Frank Yerby, Protest, and the Picturesque [by Hollis Robbins]

Every few years a scholar rediscovers Frank Yerby (1916-1991), the black bestselling author whose most famous novels, including The Foxes of Harrow (1946), The Golden Hawk (1948), The Saracen Blade (1952), and Judas, My Brother (1968) have little or nothing to do with race protest. Yerby won’t fit the standard narrative for African American writers. His work is too melodramatic, too Gothic, too picturesque. Most attention to him is a matter of making him fit or theorizing why he doesn’t.[1]  Then he slips into obscurity for another ten years.

Yerby also tried his hand at poetry. As an undergraduate at Fisk University he published one of his first pieces, “The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands,” in The Fisk Herald in 1938. This curious poem might be read as a lament that a fascination with the Romantic and picturesque would be at odds with penning protest literature.    

The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands

I

They say that when they burned young Shelley's corpse
(For he was drowned, you know, and washed ashore
With hands and face quite gone—the fishes had,
It seems, but small respect for Genius which
Came clothed in common flesh) the noise his brains
Made as they boiled and seethed within his skull
Could well be heard five yards away. At least
No one can hear mine as they boil; but then
He could not feel his burn; and so I think
He had the best of it at that. Don't you?

II

Now all the hungry broken men stand here
Beside my bed like ghosts and cry: “Why don't
You shout our wrong aloud? Why are you not
Our voice, our sword? For you are of our blood:
You’ve seen us beaten, lynched, degraded, starved;
Men must be taught that other men are not
Mere pawns in some gigantic game in which
The winner takes the gold, the land, the work,
The breath, the heart, and soul of him who loses!”
I watch them standing there until my brain
Begins to burn within my head again—
(As Shelley's burned—poor, young dead Shelley whom
The fishes ate) then I get up and write
A very pretty sonnet, nicely rhymed
About my latest love affair, how sad
I am because some dear has thrown me for
A total loss. (But Shelley had me there,
All his affairs turned out quite well indeed;
Harriet in the river drowned for love
Of him; and Mary leaving Godwin’s house
To follow where he led—quite well—indeed!)

 III

You see this is ironical and light
Because I am so sick, so hurt inside,
I’m tired of pretty rhyming words when all
The land where I was born is soaked in tears
And blood, and black and utter hopelessness.
Now I would make a new, strong, bitter song,
And hurl it in the teeth of those I hate—
I would stand tall and proud against their blows,
Knowing I could not win, I would go down
Grandly as an oak goes down, and leave
An echo of the crash, at least, behind.
(So Shelley lived — and so at last, he died.
The fishes ate his glorious hands; and all
That mighty bulk of brain boiled when they burned him!)

Yerby’s first-person speaker assumes general familiarity with the Romantic myths surrounding Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death and cremation in 1822. Dozens of ghoulish versions circulated in the decades following.[2] “They say,” the poem opens, but who does the speaker mean by ‘they’ exactly? Shelley’s friends? Books about Romantic poetry? Yerby’s college professors? The public generally? The poem assumes that Shelley needs no introduction, though Yerby’s speaker adds details about drowning and fish in a helpful parenthesis, demonstrating his detailed knowledge of Romantic poetry gossip.

The speaker then compares himself to Shelley: “At least/No one can hear mine as they boil,” he remarks. The poem demands the reader weigh in on the comparison: “He could not feel his burn; and so I think/He had the best of it at that. Don’t you?” It’s a startling moment. To whom is the poet speaking?

The second stanza offers a clue. It begins in the present. “Now,” he says “hungry, broken men” demand that he raise his voice in protest. Race is not mentioned but is clear: “you are of our blood:/You've seen us beaten, lynched, degraded, starved.” The poem is speaking back to those who want him to write about race. But the poet’s brain begins to burn and he turns to write “A very pretty sonnet, nicely rhymed/About my latest love affair.” The comparison with Shelley returns: one poet is unsuccessful at love, the other too successful. Yerby refers casually to Harriet and Mary and Godwin, assuming again that his readers know the cast of Romantic-era characters well enough.

The third stanza returns to the reader. “You see this is ironical and light,” he begins. He is sick of “pretty rhyming words.” But what can he do? At fourteen lines, the last stanza of “The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands” evokes a sonnet. Several lines “Now I would make a new, strong, bitter song,/And hurl it in the teeth of those I hate—/I would stand tall and proud against their blows, Knowing I could not win,” echo lines from Claude McKay’s sonnets “If We Must Die” (“Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,/And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!”) and “America” (“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,/And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth”).

To whom is Yerby’s speaker comparing himself? McKay or Shelley? While Yerby ends his poem with one more comparison to Shelley, McKay seems like the real competitor. “Knowing I could not win, I would go down/Grandly as an oak goes down, and leave/An echo of the crash, at least, behind.” Yerby’s talent was not in sonnets, though he published a handful,[3] but rather in sprawling costume novels with picturesque grand oaks and decaying civilizations, leaving more than an echo behind. The protest verse he left for others.

[1]See Matthew Teutsch, “‘The Foxes of Harrow’ and Resistance,” http://interminablerambling.blogspot.com/2016/03/frank-yerbys-foxes-of-harrow-and.html; Gene Andrew Jarrett, “‘For Endless Generations’: Myth, Dynasty, and Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow, ”The Southern Literary Journal Vol. 39, No. 1 (Fall, 2006); Bruce A. Glasrud and Laurie Champion, “‘The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands’: Frank Yerby, A Black Author in White America,” The Journal of American Culture 23:4 (2000); Maryemma Graham, “Frank Yerby, King of the Costume Novel,” Essence 6.6 (1975); Hoyt A. Fuller, “Famous Writer Faces a Challenge,” Ebony (June 1966).

[2]The most famous tale is E.J. Trelawny’s, from Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858): “The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off.” See Kim Wheatley, “‘Attracted by the Body’: Accounts of Shelley's Cremation,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 49 (2000).

[3] Three sonnets by Yerby appear in Arna Bontemps, ed. American Negro Poetry (New York: Hill and Wang), 1963.

Hollis Robbins is Dean of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University. Her most recent book, the Penguin Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017.  From 2017-2018 Dr. Robbins was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC where she completed her forthcoming book, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

The fish have "but small respect for Genius which / came clothed in common flesh." Well-said. dl