PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: Today when many of us think of communes, we think of hippies and the back to the land movement of the 1970s. But the real action took place in the late 18 hundreds. It was the age of American utopias when model communities with radical beliefs and unusual forms of self-government sprung up throughout the country.
Fitz Brundage: And so these are common folks who don't have access to power, who are deciding they're gonna do something to change the way they live,
Anisa Khalifa: and perhaps the most remarkable one of them all. A group of freed black people with a king and a queen was nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: The fact that they went up that mountain, they created this community. They were audacious, ambitious, industrious people.
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week we travel to the kingdom of the Happy Land.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I fell in love with some, a couple of country blues guitars like Eda Baker,
Anisa Khalifa: and although she grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, the home of blues, rock and roll, and soul author Dolen Perkins-Valdez has always had a soft spot for the traditional music of North Carolina. And a few years back, she went through a hardcore Appalachian phase.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: During the pandemic, I was teaching myself the banjo. That was my pandemic hobby, and I was Googling Western North Carolina old time musicians and stumbled on this. Really incredible story. Hard to believe about this kingdom that existed in the late 18 hundreds.
Anisa Khalifa: The incredible story she's referring to is the Kingdom of the Happy Land. A community of free black people who settled near present day, Hendersonville, North Carolina. They lived a communal life, had a king and a queen, and to Dolan it seemed too good to be true.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I was so curious about it that I reached out to someone in Hendersonville, Ronnie Pepper, who confirmed that yes, this was a true story.
Anisa Khalifa: Ronnie Pepper Sr is a well-known figure in the local community. He's a teacher, storyteller and librarian, but he is also a serious local historian and the chairman of the Hendersonville Black History Research Committee.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: He had been traveling around the area telling oral storytelling about the kingdom for years. Then Ronnie introduced me to another Black History research committee member, Suzanne Hale, who I would later learn is a retired international diplomat.
Anisa Khalifa: Hale is actually a former United States Ambassador,
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: but at the time I didn't know all that, and she's very modest, but I knew she was smart, and when I say smart, I mean brilliant.
Anisa Khalifa: And so this unlikely trio, a local storyteller, a retired diplomat, and a New York Times bestselling author, bonded over the story and together they began researching the very real history behind it. So tell me the story of the kingdom.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: So in 1873, a group of people walked up the mountain and settled on the kingdom. They made a deal with a local white woman who owned an inn called the Oakland Inn that they would live in her old slave borders and they would. Do work for her in exchange for living there. These freed people, these newly emancipated people had a vision of what their community would be like. They called it a kingdom. They named a king and queen. They created a communal treasury and they, it was really a successful communal experiment
Anisa Khalifa: for the kingdom of the Happy land. Was there something unique about the land where they chose to settle?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Well, one thing that was unique about it is that it was the mountains they were in, you know, the Blue Ridge Mountains and what we now call Black Appalachia. But the other thing they did, which was really interesting and unique is they spread across state lines. So they claimed half of the land in South Carolina and half of the land in North Carolina. The legend is that they intentionally straddled the state boundary. So that if the law came after them on one side, they could cross the state line onto the other side.
Anisa Khalifa: But there is also a lot that Dolan and her new friends didn't know about the kingdom of the Happy Land, including the most basic fact where these people actually came from.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I really have to give credit to Suzanne Hale, who uncovered the truth of their origins, which was Spartanburg County, South Carolina. They were actually in a little town called Cross Anchor. We found all of them right there in the record. So that to me was a huge breakthrough. I remember standing in Suzanne's home office. And she showed us a map with the names, with the names of the farms of where the Kingdom folk came from, near cross anchor. And I said to Suzanne, this is huge. It really changed the direction of the research because then we were actually able to. To determine why we think they came up that mountain in the first place.
Anisa Khalifa: How did it change their story, what you learned?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Well, one, it told me that they fled violence. We found newspaper articles that were about them that were really quite defamatory, that probably instilled a lot of fear in them. Articles, for example, that accused them of cannibalism and accused them of engaging in savage rituals. Which were patently Foss. We also found, um, that Martin Bobo, who was the father of the future, queen of the Happy Land, Luella, had been publicly whipped down in Spartanburg County. We believe because of envy and jealousy over his influence in the community, we found. Men on voter registration roles, they were voting, which would've also been a threat, been considered a threat to white men in the area. So there were a lot of reasons why they came up that mountain. But the overarching I. Idea that we found is that they were scared for their lives. They sold their crops, they sold their animals, their tools, everything in, you know, sort of like a fire sale, um, right before they came and they came up there urgently.
Anisa Khalifa: At this point, Dolan was mesmerized by the story and it inspired her to write her fourth novel Happy Land. It's a work of historical fiction about the kingdom. You chose to tell this story as a novel rather than as a straightforward historical narrative, even though you're clearly very involved in researching the history. Why did you decide to tell it as a fictional story?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Well, I mean, I guess this is why I write fiction. I could have been a scholar, right? Like I was trained to do archival research. But I found it frustrating when I would get in the archive and I would encounter silences, and I thought, I, I wanna try to put these puzzle pieces together in a way that uses my intuition about what might have happened. And so fiction allows me to surmise and make an educated guess about certain other things that happen that we don't have the record for. And so, for example, one of the questions I asked in this book was what? Did women want, when they came up that mountain and they settled in that area, what did they want? What did freedom mean to women? That's something that we didn't find in the archive, and those are the kinds of things that fiction allows me to sort of focus on.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm a huge fan of historical fiction, so I know from, you know, interviews and reading, uh, about how the, the process of writing historical fiction, that a lot of times you end up doing so much research that doesn't end up in the novel. So what are some historical details that didn't make it into your book?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Um, you know, pretty much everything that we found ended up in there except what eventually happened to the land. That part, my ending of my book is my ending.
Anisa Khalifa: Don't worry, we're not gonna spoil the end of a good book, but when we come back after a break, we find out what happened to the real kingdom of the Happy Land and our ideas about rural life in America. Get thrown out the window.
Jerad Walker: How common were these communities? Were they like exceedingly rare?
Fitz Brundage: No, they were, uh, I, I think you could say between 1880 and 1900, there were many, many, many of them. I would say, uh, more than 50. Wow. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere between 50 and a hundred and in certain parts of the country. They were comparatively commonplace.
My name is Fitz Brundage. I'm a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Anisa Khalifa: A little over 30 years ago, Fitz was on a research trip in Southeast Georgia when he stopped by the small town. Of Waycross there, he found something that blew his mind.
Fitz Brundage: And lo and behold, in the Waycross public library, there was a photograph of a trainload of socialist disembarking in Waycross, Georgia in 1899.
Anisa Khalifa: Incredible.
Fitz Brundage: And I could not imagine. Why 300 socialists would get off the train in Waycross. Nothing against Waycross. It's just not an obvious place to do it.
Jerad Walker: Hey Fitz. Yeah, no offense taken. Nothing about my hometown screams socialist utopia.
Anisa Khalifa: Quick sidebar. In a huge coincidence, broadside editor Jared Walker, was born and raised in Waycross.
Fitz Brundage: Imagine the courage and 'cause those people who got off that train were from all over the United States and and beyond the United States. Imagine the courage to have $500. That's all you own. One of the guys, my f favorite example is a guy from Connecticut who burned down his house to get the insurance money.
Anisa Khalifa: What?
Fitz Brundage: Yeah. Committed arson to get his $500. That's what you had to pay to join. 'cause they obviously needed money to be able to buy the resources to run the community.
Anisa Khalifa: That short-lived experiment was called the Ruskin Colony. Fitz would later write a book about it and become an expert in utopian communities in the south, and it might sound strange, but he says that there were dozens of these radical communes across the US in the late 18 hundreds. They ran the ideological gamut on one extreme end.
Fitz Brundage: Some were religious zealots, if you wanna call 'em that. So there was a community in Florida, for example, who believed that we lived on the inside of the earth and that the earth was an egg and we were inside it and had a very elaborate theology.
Anisa Khalifa: And on the other end.
Fitz Brundage: Run across that continuum to socialist organizations that believed in the kind of communitarian socialism to working class labor communities. But the common point would be that all of them saw themselves as creating this kind of model society that they were desperately hoping the rest of American society would eventually copy.
Anisa Khalifa: And Fitz says that almost all of them were motivated by the same thing.
Fitz Brundage: I think the real driving force in the late 19th century was dissatisfaction with the American economy and American capitalism at the time. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States went through a series of severe, intense, I'm emphasizing that, um, recessions. And so this boom and bust cycle left Americans very. Disturbed about their sense of powerlessness in the American economy.
Anisa Khalifa: While most of these Utopian communities were started by white people, the kingdom of the happy land wasn't alone. There were also a handful of planned black communities in places like Kansas, Florida, and Mississippi. But Fitz says their motivations were different. They were less concerned with socialism or, you know, living inside a giant egg. Safety and land ownership were their primary concerns.
Fitz Brundage: The impulse for black Southerners to own land makes all the sense in the world. Given past history, owning land meant that you owned resources that you could use to support yourself without anybody else's interference. In theory, as long as you paid your taxes, what you did on the land was up to you. For a black Southerner, especially those whose ancestors had been enslaved, the holding land ownership was up there with education and control over your religious life and, and of course being able to have your families intact. I think those would be the four bedrocks. To African American life in the late 19th century.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: We often hear in this post emancipation era about two things. We hear about lynching, lynch mobs, Klan violence, and then the second thing we often hear about is sharecropping, where black folks lived on someone else's property. But we don't often talk about. How many black families were actually trying to purchase land?
Anisa Khalifa: Author Dolan Perkins Valdez says that land ownership was the foundation of the kingdom of the happy land, and it features heavily in her book
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: and what that meant to rebuild it. You know, buying land, marrying legally, establishing a family unit, those kinds of things. We don't hear about so much in this era. So I had to ask myself, what did it mean? For the kingdom to purchase over 200 acres of land. And then what did it mean for black folks to lose over $300 billion in land wealth over the course of the 20th century? Not just in terms of lost wealth, but what did it mean emotionally and what did it mean metaphorically and symbolically for us to lose our property?
Anisa Khalifa: Did you come to an answer like, what is this story specifically of? Of Kingdom of the Happy Land? Tell us about what property ownership has meant for African Americans.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I, you know, I asked these questions and I don't always have an answer. Like, on the one hand, land ownership was the surest path to the full benefits of citizenship, and it still is. This is still a country where people's wealth is determined by. Their equity and property. But I've also been thinking a lot lately about why land should not even be owned in the first place. Why? You know, native people thought of land as belonging to all of us and how that also would have been a model that would've been benefited African Americans and all Americans in general. So I think there's some complicated answers to this question, which has to do with. You know, nature and the outdoors, and can it ever really belong to someone in the first place?
Anisa Khalifa: I think one of the things that really struck me when I first heard about this story was this idea of a kingdom of royalty. Why do you think, you know, this idea of royalty was so important to this community?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I. That was the part of the story that intrigued me the most. I thought in this particular instance, these folks were searching for some kind of dignity. They were searching for, I think every time, um, a monarchy has been invented. And to be clear, all monarchies from now to ancient times are inventions. I think for the kingdom folk, they were no different than any other. Civilization. They were searching for an ideal. They were looking for something that they could aspire to, that would give them dignity as a people. And I think in their minds there was a connection to these faint memories of African royalty and they were trying to replicate that. So that sort of aspirational dignity and regality really. Triggered something in my imagination because they had an imagination. It made my imagination come alive too.
Anisa Khalifa: The Kingdom of the Happy Land persisted for decades. But when a nearby railroad was built, it transformed the region. Traffic and economic opportunity bypassed the kingdom entirely. Young people moved away and their descendants lost the land. And nowadays all that's left are a few ruins. Like the stones of Happy Land, schoolhouse, chimney, still standing on the once cleared land that's been reclaimed by brush and fallen trees.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: The land is still there. Um, there's a current owner who is trying to keep the story alive. I think. Um, I think the last I heard it was for sale and they're looking for someone who will. Keep the property protected and you know, not develop it too, too much so that the story of the kingdom remains part of local history.
Anisa Khalifa: And in remembering that history, what do you think the legacy is? How should people remember the kingdom of the Happy Land?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: My hope is that current Western North Carolina residents will view this as. Really part of a majestic history of the ingenuity and the industriousness of North Carolinians. These people. Had audacity, you know, just the fact that they went up that mountain. They created this community. They worked to build a railroad. They worked in the nearby mines. They were audacious, ambitious, industrious people, and that's something that Western North Carolinians can be. And really all North Carolinians can be proud of
Anisa Khalifa: Dolan Perkins Valdez is the author of Happy Land, which is out now via Penguin Random House. This episode of The Broadside was produced by me, Anissa Khalifa, and our editor Jerad Walker. The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond, and Executive producer Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network.
If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.