Belonging in the Kingdom

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Belonging in the Kingdom
• Jasmin Pittman (bio)

As the story goes, a Black kingdom once thrived in the mountains of southern Appalachia. Concentrated in the lush, biodiverse land of the Green River in Henderson County, North Carolina, the "Kingdom of the Happy Land" provided refuge for newly liberated African Americans after the Civil War, quietly emerging as something yet to be seen on American soil—an attempt to create a Black utopia.

The story of the Kingdom of the Happy Land exists at the intersections of scant written records, memories, and oral tradition passed down from the "firstcomers," and archeological evidence offered by the land itself, documented in Sadie Smathers Patton's 20-page monograph, The Kingdom of the Happy Land.¹ Patton, a white North Carolina historian, published the Happy Land story in 1957 and details the skeletal remains of the Kingdom: a crumbling chimney, the decaying logs of cabins long unoccupied, and cadaverous pits marking the spots of former root cellars. The document itself is a product of its time, full of language and assumptions that settle uncomfortably in an era of Black Lives Matter and continued cultural revolution. There's tension in the telling, despite Patton's good intentions to document and preserve the story living in the breath of Black elders in Henderson County.

I turned to Ronnie Pepper, a Black storyteller in Hendersonville today. His voice settled into a familiar rhythm as we chatted, and something about it reminding me of my childhood attending North Carolina family reunions and porch sits stretched long into summer afternoons. I consider him the keeper of the Kingdom story. The Happy Land "goes beyond the surface of things in history we've been told…I think it shows proof of what type of a people we are. We have that endurance, spirit, knowledge, and skills," Pepper said. "So many times, in history you hear of the pilgrims coming over, or the explorers from Spain, and England, France…but you never hear stories of Blacks and how they pulled together."²

For roughly thirty years after the Civil War ended, the commune existed as a place where freshly emancipated men and women were said to live by the rule, "One for All, All for One" (Patton 2). In interviews with Patton, Ezel Couch and his sister Mary reminisced about their early childhood growing up in the Kingdom. Couch's parents believed so strongly in the Happy Land, it's said they named Couch after the Kingdom's unofficial itinerant evangelist, an enigmatic man known as Reverend Ezel. Born in 1872,³ Couch would know only the spectral shadow of slavery, unlike most of the adults in his life who'd experienced it firsthand. When his parents George and Maggie answered Reverend Ezel's call to journey to the Happy Land from Union, South Carolina, they brought their one-year-old son, no doubt with dreams of raising him within the Kingdom's welcoming arms. There would be no more toiling for one white master. Now, as freed people they pooled their money, working for each other and the common good. [End Page 49]

Most accounts of the Kingdom's founding agree that either a man named William or his brother Robert led a group out of the Deep South and into the Carolina Highlands.⁴ Oral tradition rumored this early leader to be, as Patton describes, "a man of light color"—the son of a Mississippi planter, surname Montgomery, and an enslaved woman (2). Montgomery afforded his son the privilege of education, and eventually when his son grew old enough, the responsibility of a few slaves of his own. But with economic devastation tearing through the South after the war, a group of freed people gathered and elected young Montgomery their unofficial leader so they could plot out their future together. Buoyed by courage and determination, the group migrated through the ravaged post-war terrain of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

They may have skirted the near-empty cotton fields, and perhaps vowed to themselves, never again.⁵ Or maybe, they hoped to catch a glimpse of family members long-lost to them during the days of slavery. Montgomery and...