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First Black Romance Novelist, Elsie B. Washington, Dies at 66
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Elsie Bernice Washington is credited as the first African-American author to publish a romance novel with a black heroine and a black hero. Dell, under its Candlelight Romance line, published her book, Entwined Destinies, in 1980, book number 575 in the series. Washington wrote the novel under a pen name, Rosalind Welles, and it was the only novel she ever published.
Born Dec. 28, 1942, in the Bronx, N.Y., Washington died in Manhattan on May 5. According to her obituary in the New York Times, her brother, James E. Peterson, said she died from multiple sclerosis and cancer.
Her novel is the story of a smart, attractive black female journalist whose romantic dreams come true through a handsome, black oil man. She sold Entwined Destinies against the odds. For years black writers had attempted to sell stories written via established romance novel formulas but with black characters only to be discouraged by white-owned publishing companies that feared financial losses. These companies espoused faulty preconceptions of literacy in the black community. Some executives went as far as saying, "Black women don't read."
Entwined Destinies was published through the persistence of Dell editor Vivian Stephens.
Stephens, one of the first African-American editors of romance fiction, bought the first works of several romance authors whose names now appear regularly on The New York Times best-seller's list. (Black Issues Book Review, Jan.-Feb. 2002)
While Stephens and Washington did not see their early venture break record sales, Entwined Destinies paved a new avenue for African-American writers to tell stories of black love and black women's hopes for love. In 2008, another African-American romance author, Florida-born Brenda Jackson, became the first black romance novelist to land on the New York Times Best Seller List. Despite the seeming lateness of such an accomplishment, African-American romance novels have proven to be a lucrative venture for romance novel publishers.
Washington's day job was journalist, and she had a productive career working for multiple publications in her lifetime, including Life magazine, the New York Post, and Newsweek. According to the NYT, an article she wrote in 1988 while at Essence magazine created a stir for its social commentary.
Alluding to a black girl's obsession with having blue eyes in Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye, Washington's piece shared the same title. In the Essence article she lamented that too many African-Americans were rejecting their natural appearance in favor of European concepts of beauty.
... Washington, a senior editor at the magazine, denounced the growing tendency of black celebritites, trendsetters and "just plain folks" to "alter their natural-born God-given dark eyes," by wearing tinted contact lenses.
"Green and blue contact lenses are a groping to identify with all that has been presented - erroneously and slanderously, I contend - as better than us," Ms. Washington wrote. "In my mind, I'm connecting this blue-eyes-green-eyes trend with the current anti-black mood around the country. I'm connecting it with another trend that glorifies and promotes mixed-race (read light-skinned) models and screen heroines, even in films that decry the maltreatment of blacks by whites." (from 1990 article "In looks, a sense of racial unity" by Lena Williams)
Oprah Winfrey wore blue contact lenses briefly during that period, provoking controversy among African-Americans.
Per her NYT obituary, in addition to her one published romance novel, Washington "wrote two nonfiction books, Sickle Cell Anemia (Third Press, 1974, with Anthony Cerami) and Uncivil War: The Struggle Between Black Men and Women (Noble Press, 1996)."
Sources
- The New York Times, her obituary
- In Memory of Elsie Washington, SORMAG blog
- How black romance--novels, that is, came to be, Black Issues Book Review, 2002
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