Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Scarlet Sister Mary"
by Julia Peterkin
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1929
• National City Bank provides $25 million credit to stop market slide
• German Shepherd Buddy first guide dog
• First frozen veggies available
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
Peterkin was sent off to live with grandparents and had a Gullah nurse. Ancestors opposed slavery, illegally taught black people to read. Peterkin taught in one-room school. Married wealthy South Carolina cotton plantation owner; mistress to 400+ plantation fieldhands and servants. Husband had her unknowingly sterilized immediately after son’s birth.
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– Share your key take-away about inclusion in this book in a sentence or two.
– Write a paragraph or two (up to 250 words) to describe your thoughts on exclusion/inclusion in the book, why you related or did not connect with the book, and why you think reading, inclusion and dialog about inclusion matter.
– Identify the name and website address of a cause you support with an inclusive mission.
Unrepentant promiscuous Gullah woman judged harshly by her church community.
Bride dances at wedding which gets her ousted as church member. Doesn’t care; knows she would inevitably be ostracized due to her pregnancy.
First Pulitzer about black people/black experience was written by a white Southern woman.
Feels longer: 345 pages
You can’t belong to anyone, and nobody can belong to you.
Black Gullahs in South Carolina lowlands early 1900s.
Oppression, racism by whites not addressed. Fieldwork/ picking cotton characterized as easy; impoverished conditions called “gracious plenty to live on.”
Sinners, viewed as damned to hell, ostracized by churchgoers, gather to play guitar, dance, drink, gamble.
Women’s rights to pleasure, independence typically thwarted by spouses and church. Independent woman leans into magic to rule feelings, get what she wants. She is strong, happy, forgiving, has power over men, sex, kids.
First, wedding cake with rat-damage repaired by icing. Go out for hog meat, rice, and store-bought white bread soaked in brown-liver hash served in pans or to-go in literal lunch buckets. Prep sweetened water for sweaty dancers and offer life-elastic tea to handle drama.
“Nobody is always right. Nobody always knows what right is. The wisest people in the world are ignorant about many things.”
Find the house where sinners go for forbidden pleasures like dancing and hot toddies (aka white corn liquor and molasses). Look for blood-red light from bonfire in front yard. Listen for a fiddle and a booming big bass drum.
Is a white person writing in dialect literary blackface?
Do you think Peterkin was an ally of the Gullah people?
How do you feel about the way white behavior was largely excluded from the novel?
What was your reaction to the portrayal of daily life, struggles, and how people felt and responded to their problems/struggles/injustices?
Is it necessary to repent? Forgive?
How do you judge the judgy church members? A woman who has children with multiple men?
How do the black characters in this novel compare to those in other novels written around the same time period?
How does abandonment damage and motivate?
Compare the independent woman in this novel to suffragettes and 1920s flappers.
Talk about why this book was banned and the standard for a 1928 Pulitzer novel win: “the American novel published during the year which shall present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood."
How would you respond if were an author and your grown son told you to write about “beautiful white men and women, not niggers”?
Go to South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck lowcountry near Murrells Inlet. See the Gullah Museum, Georgetown County Museum and the Rice Museum in Georgetown. (The Cotton Museum is about two hours away in Bishopville, SC). Take a Saturday plantation river tour excursion. Come back and visit Hobcaw Barony, a 16,000-acre reserve/plantation with cultural sites that include cemeteries and slave cabins.
Brief 1930 run of Scarlet Sister Mary on Broadway. Biopic Cheating the Stillness; The World of Julia Peterkin (2010).
Novels Black April (1927) and Bright Skin (1932), plus Green Thursday (1927 short story collection) and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933 nonfiction).