(alphabetically) of these self-nourishing writers was Bernice Kelly Harris
(–). Born on a large farm in Wake County, North Carolina, Bernice
Kelly grew up a beneficiary not only of her parents’ status as landowners
but of what is remembered as a golden age of agriculture, when weather
and commodity prices were so good that, forever after, farmers and their
advocates benchmarked them, hopefully, as ‘‘parity.’’ Bill Kelly, her father,
grew cotton, tobacco, corn, and other crops. Bernice herself remembered
the Kelly farm, including its woods and edges, as a cornucopia—all this in
the age of pellagra. Her memoir,Southern Savory(), drips with nostal-
gia for ‘‘gooseberry bushes yield[ing] tart purplish fruit for mouth-watering
pies and preserves.’’ Also for ‘‘currants and figs, scuppernongs and black
grapes,’’ not to mention ‘‘white mulberries and purple damsons, black wal-
nuts and hickory nuts, every kind of orchard fruit.’’ Her family harvested
‘‘cane patches’’ for sorghum and sage bushes for sausage seasoning and
‘‘tea for chills and fever.’’ Then ‘‘there were plump chickens and pigs and
milk cows to supply fowl and meat and dairy foods for the table. There were
garden vegetables winter and summer.’’^23
A bookish child, Bernice decided she wanted to be a teacher, and her par-
ents sent her to Meredith College, a Baptist institution for women in nearby
Raleigh. Then she was off to her first post, down east in Duplin County, then
to another rural school in western North Carolina, and finally, when she
was twenty-five, to the little town of Seaboard, up in Northampton County
near the Virginia line. In the meantime she had encountered the new ‘‘folk
drama’’ movement in Chapel Hill, where she took a summer class with Pro-
fessor Frederick Koch. Koch and other advocates of a grassroots theater
encouraged teachers and other privileged people to promote and facilitate
playmaking among ordinary country folk, who would create drama from
their own stories and traditions. Back in Seaboard, a transformed Bernice
Kelly began to help her students and then their parents compose and put on
dramas. Ultimately she was principal founder of the Northampton Players,
and her young playwrights were frequent winners of annual state prizes.
Food and the natural world figure large in much of this drama, reminding
Bernice that she would ever be a farm girl, a rural person at heart, irretriev-
ably connected not only to crops and gardens but to brambles, meadows,
and woods.
In her thirties Bernice Kelly married Herbert Harris, an older man and a
member of one of the powerful families of Northampton. With his brothers
Harris owned farms, rental housing, timberlands, a cotton ginnery, and a
fertilizer business. Bernice ended her school-teaching career and moved