Sister Scarlet Mary
Julia Peterkin, 1928
University of Georgia Press
376 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780820323770
Summary
Winner, 1929 Pulitizer Prize
Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness.
In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 31, 1880
• Where—Laurens County, South Carolina, USA
• Death—August 1961
• Where—near Fort Motte, South Carolina
• Education—Converse College (South Carolina)
• Awards—Pulitizer, 1929
Julia Peterkin was a white American fiction writer, who wrote about the African-American experience in the American South.
Her father was a physician, of whom she was the youngest of four children. Her mother died soon after her birth. In 1896, at age 16, Julia graduated from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from which she received a master's degree a year later. She taught at the Forte Motte, South Carolina, school for a few years before she married William George Peterkin in 1903. He was a planter who owned Lang Syne, a 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) cotton plantation near Fort Motte.
Julia began writing short stories, inspired by the everyday life and management of the plantation.
She was audacious as well as gracious, an ambiguity attested to by Elizabeth Robeson in her 1995 scholarly essay about Peterkin in the Journal of Southern History. Peterkin sent highly assertive letters to people she did not know and had never met, such as Carl Sandburg and H.L. Mencken, and included samples of her writing about the Gullah culture of coastal South Carolina.
Essentially sequestered on the plantation, she invited Sandburg, Mencken and other prominent people to the plantation. Sandburg, who lived nearby in Flat Rock, North Carolina, made a visit. While Mencken did not visit, he nevertheless became Peterkin's literary agent in her early career, a possible testament to her persuasive letters. Eventually, Mencken led her to Alfred Knopf, who published her first book, Green Thursday, in 1924.
In addition to a number of subsequent novels, her short stories were published in magazines and newspaper throughout her career. She was one of very few white authors to specialize in the Negro experience and character. But her work was not always praised, and Pulitzer Prize–winning Scarlet Sister Mary was called obscene and banned at the public library in Gaffney, a South Carolina town. The Gaffney Ledger newspaper, however, serially published the complete book.
In addition to the controversy over the obscenity claim, there was another problem with Scarlet Sister Mary. Dr. Richard S. Burton, the chairperson of Pulitzer's fiction-literature jury, recommended that the first prize go to the novel Victim and Victor by Dr. John B. Oliver. His nomination was superseded by the School of Journalism's choice of Peterkin's book. Evidently in protest, Burton resigned from the jury.
As an actress and possible dilettante, she played the main character to some acclaim in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Town Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, from February 1932.
In 1998, the Department of English and Creative Writing at her alma mater, Converse College, established The Julia Peterkin Award for poetry, open to everyone. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Peterkin is a southern white woman, but she has the eye and the ear to see beauty and know truth.
W. E. B. Du Bois
[N]early everything that Mrs. Peterkin's characters did and said was interesting. She has a great talent for creative observation and description, for realistic folklore.
Time Magazine (6/10/1929)
Pulitzer Prize winner Peterkin was a pioneer in writing candidly, yet unsentimentally, about black women, including their sensuality.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Scarlet Sister Mary:
1. How do you see Mary Pinesett? Do you admire her...do you like her? Or does she irritate and anger you? Is she an early feminist, defining her own sexuality and identity while defying the social order? Is she a "primitivist" who uses sexuality and child-bearing to connect with the natural cycle of life? Is she a victim of spousal abuse, struggling to regain self-esteem? Is she an immoral, immature, self-centered woman? All...some... none of the above...or something else?
2. As a white writer, does Julia Peterkin play into racial stereotypes for African-Americans? Or, as W.E.B. Dubois said of her, does she have "the eye and the ear to see beauty and know truth" whether black or white?
3. Talk about the rat and the wedding cake as symbolizing the future prospects of Sister Mary and July's marriage.
4. What role does magic and superstition play in the Gullah community and in Sister Mary's life?
5. Do you care about this book's characters? Does Peterkin fully develop them—providing them with emotional and psychological complexity? Or do you find them flat and one-dimensional?
6. In what way might Killdee Pinesett be considered, in the words of one critic/reviewer, "one of the most moving, one of the most admirable characters is modern fiction"?
7. What kind of family does Mary create...what affect does her promiscuity have on her children? Is she a good mother?
8. How does the church view Sister Mary? And how do you view the church with its concepts of sin and grace? What about Brer Dee lining out the hymns?
9. At the end, when the church has accepted her back into its fold, does Sister Mary repent? Why does she keep the charm when Daddy Cudjoe asks her to return it? What does she mean when she tells Daddy Cudjoe, "E's all I got now to keep me young"?
10. Is this book a morality tale?
11. Are you at all familiar with the Gullah culture along the Carolina coasts, its unusual patois, the beautiful sweet grass baskets? You might do a little research into the area and its history. There's a Gullah cultural and educational center not far from Beaufort and Hilton Head, South Carolina—take a look at its website.
12. Overall, what do you think of this book? Is it a good read...a disappointing one? Did it hold your interest?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)