In these novels and stories, Peterkin taps the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.

Plowing, hog-killing, revival meetings, and conjure bags - evidence of a world dominated by hard work, religion, and magic - drive the plot of Julia Peterkin's powerful first novel, Black April, first published in 1927. In this book, the classic theme of a proud man confronting his own mortality and the tragic consequences of human desire are played out against the rituals of black country life. "The figure of Black April, the foreman of Blue Brook Plantation, who gives the book its title, is of the heroic, almost grandiose, mold of the legendary protagonists of fiction", the New York Times wrote in an early review.