ABSTRACT
Romance writer Beverly Jenkins employs agape and eros in historical romances set during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction—crucial times to black women's struggles to uplift the race and to claim self-determination in their romantic relationships with black men. An analysis of Beverly Jenkins's Night Song and Through the Storm reveals that she counters negative historiography by highlighting black women's meaningful agape efforts, complicates these efforts with the intervention of eros, subverts male chauvinism with the black heroine's sexuality, and resolves the agape-eros conflict in a successful heterosexual marriage functioning as a microcosm of what the larger, currently corrupt society could be. Jenkins explores the agape-eros conflict during the historical period during and after Reconstruction: a time replete with blacks' meaningful agape work, although this has often been overlooked in history books. Jenkins writes within a cultural and Christian community where eros and agape have traditionally been at odds, not just within particular couples, but in communal life.
