Dolen Perkins-Valdez has spent the better portion of her adult life in libraries and archives. She has become one of the most celebrated Black historical fiction writers, offering Americans a means of acknowledging and embracing stories from the reaches of their ancestors’ journals and diaries.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez brings the lives of Black women to light in her debut novel, “Wench.” (Photo by Shantella Y. Sherman)
In her debut work, “Wench,” Perkins-Valdez examines the lives of four enslaved women- –Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu, by focusing on their roles as their owners’ mistresses. Instead of placing the narrative along the fields or stretches of a Southern plantation, “Wench” begins with the women meeting while on vacation with their masters are at the same summer resort in Ohio. Another work, “Balm,” documents love, passion, and reconciliation during Reconstruction, follows three characters, Madge, Hemp and Sadie from the South into Chicago, which was released in March.
Perkins-Valdez recently wrote and published the Intro to the Elizabeth Keckley memoir,” Behind the Scenes.”
For readers, Perkins-Valdez’s work opens new terrain by introducing characters with depth and agency, and who literally work against the grain of historical understanding.
“Blacks, especially Black women, are generally missing from the great American history book. When she is spoken of at all, it is by or through someone else – she never gets to tell her version of events,” Barbara Stallings-West, a retired librarian and historical fiction fan told the AFRO. “It is one of the reasons why I like Perkins-Valdez, because she gets it. She understands that Black women were as multi-faceted then as now.”
Perkins-Valdez was born in Tennessee and reared with an abiding love of Southern culture and told the AFRO it was important to give voice to the many women and men whose stories were never told by digging through archives and finding them.
“A great deal of American history simply didn’t make sense to me until I began researching African-American history. It was then that the pieces began to fit together like puzzle pieces. The two do not function as separate, segregated stories,” Perkins-Valdez told the AFRO. “We often enter history as readers or students where our interests lie, but there is a general curiosity that, I believe, AfricanAmericans should have about their place in America from 1619 forward.”
Perkins-Valdez said she was fascinated by the idea of taking Black experiences out of traditional spaces such as the South and putting them in places that were, in some ways, peripheral. As for bringing the past back to life, PerkinsValdez said what makes America triumphant as a nation is the resolve and resilience to look back, acknowledge, celebrate, and in some cases, rebuild.
“Rebuilding is a testament to who we are as a country, because we’re still doing it, but we’re still sort of surviving. We’re a triumphant nation, and that’s what I focus on. I think about the South rising again, I think of the North rising again, I think of freed men and women. We reinvent. We survive,” Perkins-Valdez said.
Perkins-Valdez reached the New York Times bestselling list with “Wench,” which was also chosen as one of “O” — The Oprah Magazine’s Top Ten Picks of the Month in 2010.