Harris, Bernice Kelly

views updated

HARRIS, Bernice Kelly

Born 8 October 1893, Mt. Moriah, North Carolina; died 13 September 1973, Seaboard, North Carolina

Also wrote under: Bernice Kelly

Daughter of William Haywood and Rosa Poole Kelly; married Herbert Harris, 1926

Born the third of six children in an established farming family, Bernice Kelly Harris spent her childhood and adult years in the coastal plains region that dominated her novels. Like other writers, including Carson McCullers, Harris' first writing efforts were childhood plays performed for family and friends. Her subsequent attempts at poetry and novel writing were short-lived. She attended Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, expressly to train as a teacher of English. After graduation, Harris taught for three years at an academy in the foothills of western North Carolina, instructing rural Baptist preachers in the rudiments of grammar. She then took a post with the Seaboard, North Carolina, public schools and remained in Seaboard the rest of her life.

In 1919, a summer-school class introduced Harris to folk drama. Although she used her skills in drama primarily for pedagogical purposes, the years 1920 to 1926, when she encouraged students to write and to produce folk plays, provided an intense period of story collection and writing apprenticeship for herself. Her marriage and the obligatory retirement from teaching prompted her to write her own plays rather than to encourage others to write. From 1932 to 1938 she wrote folk drama, drawing from actual people and events in the North Carolina towns around her. Seven of the better plays were published collectively in 1940; almost all were produced at regional drama festivals.

Harris' novels grew out of her feature stories written on a free-lance basis for Raleigh and Norfolk newspapers. Encouraged by her editor, Harris began in 1937 the work which became Purslane, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1939. Also in 1939, Harris interviewed tenant farmers for four pieces appearing in These Are Our Lives, the Federal Writers Project publication.

The nostalgic first novel impressed critics, but Harris' second novel, Portulaca (1941), a realistic portrait of the rural and small-town middle class, won even more support from the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. It also necessitated the change to a commercial publisher, since the university press feared such blunt themes would offend southern readers.

All of Harris' novels have related characters and draw from real-life experiences of Harris and those she knew. She is the narrator of a region, with a thorough understanding of its people and mores; as such she can be compared to Cather or Faulkner in her ability to evoke time and place—to produce social history in novel form. So skillful is she at delineating character from life that reviewers of her one novel dealing exclusively with black farmers (Janey Jeems, 1946) failed to understand that the characters were not white because the depiction did not follow accepted stereotypes. The characters of her seven novels encompass all classes, races, ages, and personalities of the region. The strength of her novels clearly lies in their vivid characterization, which evokes not only a sense of regional identity and folkways but also of dynamic humanity.

Other Works:

Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina (1940). Sweet Beulah Land (1943). Sage Quarter (1945). Hearthstones (1948). Wild Cherry Tree Road (1951). A Southern Savory (1964).