posted on 30 Mar 2023

Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi

When I first started making regular visits to second hand bookshops in the UK, I would often see British book club versions of novels by Frank Yerby. This was the mid-1970s and I’d just completed my degree in English literature but Frank Yerby was a name I’d never come across and (I reasoned entirely erroneously) the fact that he was available in such volume in horrid, cheap editions must indicate that he had no literary value. It wasn’t until much later, when I’d shuffled off some of my more irritating prejudices and enhanced my curiosity factor, that I discovered Yerby was a whole a lot more interesting than I’d given him credit for.

I tell you this because it is entirely germane to a new study from Princeton University Press, Impermanent Blackness, which marks the publishing debut of Korey Garibaldi, an American studies professor at the University of Notre Dame. Garibaldi’s study, although academic, is a compelling and readable account of how the relationship between emerging Black authors and their predominantly white-run publishing firms developed in the USA between the 1910s and the 1960s.

Initially it seemed that this relationship would be collaboratively creative, helping to diversify and expand the boundaries of what Black writing should or could be and that this would not only be commercially successful but would also challenge stereotypes and advance racial pluralism. And this is where Frank Yerby comes back into the story. What I didn’t know when I was passing up his books in a Birmingham bookshop all those years ago was that he was the “most commercially successful African American author of his generation” and sold titles such as The Foxes of Harrow (1946) in shed-loads. For a time at least this new inter-racial partnership in publishing looked as if it would lead to a huge step forward but there was always an undertow of resistance from the white majority and Garibaldi unpicks the way in which even seemingly well-meaning white supporters still retained the upper hand in this partnership and more hostile ‘white supremacist’ and racist sympathisers were keen to keep Black writers in a lesser or subservient position. 

These emerging tensions began to break down what the pioneers – W.S. Braithwaite, Frank Yerby, Juanita Harrison – thought they’d crafted. By the dawning of the 1960s these early advocates of inter-racial writing and publishing were being seen as ‘too white’ and failing to confront the reality of a society built on white power.

I was delighted to see that Garibaldi also gives due weight to the importance of children’s literature and there’s an engaging chapter given over to an analysis of how this notion of inter-racial writing and publishing impacted on the way story and illustration for young readers developed.

Impermanent Blackness provides a window on an important aspect of American literary history and although its author recognises the weaknesses and failures of the Black authors who allowed themselves to believe that an new kind of inter-racial was possible, he also doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These writers were indeed pioneers and achieved much that is in danger of being forgotten – a fate that’s less likely now we have this excellent study.

 

Terry Potter

March 2023