Julia Mood Peterkin and Doris Ulmann, Roll, Jordan
Julia Mood Peterkin and Doris Ulmann
Roll, Jordan, Roll
1933
Julia Mood Peterkin was the first southerner to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she did so with the publication of Scarlet Sister Mary; a book written in 1928 largely in the Gullah dialect about the struggles of a black woman living on a plantation in South Carolina.
Roll, Jordan, Roll represents a collaboration between Peterkin and photographer Doris Ulmann, who traveled to South Carolina to record the daily life and spirituality of Gullah people who descended from slaves. In many respects this work may be understood as the literary counterpart to the work of Maryland artist Ruth Starr Rose. Doris Ulmann’s softly focused black-and-white photogravure prints read much like Rose’s beautiful charcoal studies.