In my youth I was living off-the-grid along the Green River near the town of Saluda. I had heard from a multi-generational native of Polk County named Paul Rhodes about a place called The Kingdom of the Happy Land that was one of the first African American communities established after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation near the end of the Civil War. Paul took me over to a piece of cleared land with still-existing river stone foundations and a cemetery, all surrounded by woods, that was a few miles just outside of town where The Kingdom of the Happy Land had existed in the late 1800s. Paul also knew some of the local and published history of this former community, and so I had at least a basic knowledge of what had happened there all those years ago.
One hundred and twenty-five years later, I am reading North Carolina author Vanessa Miller’s novel The American Queen, that is based on the actual history of The Kingdom of the Happy Land, where much of the novel takes place. Her strongly-researched story begins with the book’s main character, Louella, who is a 24-year-old slave on the Montgomery Plantation in Mississippi and elucidates on the life and times of being a young female slave in that place and time and “with a sore back and bleeding fingers from picking cotton ten hours a day and then sleeping on a makeshift bed of straw and rags.” The first several short chapters are devoted to the life of a plantation slave and Miller puts us right there in the midst of it all. We learn that Louella has heard Lincoln freed all the slaves and so early on becomes focused on her emancipation and her future as a free and independent human being. But she’s still ‘owned’ by her plantation master who hasn’t given in to or abided by the proclamation of the national government. During this denial time, Louella is being pursued by a man almost twice her age who is proposing marriage. This man, William, is a reverend in the plantation’s black church and is a kind and compassionate person who is very open and compliant to Louella’s issues and dreams.
But too much hate was in her heart for love to grow for anyone else. She’d told William this, but he was determined to marry anyway, Miller writes. In the end, and with her grandmother’s prodding, Louella reluctantly agrees to jump the broom and marry William with the stipulation that she does not want to stay and live on the Mississippi plantation.
After much conversation convincing of her husband to leave his life on the plantation, we’re on the road with Louella and the reverend,“traveling up the North Carolina mountains by way of the Winding Stairs and the cool winter breeze of December.” They’re headed for land near Hendersonville along the Green River that they’ve heard was once a plantation, but is now vacated and possibly available for settlement. After a long and harrowing year-long journey from Mississippi, the caravan of former slaves (110 women, 86 men, and 54 children) that they have picked up along the way arrives in the mountains of North Carolina. They negotiate a deal to buy some of the old plantation land and begin clearing land and working to build their community, with Louella singing as they worked: “The dire effects of slavery we could no longer stand. We struck a blow for freedom or the grave, that’s what we demand.”
As “A Kingdom Rises in the South,” we are halfway through the book. The rest of the book is devoted to the settlement and the creation of a community of “Happy Landers” that grows to 250 members in just two years time.
After having cleared 25 acres of trees and building homes for everyone, Louella and William are crowned queen and king of what now becomes The Kingdom of the Happy Land, with its motto of “all for one and one for all.”
“If this is to be a kingdom, it will be a place where people share with one another and treat each other with dignity. That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” Louella declares as they move forward.
From there, the story proceeds and time moves on with KKK cross burnings, creation of the Happy Land school, local white shopkeeper animosity, putting together a protective ‘army,’ the coming of the railroad, a region-wide epidemic, creating a traveling Christmas choir, the unexpected death of (King) William, the community reaching 420 residents, the highs and lows of loss and reconciliation, including a legal battle to keep the land from being sold out from under them. With her children grown and surrounded by family and friends and leading the Happy Land community single-handedly as their longtime Queen, Louella, with her positive attitude and faith in God, continued for at least 40 years and probably longer until the beginning of the 20th century, “in a place of their own where they could hold their heads up and be respected.”
About the author: Thomas Crowe is the author of the award-winning memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods and publisher of New Native Press. He lives in Jackson County, North Carolina.