Author Statement about Bernice Kelly Harris
Valerie Raleigh Yow
I first heard about Bernice Kelly Harris when a friend told me to read her Federal Writers Project interviews. I got interested in this woman who went around her county talking to people—from farmers to undertakers, from ministers to housewives, from former slaves to large landowners. It was the 1930s and many of the people who described their lives to her were having a hard time just getting enough food to feed their families. What impressed me was her compassion and respect for each one. I started to identify with her, as I remembered that I have been accused of falling in love with everybody who tells me a life story.
Reading her novels, I began to notice that individuals she had talked to appeared– transformed, to be sure–in her fiction. She acknowledged in her autobiography that she was haunted by them, that she tried by writing to bring them back into her life.
Bernice Kelly had gone to Seaboard, North Carolina, to teach school and after a seven-year courtship, married, Herbert Harris, the richest man in town. She seemed staid, conforming, but my research gave me an insider’s glimpse. Herbert was extremely controlling, and he refused her most earnest desire, to have a child. He had no appreciation of literature; his only focus was on making money and keeping it. When he left in the morning for his farms and cotton gins, she sat down to write. In her seven novels, she lived a life different from the one she lived with her husband and the townspeople. Few people around her understood: one neighbor said, “I don’t know why she wrote a book—she already has a husband.”
