This
Valentine’s Day, I paid homage
to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1924 novel, “Dark
Princess,” because it highlights the least
talked about subject then and now: Black love.
Two
activities converged for me during COVID-19:
when not officiating funerals, I read romance
novels and took long walks along the Charles
River, thinking about W. E. B. Du Bois as a
romantic.
During
my morning constitutional, I intentionally
passed 20 Flagg Street, where sociologist W.
E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to
receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University,
resided from 1890 to 1893 while a doctoral
student because of the university’s
segregation housing policy prohibiting blacks
in the dorms. Since 1994, thanks to then Mayor
Reeves (the first gay and black mayor of
Cambridge), the house is part of the Cambridge
African American Heritage Trail, and the
Cambridge Historical Commission placed a
marker on the front yard to commemorate Du
Bois’s life.
During
COVID, I happened upon a romantic novel by Du
Bois titled, “Dark Princess, A Romance Novel.”
I was in disbelief. Du Bois said of his body
of works, “Dark Princess, A Romance Novel” was
his favorite. Because the book was on sale on
Amazon as a Kindle ebook for $2.99, I thought
to myself, what did I have to lose? Moreover,
the thought of Du Bois having written a
romance novel didn’t fit the image of the man
I learned about in college.
Born
three years after the American Civil War in
1868 and died one day before the historic
March on Washington in August 1963, Du Bois is
known as one of last century’s preeminent
scholars on African American life. Known as
Willie to family and friends, Du Bois spent
his formative years in the Berkshire community
of Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
approximately a 2-1/2 hour drive from Boston.
I wonder if it was during his time in Great
Barrington, with less than thirty African
American families, that the seed of his
concept of “double consciousness” began to
take root when he depicted his 1903 seminal
and autoethnographic text, “The Souls of Black
Folk,”
“Dark Princess” was written
in 1924 during the Harlem Renaissance. This
cultural and artistic movement promoted
black America’s causes, hopes, dreams, and
genius through its black intellectuals,
musicians, writers, poets, and artists, like
Langston Hughes, Zoe Neal Hurston, and James
Weldon Johnson.
“Dark
Princess” was Du Bois’s effort to showcase
black love while illustrating his concept of
the “problem of the color line” at home and
abroad and the need for solidarity across
races. While the book shows that Black and
Brown lives globally are constantly
challenged, it also highlights we must find
time for joy, love, and celebration as a
radical act of liberation.
The
protagonist, Matthew Townes, an aspiring
obstetrician student, is told because he’s
African American, he’ll not be permitted to
treat white patients, bringing the opportunity
to complete his studies to a halt. With
shattered dreams, Townes goes to Berlin, where
he meets Kautilya, a Southeast Asian princess
who’s the daughter of the Maharaja of Bvodfur.
While Kautilya educates Townes about the
racial struggles all people of color confront
globally against white supremacy, a romance
blooms between them, and they marry.
African
American life in the U.S. is primarily
depicted as a struggle devoid of romantic love
rather than a radical act of living,
liberation, and loving families. Under the
tyranny of colonization, slavery, Jim Crow,
and simple everyday life, how do we have time
for romance? Or a softer racial spin on the
subject, I’ve been asked, as a people who are
so fixated on freedom, do we have the capacity
for romantic love? Also, bombarded by the
iconography of negative images and racial
tropes on multimedia platforms of black woman
as emasculating females, mammy, and welfare
mothers, black men “super-predators,” pimps,
and roving phalluses, the perception is Black
people don’t engage in romance - we have sex.
We make babies.
Du
Bois concludes the novel with the birth of
Townes’s son, showing that love exists in
black and interracial families, both taboo
topics until Mildred Loving (Loving v.
Virginia, 1967), who’s often overlooked in the
pantheon of African American trailblazers
celebrated in February during Black History
Month. Loving gained notoriety when the
landmark U.S. Supreme Court decided in her
favor that anti-miscegenation laws are
unconstitutional. Her crime was this country’s
racial and gender obsession - interracial
marriage. Married to a white man, Loving and
her husband were indicted by a Virginia grand
jury in October 1958 for violating the state’s
“Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” the same year
Du Bois’s novel appeared.
Loving understood the
interconnection of struggles and supported the
same-sex marriage fight. Today, we are free to
marry who we want. Black LGBTAI+
couples, thanks to Du Bois, who led the way
with his novel, and Loving, who challenged the
law, illustrated what black love and families
look like.
In
2023, as a “Love letter to Black Families,” an
Atlanta-based black couple was inspired by
W.E.B. Du Bois’s, “The Brownies’s Book,” with
their version. Between 1920 and 1921, the book
was a monthly magazine, Du Bois depicted as
for “Children of the Sun … designed for all
children, but especially for ours.” Du Bois
wanted black children to hear positive stories
and see positive images of themselves while
growing up during the Jim Crow era.
Similarly,
the now husband and wife duo of Charly Palmer
and Karida L. Brown saw the need for an
expanded book version. At that time, the two
were working on “The New Brownies’ Book: A
Love Letter to Black Families,” and a romance
was blossoming between Brown and Palmer.
“We
want the book on the coffee table of every
Black family across the country and around the
world. It’s a love letter to Black families.
We want Black families to know they are
loved.”
