I want to talk a little bit more about this, because none of us start off alone. Particularly, I want to talk about the women who have most inspired me. It’s going to take a while, so there will be threads, multiple, and it’s going to take more than a few days. https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1311372959429193728

If I’m going to talk about diverse historicals, there is one person I have to, absolutely have to, start with, and that is the one and only Beverly Jenkins.

I read my first Beverly Jenkins... probably sometime in 2009 or 2010. We won’t talk about my first Beverly Jenkins (yet).

We’ll talk about my second Beverly Jenkins, which was Indigo.

By the way: Indigo is currently $2.99 and you can get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Indigo-Beverly-Jenkins-ebook/dp/B006IYGDJ4/

I picked up Indigo to pull a few passages when I was planning to write this thread, and I ended up rereading the whole damned thing, with laughter and tears.

Indigo starts with a pair of letters from a man who falls in love with an enslaved woman and sells himself into slavery so he can be with her. His last act is to write to his free family about his wife and daughter, who are sold by the master.

His free family eventually recovers his baby girl, Hester. She’s only eight or so when she’s bought into freedom, but as a slave, she’s been working with indigo, so her hands are dyed. Permanently.

She’s currently working as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and one night, a man known as Black Daniel—famed for the number of enslaved people he’s brought to freedom—ends up getting jumped by slavers and escapes, badly beaten. She has to hide him while he recovers.

So I’m going to pause a bit. You would think that with a premise like this, the book would be dark. Really dark.

And there are dark moments in the book, because it covers a dark time for a lot of people.

But this book is warmth and joy and love, so much of it. There‘s the way that Galen, the hero, thinks about Hester (who he calls Indigo), with gorgeous lines like this.

There’s the way these two tease each other, which is HILARIOUS.

There’s the food. So much description of food.

And finally, there‘s this, which tonight of all nights struck me right in the heart.

I think I appreciate this book even more on second reading than first. It’s a brilliant, beautiful little gem that takes a wealthy, jaded hero who starts working in the Underground Railroad as a lark and has him fall head over heels for the fantastic Hester.

At the point when I read this book, I had read hundreds of historical romances. Hundreds of them.

This one just about broke my brain. For lack of a better word, it was so, so loving.

Beverly Jenkins is one of the authors I turn to when I know I need a book I can count on. She writes books that cut through the fog of whatever it is that besets me.

Her books are a deep, slow breath of fresh air.

One of my favorite books of hers is Forbidden, which is currently $3.99. https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Beverly-Jenkins-ebook/dp/B00X3N8S46/

In Forbidden, Rhine Fontaine has been passing as white for a long time... long enough that he’s amassed money and power and he’s going to end up married to a girl who will give him more power.

And he’s doing this all because he sees what’s happening in post-Reconstruction years—laws going bad, Black people being increasingly targeted.

He plans to do whatever he can to make things better for his people.

The thing about this book that hit me directly in the solar plexus was this: I’ve seen books in which people pass as white before.

In those books, the people who pass were all written as ashamed of their heritage. It would be a sacrifice for them to admit their race.

This was the first book I ever read that upended that trope. For Rhine, the sacrifice was passing.

By passing, he was forgoing the vibrant and beautiful Black community that Ms. Bev so lovingly describes.

There’s a whole plot with a fish fry and with...so many other things. I know that I’m not Black, and I know there are aspects of community that are put into this book that I’ll never understand.

But they’re written so perfectly that even though it is not *my* home, I felt that longing for home and community.

That book has stayed with me for a really, really long time.

So I want to circle back to that first Beverly Jenkins I read, because now I’m going to tell on myself.

When I read that book, I was very full of myself. I had my first contract, I had figured out the Rules of Romance, and I thought I knew it all.

So I read it and—I want to make clear, this was some bullshit on my part—I thought, “She needs to start her books when the hero and heroine meet. Doesn’t she know that?”

I’m seriously just cringing that I ever thought that.

Like I said. BULLSHIT.

It did not occur to me, newly contracted author, that maybe someone who had been writing longer than I’d been reading romance knew what the fuck she was doing?

OF COURSE Ms. Bev knew what the Rules of Romance said. She was writing a different story.

Now, many books into her oeuvre, I know that her stories are going to be about community, and that she starts her stories where she starts them because of the story she’s telling about that community.

Indigo’s story starts with her father’s letters, even though her father dies and never appears again, because it is his act of love for her that brings her to freedom, and she is surrounded by a house that represents that love.

I do not think I would be nearly the author I was today without what I have gotten from Beverly Jenkins books—books that gave me strength when I needed them, books that broke rules and made me believe I could question them, books that captured home and community.

So yeah, if you like diverse historical romance and you’ve been sleeping on Beverly Jenkins, now is a good damn time to stop doing so. She’s amazing.