: I love that Rhiannon Giddens and the banjo led you back in time. So, Luella’s postbellum journey is about enfranchisement: coming into her power, owning her freedom, and protecting her kinfolk against white supremacy. Nikki’s contemporary journey is about legacy: discovering, researching, and emotionally metabolizing this rich matriarchal history while also legally helping her grandmother to hold on to a small remnant of that vast kingdom in the hills. Mother Rita is still living on the land and has deep ties to it. She maintains the family graves and farms flowers that she sells at the local farmer’s market, but her status as a property owner is under threat. It’s a gross understatement to say that those of us whose ancestors were enslaved have a fraught relationship with the land. What does land ownership mean for your characters, both in the 1870s-1880s and in the 2020s?

Possessing the deed to your own property meant a physical space to rebuild family, a site of refuge and repair, the soil for crops, and all the other rights and privileges afforded landowners.

DPV: Early in my career, I’d hoped to write a novel set in post-Reconstruction America, but I was hesitant. Though I’m sure there are many worthwhile stories that emerged from that painful period, I didn’t want to write about sharecropping or lynchings. For me, the story of the kingdomfolk offered a more compelling and powerful angle: Black people’s desire for land ownership in the years after emancipation. Possessing the deed to your own property meant a physical space to rebuild family, a site of refuge and repair, the soil for crops, and all the other rights and privileges afforded landowners. The kingdomfolk saved their money for over ten years to purchase over two hundred acres in 1883. If that land could stay within the family, generational wealth could be created. My contemporary character Nikki and her grandmother Rita are desperately trying to hold on to their family property. But as Nikki comes to understand, owning the family land isn’t just about money. It’s about so much more.

ER: Yes. In the Author’s Note at the back of the book, you wrote:

In my imagining of the kingdom, it is both a literal and metaphorical manifestation of a people’s desire to rise into their full humanity. As a native Southerner, I understand this deep connection between a community and the land they inhabit. This relationship to the land is fundamental to the way we Southerners view ourselves. 

Care to elaborate? As a Northerner, I’m not sure I have that same foundational understanding, although I believe my Southern grandmother did, before she fled Mississippi along the path of the Great Migration under Jim Crow.

DPV: It’s easiest for me to answer this question through the lens of southern literature. For example, Jesmyn Ward writes so beautifully of the significance of land in the South. Her novel Salvage the Bones renders the land as a site of power and connection in Mississippi; when the hurricane comes, it literally uproots the characters. I also think of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, another novel that depicts a hurricane. Janie’s time spent with Tea Cake out in “de muck” of the Florida Everglades represents a time in her life when she is happiest as she is connected to a freer, more liberated side of herself. One can go on and on through southern literature’s obsession with themes of the land and southerners’ connection to it: from Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County to the cane fields of Louisiana in Ernest Gaines’ work. On a personal note, my daddy often alluded to the broken promise of the federal government when formerly enslaved people did not receive their “forty acres and a mule.” Daddy would say he was about to go cut the grass on his “back forty” (meaning our backyard).

ER: Ha!

DPV: I guess you could describe Daddy’s reference as a kind of “cheerful snark” . . . .

ER: Nah, more like “black humor.”

DPV: When I got older and learned the meaning, I wondered at the fact that he still referred to this moment in history. Owning land to our family meant that we had a space where we could relax and let down our guards, where we were safe from harassment, where we could gather with friends outside the gaze of southern racial hierarchy. And that was the 1970s and 80s in Tennessee.

Bring home Happy Land today.

ER: As much as your book is about sovereignty, it’s also about land loss. Over the course of the twentieth century our people lost millions of acres of land through both legal and illegal maneuvers. In just a few decades after the end of enslavement, Black Americans like your characters were able to amass millions of acres of farmland. Today approximately 90 percent of that land is no longer in Black hands. Various weapons have been used to take Black land, including violence, eminent domain and government discrimination. Say more about the cost of that loss.

DPV: I knew that if I was going to write a book about people’s deep desire to own property in the late nineteenth century, I had to contend with the loss of that property. I didn’t want to leave that part untold because I knew a lot of my readers wouldn’t know much about it. It is estimated that African Americans lost over $300 billion in land wealth over the course of the twentieth century.

ER: Good God.

DPV: This loss of property wealth has had a momentous impact on racial economic disparity in the United States. A lot of that loss can be attributed to nefarious though legal maneuvers. In the book, I make specific reference to Heirs’property law, which left many families unable to even fight to keep their land.

ER: Right. I didn’t know too much about the devastating effect of Heirs’ Property until we watched the eye-opening Gaining Grounddocumentary during our Freedom Writers Retreat. I appreciated how your book touched on it. I also appreciated your book’s depiction of caretaking. Nikki is called upon to take care of Mother Rita, who is ill, but she is herself nurtured by the land while she’s there. She is transformed both physically and metaphysically by the landscape and her unfolding relationship to it. Nikki takes delight in floriculture as much as she does in genealogical research at the local library, and those labors seem connected. For her great-great-great grandmother Luella, there’s a similar transformation of character in relation to the land. Her political empowerment has to do with caretaking. Noticing for example, with the other women in her community, that a certain herb that grows on the mountainside will be a key ingredient in a liniment they make to sell outside the kingdom for income. And pushing the men in the council for a schoolhouse to be built on their territory, out of concern for the next generation. This passage, in Luella’s voice moved me deeply:

…after the land was our own it was like we was reborn all over again. We was still working and scraping like we always done but now there was something happening on our insides. It wasn’t like the fountain of joy and disbelief after freedom came, but it was close. Every morning sun promised new hope. Every fresh crop new belief. Every blessed child. Every creation by our own hands. We had set ourselves on a new path, and we could feel the grace of God in it.

Land ownership for Luella is spiritual, isn’t it?

DPV: Yes yes yes! I love how you read the novel, Emily. This is a book meant to be read soulfully and emotionally. And yes, spiritually. For much of the past decade, I’ve been musing on what “freedom” meant for newly emancipated people. I explored the concept in my second novel Balm, and I continue to return to it. African American spiritualism is such an expansive concept, so much broader than Christianity. I wanted to capture how living on that mountain gave the kingdomfolk something so powerfully meaningful that the best way they could understand it was by running their fingers through the dirt and feeling the sun on their faces. There is a scene at the beginning of Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World when his character Moses, an enslaved man, literally eats the dirt not only as a way of understanding the seasons but also as a kind of spiritual practice. I remember reading that scene for the first time and how it moved something within me. I understood it.

I wanted to capture how living on that mountain gave the kingdomfolk something so powerfully meaningful that the best way they could understand it was by running their fingers through the dirt and feeling the sun on their faces.

ER: Me, too. Robert, the second of Luella’s two husbands (who are brothers!) has a more pragmatic view of the land. He says, “I think the only thing white men respect is property. If we own this land, then they accept us as citizens. No choice but it. Then they can’t come over here trying to scare us because we landowners.” He’s trying to immunize the community against the Klan violence that pushed them to the mountains in the first place, but his plan doesn’t exactly work. Was it painful to write about the menace to the Kingdom and its eventual dissolution? How did you mitigate that pain, as a writer?

DPV: The ending of the kingdom in real life is a bit different than in my book, though there are some similarities. As I wrote about the kingdom, I thought of it in metaphorical terms. I wasn’t just writing about the kingdom – I was writing about all Black intentional communities, how they sustained us for a time, and how they dissipated in the face of societal forces. And yes, this loss pains me. However, I always write from a well of hope. I’m not a writer or a person who writes from a place of despair. It is that hope and belief in our ability to love and hold one another in our darkest moments that guides me. I think I may have gotten that value from growing up around my grandparents who were such proud and dignified people.

ER: Speaking of dignity, let’s talk about your book jacket! It depicts a dignified Black woman with a serene yet self-possessed expression wearing a crown of flowers. I wasn’t sure if the woman was Luella (who wears a flower crown at her coronation – or was it her wedding?), a young Mother Rita (who farms flowers), or Nikki (whose ambition at the end of the book is to own and operate a flower nursery). I liked that the figure could have been any one of these three charactees. For me, your cover called to mind the cover of Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer prize winning poetry collection, The Tradition, the delightful author photo of Jericho that accompanied that collection, and the collection’s eponymous poem, a stunning sonnet that opens,

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought

Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning

Names in heat, in elements classical

Philosophers said could change us…

For some reason it also makes me think of “the medium is the message” concept popularized by Malcolm McLuhan, in that the form of the crown (flowers rather than gold) means as much if not more than the content (rulership/empire). There’s something very humble about a flower crown. Temporary even. Yet at the same time, glorious. What does the crown of flowers symbolize for you?

DPV: Yes, the cover art on Happy Land could be any of the women in the book. I love that photo of Jericho. I’m not fully certain, but I believe Jericho was nodding to the art that circulated during the pandemic memorializing folks we lost to police violence. For example, I love the art of Shirien Damra who surrounded victims in florals to honor them as human beings worthy of celebration. Of course, I’m also thinking of my main character who grows flowers and the many flower farmers across the state of North Carolina. This is a book about how our connection to nature’s beauty can also connect us with one another. By honoring the land and the flowers that grow from it, we honor each other. We honor life.

Looking for more conversation?

 Revisit this chat with Emily about her own book, Lessons for Survival, with author Aya de Leon