into the brick house her husband had built for them. Now a prominent
matron, she could not resist the countrywoman’s imperative to plant a big
vegetable garden. She gloried in the ‘‘bounty’’—one of her favorite words—
although, like many women before and after her, she came to regret the
egregious scope of the garden in a good year, come canning time. Her hus-
band made things worse: ever the competitive businessman, he insisted
that they outdo friends, family, and neighbors, filling not only the pantry
but the cellar. Nonetheless, many years later, her husband long dead and
Bernice herself approaching eighty, she still had her ‘‘little acre’’ plowed
and, with a little help, grew her vegetables.
In the meantime, Bernice had found brief employment in with the
New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. Traveling about Northampton, mainly
among people (white and black) well known to her, she interviewed a variety
of rural subjects, men and women, representatives of every social class,
collecting their life stories, typing them up from her notes, and sending
them off to Chapel Hill, headquarters for the project’s southern region. Be-
cause Bernice was married to a big man in the county, she had access to
practically everyone, and indeed, Herbert usually drove her to interviews.
But Bernice was a kind person, sympathetic and approachable; she also
had been a beloved schoolteacher, a Baptist churchwoman, and a tire-
less and celebrated local playmaker. Now she demonstrated a receptivity
to the poor that was the equal of that of her younger contemporary, Mar-
garet Jarman Hagood. But Bernice Kelly Harris interviewed Afro- as well
as Euro-Northamptonians, a few of whom offered shocking indictments of
big white bosses, men not unlike Herbert Harris. A number of Bernice’s
life stories have been collected in print. I read all her typescripts years ago,
while wading through the ,-odd Writers’ Project southern stories then
available in several libraries and archives. Bernice’s are not only the best-
framed and contextualized and the neatest, but they are fearlessly honest
in reproducing human voices in many life situations, without condescen-
sion.
This intense vicarious experience of others influenced Bernice Kelly Har-
ris’s fiction writing for years to come. Her first novel,Purslane()—also
the first fiction ever published by the University of North Carolina Press—
is a rural southern Romeo-and-Juliet tale in which young lovers are ill fated
not because their respective families are feuding but because they repre-
sent different white social classes. The boy/young man is the equivalent of
‘‘trash,’’ although Bernice herself would never employ such a term. Instead
the doomed protagonist and his sort are represented by nature—in Harris’s