The house on 8th Street where he grew up sat abandoned and forgotten until it became an eyesore and was moved from the lot and donated to his alma mater in the name of historical preservation. But the little yellow house just inside the school’s gates isn’t really Frank’s home at all. This box, small and stuffed with manila folders, was either a treasure chest or a bust.Īs I combed through the materials, the young woman charged with supervising me asked if I had visited the Yerby House, which since 2004 has sat on a prominent corner lot on Paine’s campus.
She unlocked a heavy door, led me to a reading room, and pointed to a faded blue box sitting at the end of a table. I followed her up two flights of stairs to the Special Collections department where Frank’s archived material is kept. Alana Lewis, the kind and accommodating archivist with whom I had exchanged many emails, was waiting for me at the circulation desk when I arrived. The once best-selling but now obscure Black writer was proving to be just as elusive in death as he had been in life, and I had been running into dead ends at every turn. I was already a year into my research on the life of Frank Yerby when I walked into the Collins-Callaway Library at Frank’s alma mater, Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. My search for Frank Yerby and our Augusta, Georgia
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