The Wedding (1995) by Dorothy West

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

The Wedding (1995)

by Dorothy West

Martha's Vineyard, Massachussets 

Massachussets: 16/30

   Dorothy West (1907-1998) was the youngest member of the Harlem Renaissance but many were surprised when The Wedding was published in 1995, over forty years after her last novel was published. The Wedding is set on Martha's Vineyard in the 1950, among the black elite who colonized a neighborhood called The Oval in the town of Oak Bluffs, which had historically been a segregated community for laborers in the area.  The Wedding is the kind of book I thought I'd be seeing much more of in the 1001 Novels project:  It is about a time and place I know very little about, and the book helped me learn more about the location and the people involved.

   West takes a poly-phonic approach, writing in the third person about a variety of characters who have gathered for the marriage of Shelby Coles, the blue eyed, white skinned daughter of the leading family in the oval, to Meade Howell, a white(!) jazz musician from New York City.  The reader learns about Shelby and her family: Corinne and Isaac Coles, her sister, her Grandmother, "Gram."  Corinne, Isaac and Gram each get their own backstories as the reader learns about the experience of being a light-skinned "colored" person (black people who could pass for white) in the United States.   It's a fraught topic, both in literature, where the concept of the "tragic mulatto" usually a colored woman passing for white, was a significant one in 20th century African American fiction.  West is clearly writing to redress that stereotype, but I also feel like The Wedding is also meant to address the wave of African-American activism that proclaimed "black is beautiful" and looked skeptically at the light-skinned African American elite which proceeded it. 

  In short, The Wedding was everything I had hoped the 1001 Novels: A Library of America to be, and I'm hopeful that there will be more books like this one, and fewer about sad adolescent girls and their whimsical fantasies, going forward.