Exhibition on Black Historical Romance, Sept. 7-10

This webpage accompanies “Black Historical Romance and the Archive,” a student-curated exhibition by Jeania Ree Moore (YC ‘12, GSAS ‘26) that will be on view at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library from September 7-10. View the exhibition in the Beinecke mezzanine during open hours (Thurs. 9am-7pm, Fri. 9am-5pm, Sat. and Sun. noon-5pm; 121 Wall St.) and read more about the objects below.

While many perceive historical romance as an escapist genre, for generations of Black writers and readers, it is anything but. For over 130 years, African American writers from Frances E. W. Harper to W.E.B. Du Bois have engaged romance as a space of historical activism and education, utilizing the genre to interrogate ideas of history, challenge racist erasures, and intervene in widespread public ignorance of Black history.

This exhibition explores this legacy through the pioneering work of contemporary writer Beverly Jenkins. The bestselling author of over thirty historical romances set mainly during Reconstruction and its aftermath (1860s-1890s), Jenkins pens novels that both entertain and educate. They reveal little-known Black histories, always include bibliographies, and always end with the required happy ending.

Case 1 contains texts by Jenkins’s literary forbears, like a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 Poems on Various Subjects (observing its 250th anniversary this month) and a first edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 Iola Leroy, commonly recognized as the first Black historical romance novel; as well as formative historical sources found in Jenkins’s bibliographies and nonfiction writing, like Nell Painter’s 1977 Exodusters and Mary Prince’s 1831 History. Case 2 contains items that evoke the nineteenth-century Black worlds Jenkins brings to life. Several items on display are objects from the archives of the Sugg and McDonald family, a prominent Black family that lived in Sonora, California from the 1850s-1980s. Both cases contain photographs of nineteenth-century African Americans from the Randolph Linsly Simpson African American Collection.

Below is more information about select objects and their connections to Jenkins’s oeuvre.

Photographs

These photographs provide glimpses of nineteenth-century Black life and reflect the protagonists that appear in Jenkins’s historical romances, including heroines who are doctors, seamstresses, journalists, and more, and heroes who are Buffalo soldiers, cowboys, engineers and more in novels like Vivid, Destiny’s Embrace, and Before the Dawn.

Click on each photo to see it in greater detail and explore more images in the Randolph Linsly Simpson and WA Photos 9 soldiers collections.

 

Sugg and McDonald Family Papers

The Sugg and McDonald Family Papers document an African American family that lived in northern California between the 1850s-1980s. William Sugg, a formerly enslaved man, built the family home in Sonora, and this building is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Items on display from this collection reflect the landscapes of Black homes and domestic spaces found in Jenkins’s novels, as well as actual historical items lying behind her work. For example, a handwritten chili sauce recipe from the family’s collection of recipes and remedies recalls the archaeological inspiration for Forbidden (2016), Jenkins’s romance set in 1870s Nevada. As Jenkins recounts in her Author’s Note, she decided to set Forbidden in Virginia City, Nevada when she learned about an archaeological dig there that in the early 2000s uncovered evidence of a Black-owned saloon in the form of a hot sauce bottle and a brass trombone mouthpiece. The site was the Boston Saloon, a tavern owned and operated by William A.G. Brown from 1866-1875. Jenkins quotes from the lead archaeologist, Kelly Dixon, who said that “’the mere existence of an African American saloon … alters our sense of the so-called Wild West’” (quoted in Jenkins, Forbidden, 368). The Sugg and McDonald Family archives similarly illuminate Black western histories that refute exclusively white landscapes.

Items on display:

  • MVS. “Recipe for Chili Sauce.” Sunday, October 1, 1893. Sugg and McDonald Family Papers.

  • Napoleon Suggs. Household budget journal. 1895. Sugg and McDonald Family Papers.

  • Portraits (tintypes) of boy and young woman. Undated. Sugg and McDonald Family Papers.

 

Texts

Nell Painter. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. 1977. Publisher’s proof copy. James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.

Nell Painter’s Exodusters is included in the Author’s Note bibliography that concludes Jenkins’s first novel, Night Song (1994). Jenkins’s practice of including an Author’s Note and bibliography about the real history behind her novels began with this work. Night Song is a romance between a freeborn Black schoolteacher and a self-emancipated Buffalo soldier sergeant is set on the plains of 1880s Kansas, in a Black Exoduster township called Henry Adams. The fictional town of Henry Adams is based on the real Black towns founded by African Americans who fled white supremacist violence and terrorism in the South after the Civil War. Jenkins named this fictional town after a historical Black figure, Louisiana political activist and leader Henry Adams, who was born enslaved in 1843 and who advocated for Black emigration out of the South in the face of white supremacist violence. Adams testified before the U.S. Senate in 1880 about white terrorism. The inspired nineteenth-century town of Henry Adams is a backdrop in several of Jenkins’s historical romances and is also—over 150 years later in its twenty-first century iteration as a failing town undergoing revitalization from a Black female millionaire—the setting and focal point for her contemporary, non-romance small town fiction series, the Blessings series.

 

Phillis Wheatley. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. 1773. Signed first edition. James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.

Published September 1, 1773, Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects is observing its 250th anniversary this month. Wheatley, the renowned formerly enslaved Black poet, is mentioned in Midnight (2010), Jenkins’s Revolutionary War-era historical romance between two Black Revolutionary spies set in 1770s Boston. In Midnight, the famed but sickly Wheatley is unable to appear at an abolitionist fundraiser in a Black Boston community due to illness.

 

Frances E.W. Harper. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. First edition. James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a poet, novelist, abolitionist, feminist, lecturer, teacher, activist, and more who lived from 1825—1911. Born free in Baltimore, Harper spoke and wrote prolifically, and traveled for public speaking and work at a time when women’s, particularly Black women’s, public speaking and work was rare and discouraged. She traveled extensively in the South for social and volunteer work during Reconstruction. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted is commonly recognized as the first Black historical romance novel. It is an adventurous tale that confronts painful historical realities and legacies of slavery, including racial passing, family separation, sexual violence, and more; and yet, ends happily with the Black protagonists in love and committed to the social, economic, and spiritual betterment of their community and people. Harper wrote Iola Leroy as a form of literary activism to encourage and support African Americans in the post-Reconstruction years. Jenkins often names and celebrates her predecessors like Harper, who built the legacy of Black literature that came before and continues today with her work and that of other Black writers across genre. Iola Leroy can be read for free online at Project Gutenberg, or listened to for free in podcast or online formats via LibriVox.

 

Mary Prince. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave as Related by Herself. 1831. Slavery Pamphlets.

As Beverly Jenkins writes in her essay contribution to the 2022 Black Love Matters anthology, author and abolitionist Mary Prince’s 1831 dictated and published account of her enslavement was “Great Britain’s first published account of an enslaved Black woman’s life” (Jenkins, “A Short History of African American Romance”). Jenkins recounted the stark, painful, powerful details of Prince’s life and writing in her 2016 keynote speech before the Romance Writers of America.

Golden Legacy Illustrated History Magazine, “Black Cowboys,” Issue 12. 1972. James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.

The Golden Legacy Illustrated magazines were published in the 1960s and 1970s and utilized an innovative, popular magazine format to teach Black history to young readers. In addition to the Golden Legacy display issue on Black Cowboys, other issues focus on Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Matthew Henson, and more. Like Jenkins’s novels, these magazines represent an effort to share and circulate Black history through popular and accessible means. This Black Cowboys magazine issue reflects the Black female and male ranchers and cowboys who populate the ranks of Jenkins’s Black western heroines and heroes in romances like The Taming of Jessi Rose, Breathless, Wild Rain, Destiny’s Embrace, and more.

 

Bibliography

Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happily Ever Afters. Edited by Jessica P. Pryde. New York: Penguin Random House, 2022.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Edited by Koritha Mitchell. Broadview Press: Canada, 2018.

Jenkins, Beverly. “A Short History of African American Romance.” In Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happily Ever Afters. Edited by Jessica P. Pryde. New York: Penguin Random House, 2022.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Jenkins’s novels cited in this description:

Jenkins, Beverly. Before the Dawn. New York: Avon Books, 2001.

———. Breathless. New York: Avon Books, 2017.

———. Destiny’s Embrace. New York: Avon Books, 2013.

———. Forbidden. New York: Avon Books, 2016.

———. Midnight. New York: Avon Books, 2010.

———. Night Song. New York: Avon Books, 1994.

———. The Taming of Jessi Rose. New York: Avon Books, 1999.

———. Topaz. New York: Avon Books, 1997.

———. Vivid. 1995. Reprint, 2000.

———. Wild Rain. New York: Avon Books, 2021.

This exhibition is curated by Jeania Ree Moore, YC ‘12, GSAS 2026.