The entry begins:With her basket full of blackberries, the girl paused on the soapstone boulders, gazing on the corn fields in the valley below her, until her owner’s voice shattered her thoughts. “Katie,” the older white woman shouted, “bring those berries over here now! I need them for my party tonight, so I’ll whup you if you eat any!” Smiling slyly, the enslaved girl reluctantly complied, carefully wiping the juice from her mouth and whispering to herself the irreverent nickname her parents secretly called their owner. “Yes, ma’am,” she dutifully replied aloud, and wondered what it must feel like to obey only her own parents and to pick her own berries. “What must it feel like to be free?” Katie thought.Learn more about Liberia, South Carolina at The University of North Carolina Press website.
If my book, Liberia, South Carolina: an African-American Appalachian Community, were a movie, this scene might open the story. The book tells the oral history of “Liberia,” a freedom colony established by freed slaves in the Blue Ridge foothills of South Carolina in 1865; the story then chronicles the community’s struggles through decades of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. The book follows five generations of an extended family (and their neighbors and friends) in that community, a story told primarily (but not exclusively) through the perspectives of strong female characters. Despite the fact that their fortunes wax and wane with varied historical situations, the extended family persists into the present. Fictionalizing this story would be both easy and dramatic. I see the movie as a mash-up of...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Liberia, South Carolina.
--Marshal Zeringue
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