Julia Mood Peterkin

A dissection of social upheaval, Bright Skin is Julia Peterkin's most sophisticated book, dealing with urban migration, miscegenation, illegitimacy, and racism from the low country of South Carolina to the streets of Harlem. The story of Cricket and Blue - a woman who leaves and a man left behind - is at the heart of the African American experience. As technology replaced manual labor on the plantation, thousands of descendants of slaves made their way north to jobs in the cities, where black separatism flourished. Peterkin writes of these changing times with keen perception and descriptive brilliance in Bright Skin - a story of getting ahead by getting away, rejecting the past and embracing a new future.

Black April, the foreman of Blue Brook Plantation, must confront his own mortality and the tragic consequence of human desire in this simple tale of black country life in coastal South Carolina.

Vividly rendering the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of a bygone rural south, these closely connected stories revolve around the sometimes tragic lives of a black farming couple, Killdee and Rose Pinesett. When it first appeared in the 1920s, Green Thursday's unsentimental portrayal of African Americans was startlingly ahead of its time - enough so to inspire hate mail from white Southerners accusing the author, herself white, of betraying her race. At the same time, however, Green Thursday was praised by reviewers and social observers from all quarters, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who called it "a beautiful book."

Pulitzer Prize; likened to Nathaniel Hawthorne' "Scarlet Letter". From Goodreads - Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.