Roll, Jordan, Roll

New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933. First Edition. 8vo; 251pp, with 75 photographs on double-sided plates, including frontispiece; original blue cloth, gilt spine, edges faded about 1/8 in, endpapers a bit aged toned, jacket chipped along all edges rubbed ("E" in Peterkin missing on spine) with creases on both front panel, very good in used jacket.
Julia Mood Peterkin (1880-1961), South Carolina native, lived on her husband's two-thousand acre plantation and also had a summer home at Murrell's Inlet, a coastal village. She wrote, with realism and dignity, plantation stories and stories of the Gullah African American tenant farmers of the Sea Islands and coastal regions. She was a sympathetic and outstanding commentator of the lives of this vanishing black culture. Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was a well-respected photographer of the period who specialized in portraying the people of the "Southern Highlands" Appalachia and the coastal blacks Peterkin wrote about. Ulman's photographs of now vanished worlds capture her subjects with respect, insight, and grace and a transcendent quality which embodies the beauty and mystery of human experience. ROLL, JORDAN ROLL is a non-fiction work which portrays the Gullah in a perfect artistic blend of text and picture. American Woman Writers III, pp. 373-374. Jacobs, The Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann. In Focus: Doris Ulmann, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum.