Author Dolen Perkins-Valdez draws inspiration from a real-life kingdom in North Carolina founded by formerly enslaved Black Americans for her new novel “Happy Land,” which will be released via Penguin Random House on April 8. With “Happy Land,” the NAACP Image Award-winning writer continues her trend of pulling from real-life, little-known American stories as the basis for fiction novels, including her 2022 release “Take My Hand,” 2015’s “Balm,” and her debut “Wench: A Novel” in 2010.
In 1873, a group of recently freed Black Americans fled violence in South Carolina in search of a new home, and settled in an area in the Appalachian Mountains in Henderson County, North Carolina. Nine years later, they purchased 205 acres of the land they were living on, and established the Kingdom of the Happy Land, which the author describes as a “constitutional monarchy,” led by the Queen Luella Bobo and her husband, King William Montgomery. The last recorded deed of sale of the land was in 1919, to a white family with the last name Bell, who Perkins-Valdez discovered still owns the land.
The novel introduces the story of the Kingdom of the Happy Land through the lens of Bobo’s fictional great-great-great granddaughter Nikki Berry, who, as an adult, discovers the family history during a visit to her grandmother, who lives in Henderson. Like the character she imagined for her book, Perkins-Valdez was shocked when she first learned that there had been a Black kingdom in the U.S. less than 20 years after the nation’s formal abolishment of slavery.
“I was looking up old-time musicians in Western North Carolina because my pandemic hobby was teaching myself the banjo, and I was looking for Black North Carolina banjo players. And I stumbled on this in the Asheville area,” Perkins-Valdez explained in an interview with the AmNews. “And I thought, is that true?”
Perkins-Valdez, who lives in Washington D.C., took her own pilgrimage to Henderson County to do on-the-ground research about the kingdom. There she began to draw a connection between the kingdom’s history and more recent accounts of Black land loss she had read about, including the 2022 return of Bruce’s Beach in California to a family that saw the land stripped from them in 1924 due to eminent domain, and the Reel Brothers in North Carolina, who were held in contempt of court for eight years in a county jail for not vacating land that their family had owned for a century that a distant relative had sold.
A research paper published by Boston College Law School in 2022 estimates that “[the] compounded value of the Black land loss from 1920 to 1997 is roughly $326 billion.” For Perkins-Valdez, herself a native of a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis called Orange Mound, and a fifth-generation Memphian, the idea of Black land ownership is personal.
“In this book I’m using the experience of what land meant to my daddy, and part of what I’m trying to do is [speak about] the return to the land and why it meant so much,” Perkins-Valdez said, adding that the majority of her family stills lives in Orange Mound. “And even what happened in the Great Migration, when African Americans migrated to urban centers and lost our connection to rural life, we know we lost generational wealth and that is the biggest part of it. But we also lost our connection to each other, we lost our connection to the outdoors.”
Award-winning author Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s novel “Happy Land,” about a Black kingdom in North Carolina created by formerly enslaved Americans, may sound like a fantasy, but it’s heavily based on the real life Kingdom of the Happy Land from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Perkins-Valdez’s research on the community led her to imagine the conversations and relationships that existed in the kingdom, and what might happen if a present-day relative of the queen discovered her rich family history just as the land was in danger of being stolen. (Julian Michael Caldwell video)
Perkins-Valdez’s research revealed that in addition to establishing its own political system with a queen, king and council, the Kingdom of the Happy Land also had its own branded liniment, or pain relieving cream, which brought in revenue for the community. In the novel, Perkins-Valdez imagines fictional conversations between the architects of the kingdom about their motivations for intentionally setting up a monarchy as opposed to a sovereign land that operated under the same governmental structure as the rest of the country.
“The men had gotten the right to vote and they had been terrorized for that by the Ku Klux Klan,” Perkins-Valdez explained of their lives in South Carolina. “So when they go up on that mountain, I found no record that they ever voted again in the context of the kingdom. They decide that rather than participate in this nation’s government they’re going to create their own system, they’re going to pool their resources together.”
“Happy Land” details two storylines more than a century apart. Perkins-Valdez illustrates Bobo’s challenges as queen of a brand-new monarchy in the late 1800s and her great-great-great granddaughter’s quest to save the land in the present day after finding out it is in danger of being stolen away from her family — at the same time she learns of its full significance.
Perkins-Valdez doesn’t intend for “Happy Land” to solely entertain; it also comes with calls to action. The first is for Black Americans to connect with nature in any way they can, such as visiting national parks and teaching children how to identify different species of birds, as she practices in her own family.
“What I recognize is the beauty and value of Black rural life, and how we have to somehow reconnect to that,” she said. “There’s strength there. That’s why I’m urging everybody to get outside.”
Perkins-Valdez is also using her book as a means to raise awareness about the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), legislation meant to help families sort through legal discrepancies and understand their ownership rights before they lose land in auctions they may have never known about. So far 24 states have enacted the law, but North Carolina is not one of them. Perkins-Valdez has gone as far as to include information in the back of the book about how to encourage lawmakers in the other 26 states to enact the UPHPA.
“Happy Land” will be released on April 8 and is available for online pre-order via Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org.