Scarlet Sister Mary
by Julia Peterkin
Summary
Mary is an orphan raised on an abandoned Low Country plantation by Maum Hannah, the community's midwife and moral centre, and her crippled son Budda Ben. The white owners are long gone; the Gullah people who remain run their own world of work, church and conjure, and the novel stays entirely inside it. Mary marries July, the handsomest and least reliable man available, at fifteen, and when he runs off with another woman and leaves her with the baby, the church puts her out as a sinner.
What makes the book something other than a fallen woman story is Mary's refusal to fall. She takes lovers as she pleases, raises a houseful of children by several fathers, works her land, wears her scarlet, and meets the deaconry's judgement with a self possession the novel plainly admires. Peterkin gives her grief, especially in the death of a child, and gives her a late return to the church on her own terms, conversion without repentance: she will be a sister again, but she keeps the memories.
Modern readers need the frame stated plainly: this is a white plantation mistress writing Black inner lives in dialect, and the whole enterprise sits inside assumptions of its moment. Within them, it is striking how much authority, sensuality and self rule the book grants a Black woman in 1928, which is exactly what scandalised its first audience.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers interested in the strange corners of the Pulitzer list, taken with its history attached.
Historical Context & Significance
Scarlet Sister Mary won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1929, over the protest of the jury chair Richard Burton, who had recommended John Rathbone Oliver's Victim and Victor, and resigned when the advisory board chose Peterkin instead; the public library in Gaffney, South Carolina banned the novel as obscene. A stage version reached Broadway in November 1930 with Ethel Barrymore playing Mary in blackface, a fact that now summarises the era better than any essay could; it closed in thirty four performances.
Julia Peterkin was the mistress of Lang Syne, a cotton plantation near Fort Motte where several hundred Gullah people lived and worked, and her fiction, Black April before this and Bright Skin after, drew entirely on that world. White South Carolina considered her a traitor to her class; northern critics, and some Black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance era, praised the books' seriousness while others rejected the whole premise. She stopped writing by the 1940s, died at Lang Syne in 1961, and her Pulitzer is now the least defended on the list, studied rather than loved.