I found a copy of Yerby’s 23rd novel, Speak Now, in Beckham’s Bookshop in New Orleans. It was the first Yerby novel I read. I saw, even in a novel set in France, how Yerby was deconstructing the myths of the Old South and tearing down the social constructions of race that have dug their roots deep into our cultural psyche. I backtracked, started reading his earlier works, and I saw that while the covers and plots mirrored Mitchell and Faulkner, he subversively countered those narratives.
Frank Yerby published his first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, in 1946. It immediately became a smash hit, selling over 500,000 copies in its first few months. Yerby became the first African American writer to option off the film rights for a book, and Twentieth Century Fox released a watered-down film version in 1947, directed by John Stahl, with a screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, and starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara. In The Foxes of Harrow, Yerby directly confronted Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a novel that Lillian Smith called "a curious puffball compounded of printer's ink and bated breath, rolled in sugary sentimentality, stuck full of spicy Southern taboos."
Yerby would go on to write 32 more novels, the majority being Book of the Month Club selections and financial successes. Some artists and critics like Langston Hughes initially praised Yerby; however, they began to malign him because all of his novels, except two, centered on white protagonists. Robert Bone even infamously called Yerby “the prince of pulpsters” in his 1958 The Negro Novel in America.
When I read Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949), I saw how she was illuminating the triptych forces of sin, sex, and segregation that unleashed themselves amongst the masses. Just as I did with Yerby, I began to backtrack, reading what she had written from her mountain home in Clayton, Georgia. From 1936 to 1945, when public lynchings and Jim Crow law ruled the land, Smith and her partner, Paula Snelling, published an openly liberal quarterly journal, Pseudopodia, that had a circulation of 10,000, and included authors such as W.J. Cash, Pauli Murray, and artists such as Jacob Lawrence.
“Even the children knew that the South was in trouble. No one had to tell them; no words said aloud. To them, it was a vague thing weaving in and out of their play, like a ghost haunting an old graveyard or whispers after the household sleeps—fleeting mystery, vague menace to which each responded in his own way.”