Freedom figures prominently as a theme in Black historical romances – whether the characters are enslaved or free – and the HEA of the individual couple often seems bound to the freedom of the Black community at large finding romantic love is so rarely the sum total of a HEA. Despite this good fortune, she believes that only the end of slavery can make her life complete” (36).
Dandridge asserts that Hester and Galen’s HEA is not located at the end of the book but would have to exist at some point in the future: “As a married woman, Hester has a good husband, has found her mother, and is pregnant with her first child. In her discussion of Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo, Rita B.
But how might the complicated relationship between love and pain figure into the HEA of a romance novel when the characters are enslaved or living in the time of slavery?
Pain in the Black past was often tempered by joy and vice versa, so for historians and writers to bear witness to one, they must necessarily involve the other, which Newkirk’s volume demonstrates in beautiful snippets. And yet, there was so much more: more laughter, more joy, and so much love. In the field of African American history, so much of the bearing witness scholars have done has been toward the pain, injustice and activism, while only giving passing and inconsistent attention to the many other aspects of life that made survival vital and possible – with the exception of religion. Pamela Newkirk begins her collection of love letters from slavery to freedom by stating that the volume is meant to “bear witness to the love that has sustained African Americans throughout their turbulent history in America” (xv). But if one puts Alyssa Cole’s self-published Black romance novellas, Be Not Afraid and That Could Be Enough, in conversation with Black histories of love and emotion, one can see the political work in Cole’s depiction of Black love in historical romance as she expands a genre so long resistant to change. This omission of the presence and progressive power of Black love in historical romance is curious, not least because of Black historians’ decades-long dedication to recovering love as an important aspect of Black history. But no subgenre in romance more clearly exemplifies the often slow-walk of progress better than historical romance, where Black authors were, until very recently, few and far between, and Black characters finding their Happily Ever Afters (HEA) together still seem rare. As Cole notes, who gets to love and be loved in (romance) media is political, especially in a genre that so often centers whiteness and white womanhood at the pinnacle of feminist freedoms. In 2021, novelist Alyssa Cole argued in an interview with NPR that “romance itself is political, particularly when you’re talking about diversity – who is considered a whole person, who is able to live their full lives” (Garcia-Navarro).
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