Cheating the Stillness: The World of Julia Peterkin (2010)

The World of Julia Peterkin chronicles the life of a remarkable woman who rebelled against expectations of Southern women in the early twentieth century. As a young woman, Peterkin married and moved to Lang Syne, a fifteen hundred-acre plantation in the South Carolina midlands where four hundred black workers farmed cotton. At age forty-during the era of Jim Crow and the Harlem Renaissance-she began writing startling tales about these struggling black families and their Gullah culture. Throughout Cheating the Stillness, dramatizations of Peterkin's literature, haunting images of the South Carolina countryside, evocative archival photographs, and interviews with writers, scholars and those who knew the writer, piece together an evocative story of a woman before her time. Peterkin persistently sent writing samples to critic H.L. Mencken, who introduced her work to the literary world. Her first book, Green Thursday, was published in 1924 to critical acclaim, and many wondered at the author's race. W.E.B. DuBois described her as a Southern white woman who had "the eye and the ear to see beauty and to know truth." Her third novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.