Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s latest novel, Happy Land (Berkley, 2025), uncovers the remarkable true story of an African American community established in the mountains of North Carolina during Reconstruction. This kingdom, led by a king and queen, created a self-sufficient community that thrived for decades and challenge traditional narratives of Black life after Emancipation. Through dual timelines—one following Queen Luella in the nineteenth century and the other tracking her descendant Nikki’s quest to uncover this buried history—Perkins-Valdez explores themes of land ownership, desire, and stepping into one’s legacy.
Perkins-Valdez is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Wench and Take My Hand. Her work frequently examines overlooked aspects of Black history through meticulous archival research and rich, character-driven storytelling. An associate professor at American University, she has received numerous awards for her fiction and her contributions to literary culture.
I spoke with Perkins-Valdez about her discovery of Happy Land during the pandemic, her research process, and how this story of Black self-determination resonates in our current moment. Her commitment to uncovering silenced histories and her view of storytelling as an act of hope offers readers not just a window into the past but also inspiration for community building in 2025 and beyond.
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The Rumpus: How did you first learn about Happy Land, and when did the idea of a novel about this place start taking shape in your mind?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: I always stumble into book ideas because I don’t go looking for them. During the pandemic, I took up a hobby: learning the banjo. I was really interested in it as a Black and African instrument. I was crazy about Rhiannon Giddens and what she was doing with the banjo. While researching Black history in western North Carolina, I stumbled on an article about this kingdom outside of Hendersonville. It was just a local newspaper, and I thought, “What is that?” It was a very brief article with an illustration showing that there had been this Black community during Reconstruction in the mountains.
I started Googling to see what this was all about. There weren’t any national articles about it, just these local papers that had reported on it over the years. One woman had written a master’s thesis about it, but there just wasn’t much information. So I reached out to this guy, Ronnie Pepper, who is a local storyteller in Hendersonville, a raconteur, and he’s also a librarian. I thought, “Let me reach out to him and see if this is real or if this is some kind of local legend.” He said it was real, and he invited me to come down there. Once I went down there, I knew I had a book.
Rumpus: Some characters in your novel needed to be convinced that a place such as Happy Land could exist. When were you convinced, and what convinced you? What did your time on that land feel like?
Perkins-Valdez: I was convinced because I believe in the imagination of Black folks. I believe in our creativity, and a lot of that emerged from dire oppression. We had to be creative in order to survive. So I never once doubted that this place existed and that these people called themselves king and queen.
I did encounter a couple of locals, not many, who were African American, who said, “Well, we know the place existed. But do we really know they called themselves king and queen?” The history had been traced back to this one pamphlet written by this local, white historian in the 1950s, Sadie Patton, so some people doubted her account.
There’s something really magical about western North Carolina—the people were really warm and nice, and there’s a lot of sense of community. I was able to go on the land, and just standing there, I really felt the power of that place. It’s still undeveloped, beautiful mountain country. It was very peaceful.
Rumpus: The land and the flowers felt as much a character in the story as any other living thing. How did the landscape and the terrain help bring the story alive for you?
Perkins-Valdez: I think there’s something really revolutionary in putting us on that land. After the Great Migration, so many Black people ended up concentrated in cities, and we often forget that we are fundamentally a rural people. You don’t have to go back many generations to a grandmother or a great-grandfather who was a country person.
There’s something revolutionary to me with even the cover of my book. I loved it so much when my publisher proposed it to me—for us to be connected to flowers, to fresh vegetables, and to think about all that the land has meant to us, much more than just a place to live or a property deed. That was the question I kept asking myself as I wrote this book, “What did that land mean other than just a piece of paper?” The piece of paper was important, too, but the paper was important because of all the other things.
Rumpus: Throughout my life, I’ve encountered Black folk who strongly believe, with or without proof, that our enslaved ancestors were descendants of African royalty. How did you reimagine what kingdom and royalty could mean when creating Happy Land’s community structure in the book, which is founded on Black liberation, land stewardship, and collective freedom rather than the hierarchy and subjugation often associated with royalty and monarchies of the Western world?
Perkins-Valdez: When you look at any monarchy, even in the Western world, they’re all implicated. They’re all made up, created. Despite what monarchists would have you believe, they’re not divinely ordained. There is no king who is ordained by God. What I reminded myself was that they made it up. They used their imagination to imagine what those particular roles would mean for their community.
When I was writing the book, my editor said, “Wouldn’t their children be technically the princess and the prince?” I never had really thought about that because when I was looking at the historical record, there was never any indication that it was passed down in that way, even though they had children. So I thought, maybe they didn’t think of it as something by blood. They thought of it as something that you appointed someone to. I tried to remind myself that every royal is an act of imagination. And if it is an act of imagination, you can do with it whatever you want. You can use it for good or for bad. In this particular instance, they used it for good.
Rumpus: Throughout history, Black people in this country have been forced to leave the land in search of a better life or work. It disrupts our legacy and our relationship to land. What does it mean for a Black person to see themselves in relationship to land as a steward when their presence upon that land may not last very long?
Perkins-Valdez: We’ve been terrorized on the land—Black men and some women were hanged from trees. How does that not affect our relationship to a tree? In the book, Luella’s son decides to become a barber rather than live on the mountain because his relationship with the land has been fundamentally altered by his trauma. Being in the woods at night is not a place we want to be. I understand that.
But as human beings, we need nature. We need to turn off our cell phones and screens and go sit outside and feel the breeze. One of my pandemic hobbies was bird watching. I got a pair of binoculars and would go on bird walks, which was really nice during the pandemic because everything was quiet. The birds were there, and they really enjoyed not having traffic. Those things are really calming to the human spirit—to go on a walk, to sit in a park and watch birds. Part of the reason why Nikki and her mother are amateur bird watchers is because of my own experience as a Black bird watcher. There are not a whole lot of them. We’re out here, and I would love to see the younger generation also have a better connection with nature.
Rumpus: Another aspect of Nikki’s journey was going through the archives and historical records, which offer readers a model for exploring their histories. What advice would you give folks interested in uncovering their family stories, particularly those whose ancestors’ histories might have been deliberately obscured or erased?
Perkins-Valdez: I would say, don’t over-rely on the US Census. Censuses are really important—they found all kinds of things in the census for my family that were astounding. But I recently learned that I’m a fifth-generation Memphian, and in order to figure that out, I had to go back to the Federal Slave Schedules. I had to go back to before 1870.
I would tell people, familiarize yourself with slave schedules, Freedmen’s Bureau contracts, voter registration records, church records. These early Black churches were so good at keeping records. Some of those church records have now been digitized. If you go to your local town and go to the archives of the library, some of them will have Black church records you can look at. Also check newspaper articles, death certificates, military records, marriage records—go beyond the census. Look for any paper trail, property deeds if any of your family owned property, which a lot of Black people did at one point. We lost a lot of that property, but if any of your people owned property, that’ll tell you something too.
Rumpus: I once sat in a room with Black writers, and we made personal lists of what we inherited from our families, and the word “silence” came up on everyone’s list. For Nikki, the silence inherited from the rift between her mom and grandmother threatens to destroy the family and its legacy. How does your exploration of inherited silence reflect your experience with silences in the archive? What guidance might you offer readers seeking to transform familial or historical silences into sources of strength?
Perkins-Valdez: What a great question. People took this stuff to their graves—or they were trying to. But they really weren’t, because then their little nosy descendants came along and started digging around.
I remember finding a census record for my grandmother. She had eleven children, and they were all a year to eighteen months apart. My granddaddy didn’t let up. He didn’t let her breathe. I knew both my grandparents, but it never occurred to me that she had those babies so close together. Now that I am an adult with children, I know a woman’s body has to heal. To give birth and then have a baby still breastfeeding while you’re pregnant again, over and over for twenty years, is just astounding to me.
When we go into those archives and look at all those records, we do have to infer. We do have to interpret. If you are in touch with the ancestral world—and by that I mean, if you keep your feet planted on the ground, if you’re quiet and you listen, if you hear and receive when old folks are talking—then your inferences will be more accurate. I have found that sometimes I’ll make these guesses, and then somebody will come along and tell me, “That really happened.”
If we are quiet and purposeful and we really spend time at the feet of our elders—we can’t brush them off when they’re trying to tell us those stories, we have to listen—we’ll get a sense, even in the silence, of what they don’t tell us. You can hear it when they’re glossing over something because when you ask them something, they say, “Oh, I don’t remember,” or “Oh, you know.” They do remember. They just don’t want to tell you. The key is to just be close.
Rumpus: Your novel alternates between Queen Luella’s Happy Land origin story and Nikki’s attempts to uncover that story in the present day. How did the choice to tell those stories concurrently come to be?
Perkins-Valdez: I began with the historical timeline because that’s the kingdom story. But I kept thinking, what did the land mean? Whenever I begin to write a book, I always ask, “What do I have to say about this? What’s the point of view that I’m offering?” I am a historian, but I’m also a storyteller. I don’t think I should just tell the history because there are people who can tell that history so much better than I can. There are experts in western North Carolina history that I wouldn’t dare touch.
Part of what I had to say had to come out in that contemporary storyline. What I had to say was: This is what happens generationally when the land is lost. This is what happens not just when the land is lost, because the land is just the thing. This is what happens when the connection to that land and to that story and to your ancestral spirit is lost, and so many young people have lost it. Then you’ve lost something really fundamental to who you are.
When people say, “Well, I don’t want to learn about slavery anymore, and I don’t want to hear about these things,” I can understand that. We all have times where we need books of uplift, and Happy Land is my book of uplift. But I do think there are other times when we need to get close to that historical trauma so that we don’t forget and so that we remain close to their strength because they had to be incredibly strong to survive that, and we can draw from that strength by hearing their stories of resilience.
Rumpus: I was really intrigued by how you explore love and loyalty in a very unexpected way. What drew you to telling a story that challenges the traditional idea of what a relationship could look like, especially within the backdrop of Black life during Reconstruction?
Perkins-Valdez: When I first wrote the book, I was really interested in Black women’s desires in the late nineteenth century. What did they desire? What did they want? There was this nineteenth-century novel by Emma Dunham Kelly called Megda, and these Black girls are sitting there eating candy. I remember reading that novel in graduate school and my professor saying this mere act of writing about these girls eating candy is a symbol of Black women being free to consume and act on their desires, even if it’s just for sweets.
There’s that one scene that I wrote in the book where Luella asks the women what they want, and they say, “We want fabric for dresses, we want a say in the ruling, we want a seat on the kingdom council.” The relationship that Luella has with William and Robert—an unconventional relationship—was an extension of me thinking about Black women’s desires and that one of the things we were able to do as emancipated people was to love freely. Her friend Jola does not ever marry, for whatever reason. We don’t know why, but she is free to act on her desire, even if it’s one that isn’t necessarily societally acceptable.
Rumpus: This being historical fiction based on a real place, what felt important for you to get right about Happy Land in your novel?
Perkins-Valdez: There are some things I don’t like to change. As a historical fiction writer, you’re often thinking, what am I going to fictionalize, and what am I going to keep the same? I always want to respect the integrity of the story. For me, that meant I didn’t want the kingdom to implode because it didn’t—it was a successful communal living experiment.
I also wanted to research those original kingdom dwellers. What brought them there? Where were they before? Who were they? That’s why I said I had to engage that Sadie Patton pamphlet, because I wanted to make sure that I got the history right. I thought about what story I wanted to tell and how I was going to tell that story—from whose perspective?
Rumpus: What ways has hope colored the stories you tell? Were you driven by a feeling of hopefulness while writing and moving through your process?
Perkins-Valdez: My work is really infused with hope even when I’m writing difficult history—there’s always love there. I told the writer Edward P. Jones when I met him that the thing I love about his work is that it’s filled with hope and love, and I aspire to be a writer like that. I want people to know that love exists. In Take My Hand, these terrible things happen to those girls, but I have this one chapter where I celebrate them as little girls. One loved chocolate ice cream. I wanted to just have a moment where we paused and remembered that they were beautiful little Black girls.
I’m always driven by hope. I don’t understand despair—if you truly give in to despair, what do you have left? Where is your humanity if you truly give in to despair? There are people on this planet who have nothing, who have hope.
When I was little, I remember my grandfather would put on a suit and his hat just to go to the store to get something my grandmother wanted. He would put on a suit and a hat, and I remember how tall he stood. He wasn’t that tall of a person, but he stood tall. He’d walk out that door with such dignity to go get that loaf of bread. It never occurred to me that he suffered indignities as a Black man because he always held his head up high. He was always hopeful, and he always had a smile.
These were Black folks in the South who surely suffered indignities, but I never knew it because they smiled and they laughed, and we were family, and we had family time. I say that to say, it permeates my work. I’m driven by hope and driven by optimism. Even in this time that we’re in right now—which is a historical moment that people will read about in history books one day—I still don’t give in to despair.
The way to do that is community. That’s what the kingdom was about, forming community. One of the things I said at the top of 2025 is that this is a year for community, however that looks for people, whether it be friends, family, loved ones, whatever your community looks like. This is not a year to be alone in the world. This is a year to connect with people, to hug. When somebody comes to town, make time to see them in person. Don’t just text them. This is the time to take your lunch break and not eat at your desk. Get out and take a walk. This is the kind of year that we’re in.
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Author photograph by Norman E. Jones
