Cheating the Stillness: The World of Julia Peterkin chronicles the life of a remarkable woman who rebelled against expectations of Southern women in the early twentieth century. As a young woman, Peterkin married and moved to Lang Syne, a fifteen hundred-acre plantation in the South Carolina midlands where four hundred black workers farmed cotton. At age forty—during the era of Jim Crow and the Harlem Renaissance—she began writing startling tales about these struggling black families and their Gullah culture. Throughout Cheating the Stillness, dramatizations of Peterkin's literature, haunting images of the South Carolina countryside, evocative archival photographs, and interviews with writers, scholars and those who knew the writer, piece together an evocative story of a woman before her time.

Peterkin persistently sent writing samples to critic H.L. Mencken, who introduced her work to the literary world. Her first book, Green Thursday, was published in 1924 to critical acclaim, and many wondered at the author’s race. W.E.B. DuBois described her as a Southern white woman who had “the eye and the ear to see beauty and to know truth.” Her third novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The gritty tale of a fiercely independent single mother set in a South Carolina black farming community was a bestseller at a time when American readers of all ethnicities were ostensibly not interested in rural African American life.

With fame came a double life, walking a line between sought-after New York wunderkind and Southern plantation mistress who many felt had betrayed her race, class, and gender. Cheating the Stillness tells the story of the choice between these two radically different worlds, and chronicles what it meant to be black or white, male or female, in twentieth-century America.

2010 Biennial Conference, The Society of the Study of Southern Literature, New Orleans