Collins adopts an unflinching prose style, as bold as the character with “a cold longing weighted” between her legs who yearns for “a little light fucking” with a man who is not cursed “with a penis about the size of a pea”. These sexual and racial adventurers contravene social mores and upset their class-conscious relatives, whose aspirations for family members’ courtships and unions with the lighter-skinned do not extend to dangerous liaisons with white folk. Many of the stories are inversions of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with young black female protagonists. They include dilettantes (“everyone who is anyone will find at least one ‘negro’ to bring home to dinner”) and the committed – black and white people putting their bodies on the line, idealists who march, ride the freedom buses, and sometimes, in deliciously illicit affairs, lie down together. The suggestion that love might soften if not conquer differences between the races is echoed in the radical fervour of Collins’s characters. The title of this collection poses a pertinent question: actually, whatever did become of the heady promise of interracial love amid the racial conflagrations of 1960s USA? The reality never lived up to the Hollywood fantasy of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier’s “negro” doctor – with perfect manners, starched collar and ultra-clean fingernails – falls in love with a young white liberal woman.

Whatever happened to interracial love