Scarlet in South Carolina

Smalltown newspapers are fun to publish. Along with the small town and county and state news there sometimes comes a chance to champion a cause, to cry a crime, to excite a people, usually a sluggish, smalltownish people. Such a chance came less than a month ago to "the youngest newspaper staff in the country" (not a man over 32)--the staff of the Cherokee Times of Gaffney, a hilltown on the northern edge of South Carolina with a population of 10,000 (including Negroes).

The cause which Editor-Publisher George B. Lay hit upon seemed germane to the whole state of South Carolina. It derived from a lady living near the centre of the state on Lang Syne Plantation, 40 miles from Columbia. She, Mrs. Julia Peterkin, began acquiring national distinction as an authoress five years ago when she published Green Thursday, followed in 1927 by Black April. All her major characters are South Carolina Negroes, drawn as she has known them all her life on a South Carolina plantation. Not everything that plantation Negroes do is charming or even pleasant to contemplate. But nearly everything that Mrs. Peterkin's characters did and said was interesting. She has a great talent for creative observation and description, for realistic folklore.

Last Autumn when Mrs. Peterkin announced a book called Scarlet Sister Mary, librarians throughout South Carolina ordered copies as a matter of course. They were a little taken aback to read the publisher's blurb that this was "the story of the harlot of Blue Brook Plantation.'' But since there are black harlots on some plantations, and everyone knows it, most South Carolina librarians read the book anyway and put it on the shelves.

Not so Librarian Mattie Pearson of Gaffney. She concluded that Scarlet Sister Mary was too promiscuous, even if she was the brainchild of Mrs. Peterkin. Mrs. Pearson saw to it that the book stayed off the public shelves of Gaffney. When Gaffneyans came asking for Scarlet Sister Mary they were told she had been suppressed for immorality.

That was when the Cherokee Times stepped in. Commercially it seemed a good bet to get permission, quickly granted, to publish Scarlet Sister Mary serially. Intellectually it was exciting for Editor-Publisher George B. Lay, 32, and his two young associates--Thomas Freeman and W. Wells Alexander, each 22--to awaken Gaffney from what they, as college men, called its "uncultured daze.'' Moreover, there was, as Mrs. Peterkin said in her letter to Mr. Lay, the possibility that Librarian Pearson had eaten something disagreeable the morning she proscribed the book.

Newspapers throughout the state had carried the news that Scarlet Sister Mary was too scarlet for Gaffney. Now they carried the story that the Cherokee Times had a scarlet serial. And next--great "scoop" for the Cherokee Times!--they carried news that Scarlet Sister Mary had won the Pulitzer Prize for 1928 as best U. S. novel of the year (TIME, May 27).

Last week notes began dropping in upon the Cherokee Times--Gaffneyites cancelling their $1.50 subscriptions. But also came notes, many of them from outside of Gaffney, ordering new $1.50 subscriptions. For this week the Cherokee Times was the first of U. S. newspapers to begin publishing the year's Pulitzer novel in serial form--a feature for which big metropolitan publishers always bid handsomely.

With each issue of the Cherokee Times, the issue of Scarlet Sister Mary will grow greater, for over and above the question of a black wench's "immorality," is the question of whether or not conditions on South Carolina plantations are as Mrs. Peterkin paints them, and above that comes the question of whether or not such conditions should be recognized and discussed. "If you know South Carolina," chuckled the Cherokee Times, "You may surmise that the storm will be more than a zephyr."