    
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2925
Registered: 07-2005
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Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 08, 2006 - 01:33 am: | 
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The Wedding
I have a confession to make. I was an English major, and I never learned about Dorothy West. There’s no excuse, I should have known who she was. According to the information that I found during my incredibly brief Google search, West was one of the few black female writers during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the period’s longest surviving veteran. I read several of her contemporaries – Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larson – but I had never even heard of Dorothy West. But finding buried literary treasure is always fun.
West’s second novel is called The Wedding. West wrote the book late in life, well after the Harlem Renaissance, and took her time finishing it. (Although she may have started the novel in the 1980s, it was not published until 1995.) Set in the 1950s, The Wedding is the story of a wedding (of course) – the union of the beautiful and well-bred Shelby Coles and Meade, her poor, white, jazz playing fiancé.
Did I mention that Meade is white? Anyway, Shelby’s wedding is to take place in an elite vacation paradise called the Oval, which I believe is located on Martha’s Vineyard. (I don’t think that the name of the island is ever mentioned, and I don’t know anything about where rich and elite black people vacation during their summers, so I can only assume.)
While the book does not share the reaction of Meade’s family to his choice of bride, Shelby’s family is, for the most part, crushed that she would stoop to marrying a poor white man when there are so many handsome, educated black men from good families to choose from. Perhaps in order to help the reader understand Shelby’s family and their reaction to her union, much of the novel takes the reader even further back into the past to witness the lives of Shelby’s parents and their ancestors.
First, Shelby’s parents. Her father, Clark Coles comes from a family of handsome and Harvard-trained black physicians. Her mother, Corinne, is a very ladylike and fair-skinned mulatto from a proud family of southerners. Corinne was raised in the shadow of her hardworking but disengaged father, Hannibal, and her white mother, Josephine, who was never able to accept the shame that she brought upon herself by marrying a black man and having a colored baby.
Second, we have Corinne’s grandmother (Shelby’s great-grandmother), Gram. Gram’s family was rich, elegant, proud and prejudiced during slavery, but her family lost all their fortune (in land and in slaves) after the war. All that Gram had left was her pride and her heritage, and she never would have thought that she would see the day when a colored person would be a successful, well-mannered, tasteful physician. But in spite of the manners, wealth, or kindness of any of the colored folks that she met in the decades that followed, to Gram, these people were still colored, and therefore still never equal to her.
Gram once thought that she would die from the shame that her daughter Josephine brought upon them both, but instead she lived. Just as poverty persuaded her daughter to marry a colored man, poverty led Gram into a strange world in which the only reason that she was not hungry or homeless was because of the food and shelter provided by her colored son-in-law. Gram witnessed the death of her daughter and the births of her colored granddaughter and great-granddaughters, and she judged them with the same racist disdain that her generation had always held onto. Especially if they were too dark.
Shelby’s sister, Liz, married a “dark” man, which was unexpected and often unpardonable in this particular colored society, and tolerable in this case only because the man was a doctor, which was the family profession. Shelby, who was considered the more beautiful of the two sisters precisely because she looked just as white and blond and fair as Gram, is making an even more unpardonable choice. Although light skin is preferred in this world, it is achieved by marrying light-skinned, well-to-do black men, not by marrying poor white men. Only Gram is pleased by Shelby’s choice, because she hopes that through Shelby’s union the taint of “color” will be removed from her family tree.
So Shelby's family is colorful and complicated. And so is the novel. There are so many family and cultural issues that are skimmed and touched in this short novel, without ever being resolved or fully illucidated. First, although Clark had the "sense" the marry "light," Clark Coles always preferred darker-skinned black women. He knows that he married the wrong woman, and has had an affair with his darker-skinned assistant for years. Why? Because, as West reminds us several times in the novel, “there is no beauty like that of a brown-skinned woman when she is beautiful.” (Does that mean that a dark-skinned woman who isn’t beautiful still can’t compete with a woman who is fair-skinned and ugly? West never says.) Clark also seems to find that the dark-skinned women in his life were more desirable as women, while Corinne was more desirable as a wife. Heavy. But, to further complicate matters, Corinne is only sexually attracted to dark men, even though her attraction to them at night is just as intense as her “repulsion” for dark men during the day. Finally, Clark and Liz, and sometimes even Shelby, are afraid that Shelby is only marrying Meade because she is afraid of black men. Both light and dark.
Of course, none of these issues are resolved. Finally, a tragedy in their island community leaves Shelby assured that, whatever the reason, her love for Meade is real, regardless of race. Gram holds her too-brown great-great granddaughter with love and care, and we have no idea what happens to Clark or Corinne.
When I finished the novel, I was more intrigued by Dorothy West the person and the artist than I was by any of the characters in the novel. What exactly was she trying to say with this novel? Was she trying to say anything at all, or was she just showing us a portrait of the world and history of the black elite? I don’t think any answers will be forthcoming from West, but I think my book club will have a pretty intense discussion this month.
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art37249.asp |
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