The conditions of freedom for Black people in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War is one of the least covered topics in American history. But volumes of documented evidence of a century of violent white terrorism targeting Black people and their White allies could fill an entire library dedicated solely to the topic. Vigilante and institutional violence was a hallmark of the era of the 1860s throughout the 1960s across the nation.
Millions of Black Americans were displaced by violence and violent threats and intimidation. They moved from concentrated regions of the south in great migration over decades into northern and western areas of the country. This is part of America's historical record. While it is generally known that indigenous peoples were removed from their lands across the entire continent, a much lesser-known part of American history is the dispossession of the lands that cost Black American families hundreds of billions in stolen generational wealth assets.
But one unique story of Black migration and land dispossession is now being told. That's the story of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, which author Dolen Perkens-Valdez introduces in her new novel.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez joins the Exchange to discuss the aforementioned societal issues and more contained in her new novel "Happy Land."
In a story of historical fiction, Perkins-Valdez immerses the reader into a small group of Black people newly freed from enslavement after the Civil War. They're seeking refuge and opportunity in a hostile White America. All they want is to be left alone on their own land. But when they are displaced from their community by the Klan in South Carolina, they collectively embark up a mountain to find their Happy Land.
Perkins-Valdez writes in cinematic prose, cutting between the family of modern-day descendants and those from four generations prior, who sought safety in their newfound freedom and pursued an equitable ownership stake in the American dream of prosperity: land and homeownership.
Through her creative lens that links the present with the past, and weaving of well-researched historical facts, Perkins-Valdez guides readers on a heartpounding, gutwrenching, suspense-filled, romance-laced journey of paradigm-shifting discovery through one family that found their roots in an African queen of the only African kingdom founded on American soil after the Civil War.
Lessons learned from the experiences of the women of the Lovejoy family offer deep insight into family relationships, marital relations, friendships that span generations, and the "notorious" and "hostile" legal loopholes and judicial gymnastics involved in the generational struggles for land ownership by Black Americans then ... and now.
