DN18 -

Frank Yerby & Origins of Foxes of Harrow

September 1, 1948

I have been upset all day. I have made investigations and inquiries, and now, after all, I am more confused than ever. I do not know what to think or whom to blame. . . . I was searching through the numerous plans and projects in the boxes in the kitchen when I came upon one folder of unfinished manuscripts that my wife [Ruth] had arranged in an envelope when she returned from Chicago in 1945. 

Running through them, they begin to bring back things I had almost forgotten about, and then I picked up two pages entitled, "An Antebellum Legend." It was nothing unusual about the paper as I read it through. The name Harrow arrested me for only a moment, and knowing the rest of the story which was a part imagination and a part of my life, I looked at it, wondered when I had written it, why had I written it and put it aside.

Then something did not register in the whole thing and I picked up the paper again. I remember that I had typed it, all right, but then dates began to assert themselves. Why it had been done? Probably backtracking on Yerby. I thought, because Miss Stripling and others had twitted me about the fact that Yerby was "stealing my thunder." I was probably trying to satisfy myself that I could do what he had done -- capture the atmosphere that he had gotten into his  prologue in which he had set the tempo of the whole story of the FOXES OF HARROW.

I was thinking that I had probably come in after being twitted and wrote this to satisfy myself that I, too could catch the eerie, dank dark atmosphere that was so much a part of Lafcadio Hearn, The Rubaiyat, Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," and the famous Abolitionist Orator's "And this age came to tell our own that though hand joined in hand, the wicked shall not prosper."

It was a type of thing which showed the frailty of the things of our world when cast against the backdrop of the immutability of time. But in my mind things were registering confusedly, so when I picked it up this time I read it to the end. Near the end the word "Stephen Harrow" caught my attention and held it. Wasn't that the given name of Yerby's hero? Or was it? I couldn't remember. . . .

So dazedly, I still revert to the question: If I wrote the story or sketch after 1946, how could I do it with a typewriter which I had given away in  about 1944? Furthermore,  I know all of the material with which I have dealt. I had ofttimes wondered why Yerby used such a name as Harrow--where did he get it from in Louisiana? I do not recall ever having seen it.

But in reading the sketch I readily recall that I placed the word "HARROW" there because of a little trick of covering up I had employed while on the WPA Writers' program. Move the person's real name, say six letters down the alphabet, using this only in regard to the initial letter, and you would thus disguise it. This name was Barrow. Six letters down and the name was changed to Harrow.

One of the Barrow girls, Hallett, played with my older brother, I am told. they lived on a fine estate about a quarter of a mile from the home-site that I still hold in the name of my father. The Mary-Jane of the sketch was probably a close relation of my grandparents, because I believe that my father told me that we were third cousins of the present--or rather the present generation. 

My father told me the story of this proud slave-woman who was very beautiful, and who spurned the advances of the overseer of the plantation to which she belonged. This plantation was probably--no, was the Barrow plantation which then comprised the entire area of the village in which our home-site is located. I remember the slave graveyard, and once I went through the slave graveyard with a small group of playmates--boys roving through the fields when the cane was cut.

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