Image of Emeralds and Chocolate
by K. Murry Johnson
Johnson and Franklin, LLC. 307 pages, $17.95
K. MURRY JOHNSON’S Image of Emeralds and Chocolate is a black gay love story set in both contemporary and slave times, a book that’s destined to become a classic in black and gay vampire literature. Primarily set in the Louisiana of today and the 1800’s of slavery and abolitionism, it is a coming-of-age story and also a fictional attempt to explore male sexual relations between slaves.
Eric Peterson is a gifted young musician and poet. Marquis LeBlanc is a strapping “black Adonis” who writes fiction and narrative. They meet at Loyola University in a creative writing class and fall for each other. But Marquis has a secret: he was born a slave almost 200 years ago and once loved another male slave. After they meet, Marquis almost loses Eric to the unwanted advances of the muscular, handsome Santiago, also a vampire. It is only by exposing who he is and how he became a vampire while a slave that Marquis will be able to save their relationship. Meanwhile, his life as a slave brims with black folklore, the quest for literacy and education, survival strategies, and myth.
Unlike Celie in The Color Purple, who turns inward at loss and abuse and writes to God, Eric and Marquis write and share their stories with each other. Through everyday encounters in the course of a semester, Johnson details their epic romance, creating a love story sprinkled with the tensions of a new relationship, threats of jealousy, and stings of homophobia. Johnson sets up a series of contrasts between the two men, who would appear to share very similar backgrounds. One is musically inclined and chooses to write poetry, the other a masculine, muscular wonder who writes fiction and history. By deftly, often lyrically, describing their sexual interaction, the world of creative writing students and young men who fall in love, Johnson captures the spirit of black gay romance while connecting the characters to their African-American roots.
Johnson’s novel joins a handful of published black gay vampire stories, notably Jewelle Gomez’ lesbian classic The Gilda Stories (1991), which also begins in slave Louisiana. Johnson’s story is a deeply personal one, weaving homosexual meeting, romance, desire, and love into a tale of two contemporary lovers, while delving into historical topics of slavery, emancipation, civil rights, and the election of a black president. It is also a story of personal loss and unrequited love flowing between the male lovers, with a focus on Marquis’ quest for happiness, which is earned through coming out with his past to Eric.
Image of Emeralds and Chocolate is a subtle and mature black gay romance, a marriage of sound and poetry, nature and fiction, past and present, old wives’ tales and modern technology. Though it opens with our narrator giving a tour of Loyola University, it manages to span several centuries, probing the depths of classic black folklore and history, civil rights, and gay relations. It draws upon the classical slave narrative and black fiction writers such as James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Jewelle Gomez, Alice Walker, and James Earl Hardy. Johnson is able to scale the depths of black folk tradition to explore Louisiana’s slaveholding past up to post-Katrina Louisiana in a romance at once timeless and political.
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Bill Stanford Pincheon, PhD, is a writer based in Spokane, WA.
