Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature

Chapter 6: "The Race Problem Was Not a Theme for Me"

Chapter 6 "The Race Problem Was Not a Theme for Me" Richard Wright and Frank Yerby thrived in similar social, geographic, and intellectual circles. Born in the same month but seven years apart, both came from the American South, Yerby from Augusta, Georgia, and Wright from Roxie, Mississippi.1 During the Great Depression, poverty forced Yerby to drop out of a doctoral program in English at the University of Chicago, where Wright happened to obtain and read sociological literature during his formative stage as a writer. Toward the latter part of the 1930s, Yerby participated in a Chicago-based New Deal program and probably rubbed elbows with Wright, Margaret Walker, William Attaway, and Arna Bontemps, all affiliated with the Chicago Renaissance. Like Wright,James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith, all expatriates in the 1950s, Yerby moved, in 1951, to Paris. In five years, he relocated to Madrid, where he lived until his death on November 29, 1991. The earliest highlight of both of their literary careers, furthermore, was the 0. Henry Award, which Wright won in 1939 for "Fire and Cloud" and Yerby in 1945 for "Health Card." Yerby's story critiques the ideology and practices of racism in the United States in ways Wright, a decade later, found provocative. For Wright, "Health Card" relates "a variation of the same theme, a man subjected to a sort of psychological castration, as it were, directly in front of his wife's eyes ... This Negro, being further from his roots, weeps tears of innocent rage."2 Despite the similarities between his work and Wright's, beginning in the mid-1940s, Yerby tried to rid himself of the expectations and responsibilities that came with writing both as a black man and in the wake of Wright's success. In a letter written to Michel Fabre, who was working on a biography of Wright, Yerby clarifies the extent of his dissociation: "I knew Dick Wright none too well. I admired him immensely as a man. I visited him in Paris circa 1953 or 4, I don't remember which. I was not at all influenced by him as a writer, except perhaps negatively. ... I liked, admired, enjoyed his earlier books; but if they influenced me at all, it was to confirm my growing suspicion that the race problem was not a theme for me."3 Certain corre- 144 Chapter 6 spondence and literary works (poems, short stories, novels, and criticism) Yerby wrote between 1933 and 1956 could explain that last line, "the race problem was not a theme for me." He was referring to the "race problem" as constructed by the genre of New Negro radicalism in Mrican American literature, led by Wright. Yerby's aversion to this genre, as articulated in his letter to Fabre, did not exist throughout his career. Nor was it the sole reason for his production of thirty novels between 1946 and 1986, with nonblack protagonists and eclectic historical settings, cultural geographies, and political themes. Early in his career, during the early 1930s, Yerby was a poet ambivalent in his employment of outdated atavistic tropes attributable to the Harlem Renaissance and in his experimentation with classical Western verse forms and humanistic themes. In the latter part of the decade, he shifted to writing short stories in the genre of New Negro radicalism, capitalizing with great critical success on the prevailing interest in Wright's fiction. Around this time, however, Yerby was becoming increasingly aware of the racial politics of American literary criticism and commercialism. Sounding much like the discontents of New Negro radicalism, he was learning that as a black writer he had to deal with the market for racial stereotypes, which appreciated Wright's Bigger Thomas at the expense of other kinds of characterizations, including the uplifted black protagonist featured in the novel he was trying to publish, This Is A{y Own. Mter several failed attempts to sell this novel to a publisher, Yerby decided that he would never write in a literary market in which racial myths, stereotypes, and other related discourses so constrained his creative options. In this regard , his first published novel, The Foxes qf Harrow, signifies a philosophical turn toward an anomalous aesthetic. The Foxes qf Harrow is quite complex. It is a peculiarly '~erican" story about Stephen Fox's vision "for endless generations" of Foxes at Harrow, the plantation in Louisiana where Stephen builds a mansion, settles his family, and cultivates his notoriety in the eyes of the local gentry...