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- Publisher
- University of North Carolina Press
- ISSN
- 1534-1461
Abstract
Why Does the Slave Ever Love? The Subject of Romance Revisited in the Neoslave Narrative by Angelo Rich Robinson [Blacks] are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. — Thomas Jefferson, 1787 Until . . . [the emotional capacity for romance] is thoroughly established in respect to Negroes in America, . . . it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex. . . . As it is now, this capacity, this evidence of high and complicated emotions, is ruled out. — Zora Neale Hurston, 1950 Like Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Sherley Anne Williams’ white male antagonist, Adam Nehemiah, in her novel Dessa Rose (1986) also believes that African Americans are incapa - ble of experiencing romance in their intimate relationships. Nehemiah is of the opinion that blacks are capable of achieving only the most innate form of physical desire: lust. The idea of black romance, even if fiction - alized, is for Nehemiah, a nineteenth-century writer, a joke,
Journal
The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 30, 2008