Bernice Kelly Harris was the third of seven children born to an eastern Wake County farm family. Her early life was centered in the Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, her large extended family, and the social and practical concerns of turn-of-the-century rural life. She graduated from Meredith College in 1913, and worked as a high school English teacher until shortly after her 1926 marriage to Seaboard farmer Herbert Kavanaugh Harris. Following her marriage, she took part in community dramatics activities and taught playwriting classes in her living room to local women, sharing knowledge she had gained as a summer school student under Frederick H. Koch at the University of North Carolina.

In the 1930s she began sending character sketches and human interest stories to the Norfolk and Raleigh newspapers. Her work caught the attention of editor Jonathan Daniels, who suggested she write a novel. Her first attempt, Purslane, won the 1939 Mayflower Society Cup as best North Carolina book of the year. The episodic novel is based on Harris' childhood memories of her home, family and community. She wrote six more novels over the next decade, each of them loving, occasionally satiric, evocations of human behavior with all its strengths and weaknesses. Her 1946 novel, Janey Jeems, followed the fortunes of a hard-working, religious country family that the author only inferentially indicated was black. The novel was noted by its publishers as the first by a white author about African-Americans to have the humanity not to mention race.

After her husband's death in 1950, Mrs. Harris once again grew active in community dramatics, holding writing classes and staging productions in local towns and at the state festival. A dramatization of one of her novels was nationally televised. In 1963, she began teaching non-credit creative writing classes at Chowan College, as much for the pleasure of meeting imaginative people as for anything else. She once said, "People, not books, have always been my first interest in life." One of those teacher/writers whose minds are stimulated by contact with students, her teaching resulted in two of her favorite books, Southern Home Remedies and Strange Things Happen. She received, posthumously, a Brown-Hudson Folklore Award for these two collections from the North Carolina Folklore Society. Her other honors and awards included honorary degrees from Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1966. She served as President of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and on the board of trustees of the State Library Commission and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was also active in the North Carolina Writers Conference and the Roanoke-Chowan Group.

Excerpt from Purslane
UNC Press, 1939

Calvin and Nannie Lou gathered the ripe persimmons and locusts, packed them in the molasses barrel with a few sweet potatoes, covered the mixture with water and broom straw, and waited. Later they would heat some rocks to drop into the barrel, and by Christmas the beer would be ready to draw. There was still enough in the other barrel for the cornshuckers. By Friday the corn was arranged in huge mounds, with chairs placed around the heaps for the shuckers. The men gathered early in the afternoon around the plump tan-sheathed ears of corn, joked lustily, wise-cracked a little naughtily, sang, yodeled, and shouted over the red ears. In the kitchen the women were preparing great platters of savory chicken slick, fresh backbone from one of the shoats John had butchered the day before, sweet potatoes, fruit pies, collard greens seasoned with hog-jaw and red pepper, potato pudding, turnips. The girls frisked back and forth with huge pitchers of persimmon beer; Uncle Job asked them to bring him a glass of water. Then Cousin Nath pretended the beer had gone to his head and acted drunk, to the great merriment of the crowd, who knew that a whole barrel of their kind of beer would not intoxicate. The girls, lingering while the boys hunted for red ears, were finally called back to the kitchen to peel the syrupy batises,* to open stone jars of cucumber and pear pickle and grape and fig preserves. Letha stayed with the women and never showed herself at all before the men. When the table groaned to the right volume for the women, the men came in and were served, not too obtrusively, for some were ill at ease with the girls watching them eat. By lantern light the men finished the shucking and then came to the house to sit by the open fire and plan their next year's crops, while the women across the room raised biddies, planted gardens, and bragged a little on their children. In the kitchen the young folks pulled stewed sugar and molasses into ropes of taffy. Over a pan of stewed molasses Kate and Garland became conscious of each other. The syrup stuck to their fingers however heavily they were buttered, and Garland finally whispered to Kate that he was some kind of stuck on her. *A variety of sweet potato.

Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940.

Hearthstones. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948.

Janey Jeems. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946.

Portulaca. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1941.

Purslane. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939.

Sage Quarter. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1945.

The Santa on the Mantel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.

Southern Savory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

Sweet Beulah Land. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1943.

The Very Real Truth about Christmas. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.

Wild Cherry Tree Road. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951.

Appearances in periodicals, including in Carolina Play-Book, and North Carolina Historical Review.

Glover, Erma W. Salt of the Earth: Plain People in the Novels of Bernice Kelly Harris. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977.

Walser, Richard. Bernice Kelly Harris: Storyteller of Eastern Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Library, 1955.

Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Bernice Kelly Harris: A Good Life Was Writing. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1999.

Links to further information:

Bernice Kelly Harris' Papers at UNC

Sweet Beulah Land - recent Coastal Carolina Press reissue of this Carolina Classic