African-American Historical Romance and the Imperative to Protect

"It's mighty hard when you can't protect your woman."





One of the major themes running through all the different genres of romance fiction is that of protection. In particular, the naturalness, nay, even the inevitableness, of heterosexual males' need to protect the women they come to love romantically. Just this month, I've come across the theme in one form or another while reading science fiction/fantasy romance (in the first story in Robin D. Owens' Hearts and Swords collection), comic literary romance (Grahame Simsion's The Rosie Effect), category romance (Maisey Yates' Married for Amaris's Heir), and urban fantasy romance (Kit Rocha's Beyond Innocence). If I'd read more historical romance this month, no doubt I would have found the theme there, as well. I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult for you to add to this list from your own recent romance novel reading.

Whether the story offers the promise that a hero physically or psychologically protects the woman he loves, or, more often these days, demonstrates to the hero that his need to protect his woman is getting in the way of said woman's self-actualization and must be restrained, if not given over entirely, in romance, the hero's desire to to protect his mate is rarely called into question. More importantly, neither is his ability to do so.

Perhaps that's why the line above, used as this post's epigraph, made such a striking impression on me. It's from Piper Huguley's African-American inspirational historical romance A Virtuous Ruby, the first volume in her "Migrations of the Heart" series. I'm not usually drawn to Christian romance, given its tendency to embrace traditional patriarchal (i.e., anti-feminist) values, but there is so little historical romance with African American characters currently being published that I decided to give Hugeley's series a try. And I'm glad I did, not only because Hugeley's story features characters and histories rarely seen in popular romance, but also because it got me thinking about whether there is an inherent opposition between genre romance's protection imperative and the realities of African-American history. Or at least the pieces of African-American history that are most often taught in white classrooms.

Set in a small Georgia town in 1915, A Virtuous Ruby tells of the romance between two light-skinned African-Americans, one a doctor trained in the north, the other the oldest daughter of a local farmer and a laundress, a young woman whose outspokenness on behalf of factory workers' rights and against lynching met with white retaliation in the form of rape, impregnation, and the scandal of bearing a bastard child. Right from the very start of the novel, then, we are given a female protagonist who has not been protected—not by her father, not by her family or community, and especially not by her white male best friend, who, in a vicious inversion of the typical romance trope, is the one who is chosen to commit the violent attack upon Ruby Bledsoe's person.

Does the arrival of doctor Adam Morson in town signal a change for Ruby? Does Ruby just need the love of a good man, a man committed to her protection, to guarantee she will be free from future harm?

Amos 'n Andy's Sapphire
Stevens, whose character first linked
the name "Sapphire" with the African
American woman as domineering shrew

If the characters in this novel were white, the answer would more likely than not be "yes." But though Ruby and Adam are as light-skinned as any of the officially white citizens of the small Georgia town in which they live, they are not white; they are black. If an African-American young woman in 1912 does not conform to the one "positive" stereotype held by the majority of white Americans—that of the nurturing "Mammy"—then she must fall into one of the two negative stereotypes—the sexually promiscuous Jezebel, or the angry, in-your-face Sapphire. Or, even more upsettingly, embody a terrifying combination of them both (See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, and Carolyn M. West, "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and Their Homegirls" for more on these stereotypes).

A racist license plate deploys the Jezebel stereotype
to denigrate black Democrats

The white anxiety that the stereotypes of Jezebel and Sapphire simultaneously create and evoke leads not to a desire to protect another, but to lash out in fear, to protect one's white self against a black threat. Such racist anxieties, combined with the historical reality that enslaved black women were often overworked, beaten, and raped, make it more than a little difficult to deploy the romance theme of male protectiveness in historical romance featuring characters of African descent.

The word "protect," or one of its other forms ("protection," "protected," "protectiveness") appears 43 times in the NetGalley version of Huguley's book. Black characters protect themselves from the elements ("The wide brim would protect her too pale skin from the June heat" [43]); they express a desire to protect family members ("you know we want to protect our little man," says Ruby's younger sister, referring to Ruby's baby [664]); they bemoan the ineffectiveness of others' protective efforts ( "the solid nature of the wood that John Bledsoe used to protect his family struck him. What a good man he was, and still, despite his protections of building this big porch for his daughters, they were still terribly vulnerable" [1030]; they grieve their own inabilities to protect ("It was four or five of them. They all beat me down and had their way with me. I tried to fight them off, but I couldn't. I just couldn't.... "And they knock me out so I couldn't protect her." [1624]). Whites use the word as a form of threat: "I'll do what I have to do to make sure he's protected" [1882].

As this is a Christian romance, ultimately the characters must give themselves over to God's protection: "God will protect me. He will keep me," Ruby tells herself when she fears her former friend is about to attack her again [33-8]. Yet even God can't keep Ruby safe in her small Georgia town. Nor, significantly in romance terms, can Adam. Though Ruby pictures running "straight into the protective arms of Adam" as she flees from her potential attacker, ultimately Ruby and Adam must promise to move out of their town completely, and migrate to the north, in order to ensure their own safety.

Towards the end of the book, Adam can not only not protect Ruby, he cannot protect himself: he is shanghaied onto a chain gang by a malevolent (white) sheriff. While working on the gang, he hears the words used as the epigraph above, spoken by a fellow prisoner:

     "It's might hard when you can't protect your woman," James said.
     Many of the men around the table nodded, agreeing. "Don't nobody blame you." (3047)

I wonder, though, if that "nobody" includes the average romance novel reader? Do expectations raised by romance as a genre, expectations that male heroes must and will always protect their women, make it difficult for some romance readers to embrace stories where such protection proves problematic? Might the woeful lack of African-American historical fiction be due in some small part to this opposition between, on one side, romance's protective imperative, and on the other, the painful historical realities of the African American experience, and the stereotypes whites have developed to protect themselves against acknowledging it?


Photo credits:
Sapphire Stevens and LBJ license plate: Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
Psalm 91:4: Spiritual Inspiration Tumblr