As an African American man in Augusta, a town deeply rooted in the racist ideologies and practices of the segregated South, Frank Yerby certainly had had enough experiences with Jim Crow living, discrimination, and racial terrorism to fuel his writing for a lifetime. Despite becoming best-known, perhaps, for his prolific authorship of novels that focused primarily on white lives and characters, Yerby commented in an interview with Maryemma Graham, “In every novel I have written about the American South, I have subtly infused a very strong defense of Black history and Black people” (70). Rhetorical defenses in novels that are largely not about Black lives are certainly worth noting; however, in this chapter I argue that the exploration of the world as it impacted Black people was a more consistent interest for Yerby than many recognized. He wrote a number of short stories that specifically focused on the impacts of racism and subjugation on the Black psyche and identity, the intimate relationships between men and women of African descent, and the understandings and performances of Black masculinity.
Familial Places in Jim Crow Spaces: Kinship, Demography, and the Color Line in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County