Scarlet Sister Mary

An African American woman lives life on her own terms in the early-twentieth-century South Carolina Lowcountry from the Pultizer Prize–winning author.

In this once-banned classic of 1928, Julia Peterkin introduces readers to a Black community in the post-slavery South—and to a woman who follows her own path in the close-knit world in which she’s born. Mary is just fifteen and already used to the hard work of surviving off the land that used to be a plantation. She is strong, in love, about to be married—and already pregnant. It is this “sin” that marks her, an excuse for everything that goes wrong in her life, especially the failure of her marriage and the children who she continues to have out of wedlock. But Mary doesn’t see it that way. She has learned to give her heart when and to whom she wants to—without apology.

Though the portrayal of an unrepentant Black woman was shocking to some upon initial publication, the Chicago Tribune called it, “a rich, colorful, passionate panorama of a person who took life as she found it and achieved, despite everything, a personal peace of spirit,” and the New York Times said it “all but cries with color, scent, sound, in a style that is a happy combination of solidity, brilliance, and pure beauty.”

“Reading Scarlet Sister Mary one should keep a pencil near at hand. Sentences in the text leap out to be marked, to be read again and again and held in memory for all time. Mrs. Peterkin’s prose has a beauty and a richness which is balm to a distracted world.” —Boston Evening Transcript