Happy Land

Nikki is a protagonist and point-of-view character in the novel. She is 39 years old and lives in Washington, DC, where she works as a real estate agent. She has a 19-year-old daughter, Shawnie, with her ex-husband Darius, whom she divorced six years ago. She acknowledges at the start of the novel that her life is a “mess,” as she no longer enjoys real estate and struggles with Shawnie’s lack of direction in life after her high school graduation. When her grandmother, Mother Rita, asks her for help, Nikki willingly goes to her home in the hills of rural North Carolina to try to figure out what caused Mother Rita and her mother to stop talking eight years before.

Throughout the course of the text, Nikki changes as she learns to value the importance of her history and lineage. Initially, she is hesitant to believe Mother Rita’s story about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, thinking that there should be more information about it online and that it seems like a “fairy-tale,” as she cannot imagine a Black community with an actual king and queen. More importantly, she is initially uninterested in the story, failing to see its relevance to her life.