Cheating the Stillness: The World of Julia Peterkin chronicles the life of a remarkable woman who rebelled against what was expected of a Southern woman in the early part of the 20th century. As a young woman, Peterkin had married and moved to Lang Syne in South Carolina, a 1500-acre plantation in the South Carolina midlands where 400 black workers farmed cotton. At age 40, she began writing startling tales about these struggling black families and their Gullah culture. This was in the nineteen-twenties, the era of Jim Crow, but also of the Harlem Renaissance. These touchstones are brought to life in the film through dramatizations of Peterkin s literature, haunting images of the South Carolina countryside, evocative archival photographs, and through interviews with writers, scholars and those who knew the writer in her later years. Peterkin persistently sent samples of her writing to the critic H.L. Mencken. He introduced her work to the literary world, and in 1924 Alfred Knopf published her first book Green Thursday. The novel met with critical acclaim, and some wondered if the author was black or white. W. E. B. DuBois described her as a Southern white woman who had "... the eye and the ear to see beauty and to know truth." Her third novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The gritty tale of a fiercely independent single mother set in a South Carolina black farming community was a bestseller at a time when American readers - white or black - were ostensibly not interested in rural African American life. With fame came a double life, as a sought-after writer at New York cultural events and as the plantation mistress who many in South Carolina felt had betrayed her race, class and gender. She felt she had to choose between these two radically different worlds, and the choice she made tells much about what it meant to be black or white, male or female, in 20th century America.