Pawleys Island Festival of Music and Art

Provided by

South Carolina novelist Julia Peterkin revolutionized American literature and launched what we now call the Southern Renaissance by writing about the lives of plain black farming people. Although she was white and the mistress of a cotton plantation, scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois declared that she had “the eye and the ear to see beauty and to know truth.” In 1922, when she had published only a handful of short sketches, the influential critic H. L. Mencken announced that her stories were “violets” in the “Sahara of the Bozarts,” his withering nickname for the South. Today, writer and teacher A.J. Verdelle maintains that, “the Peterkin story is a fascinating and phenomenal story, because she is white.”

In 1929 Peterkin won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, and she was leading the double life of plantation mistress in South Carolina and sought-after writer at New York cultural events and dinner parties. Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to the White House. By the mid-1930’s Julia Peterkin had stopped writing and retreated to South Carolina.

Why did she abandon her career at its height? What prompted her to begin writing in middle age? And how did a white Southern woman become a highly respected chronicler of African-American rural life? “Cheating the Stillness: the World of Julia Peterkin” looks into these questions as it delves into her life and her remarkable — and controversial — work. Lee Brockington, author and local historian, will offer an introduction to the film. Afterwards, Dr Veronica Davis Gerald, professor at CCU and long time researcher on the life of Julia Peterkin will be part of a panel discussion that includes Betsy Newman, ETV producer (including “Cheating the Stillness, “Saving Sandy Island” and an upcoming documentary on Hobcaw Barony); Bill and Anne Chandler of Murrells Inlet; invitees so far include Franklin “Snake Man” Smalls, June Hora, and Richard Camlin. A reception will be hosted by The Litchfield Company.