While Yerby implies [in Speak Now] that racism can be overcome by love, he stresses the point that it could not happen in the United States. (p. 155)

Love can triumph, according to the author, but only at the cost of alienation from a racist world. Despite the use of melodrama, sensationalism, romance, and stereotypes to excessive degrees, Yerby catches the revolutionary temper of the late sixties in both France and the United States…. Against this dynamic background Yerby enacts a passionate story that also competently reflects the racist attitudes of white people, especially in regard to miscegenation; but in typical Yerby fashion the romance and the melodrama are paramount. (p. 156)

[Yerby] indicates that under certain conditions interracial love can triumph over racism on an individual basis. White society in general, though, as depicted in [Speak Now] …, is impervious to the problems and the agony of Negroes. The love affairs described in [this novel], and in the others of the apologetic field, tend to alienate the participants from their society, and, in many cases, from their country. Whether racism tends to force the lovers closer together, causes them to crack under the pressure, or simply forces them to see that a mixed couple cannot function within white society, the affair is fated to be a source of pain. It tends to evoke the bigotry of people around them, and sometimes of the lovers themselves. (pp. 156-57)