The Wedding by, Dorothy West is a novel about a prominent black family that is preparing for the wedding of one of their own - Shelby. However, Shelby’s fiancé is white jazz musician, Meade. Instead of focusing on the relationship of Shelby and Meade, the narrative goes into the family tree of this prominent, northern black family and how, through their lineage, as slaves to a family of doctors and socialites, living in well-to-do areas of New York City. This novel could have easily been a story about the complexities of interracial relationships, however, West goes deeper and explores the complexities of race, colorism, and classism from multiple perspectives. She calls everyone out - black and white.
“But how Shelby, who could have had the best of breed of her own race, could marry outside her own race, of her father’s profession, and throw her life away on a nameless, faceless white man who wrote jazz frivolous occupation without office, title or foreseeable future, was beyond the Oval’s understanding…”
“Her mother blew the trumpet of praise for marriage to her own kind, if not color, the right color being preferable but not as mandatory to the right class.”
We see marriage portrayed in a way that is very common across all societies - as a business arrangement and status symbol, rather than two people coming together because they connected. However, West uses the generational structure of the novel to highlight how the younger generations deviate from this mentality. Shelby and her sister Liz marry men that are outside of their family’s expectations.
“You’re not that blind, you’ve just got a blind spot … Maybe past generations had color prejudice, but my generation has color appreciation.”
Shelby comes to the realization that “color” and race really have no bearing on a person’s character. Society boxes people into categories, base simply on their outward appearance. West blatantly makes the statement tat both black and white people do this and this ultimately is a disservice. West does not sugar coat the realities of slavery, being black in the north or south, and the mindsets of those who were slaveholders, however, she allows for nuance and doesn’t lump all black people together and all white people together, just because they have their skin tone.
“Because you don’t know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks. Lute equals black, Meade equals white. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires. Trying to figure what a man is going to think or do based on the color of his skin will tell you as much about you was it will about him.”
"Color is a false distinction; love was not.”
In The Wedding, West provides interesting commentary about the rise of the black middle and upper class, as well as the important and often forgotten role that single, white women played in this.
“She was the hand of God who had plucked him out of the Jim Crow riddle south and into a new life. So many whites has done do so much to make the colored man’s life miserable that it was all too easy to forget the miraculous migration of white spinster school teachers, women … who flocked to the south giving up everything they had to teach a generation of newly emancipated children…”
One question main question came to my mind when reading this novel and this last quote was the lightbulb moment. How does this novel, published not that long ago in 1995, challenge the thesis of books like White Fragility? People are people and all groups of people have issues because all groups of people are comprised of fallible human beings. It’s when people with a conscious and a desire to do good, regardless of what they look like, come together is where good change happens. I know personally, I assess people as individuals and avoid making broad, sweeping statements about a person based on how they look because, that just makes no sense. And sometimes people are jerks, just because they are jerks, not because of the color of their skin. But that is conversation for another day.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Wedding. It was a quick read that packed a punch. I appreciate that West tackled these topics in a detailed and nuanced manner, however I was still hoping to get more into Shelby and Meade’s relationship. In fact, we never meet Meade at all. I understand that wasn’t the point one of the novel, but this did leave me feeling a bit disappointed. I really enjoyed West’s writing style - it’s descriptive and at times quite witty. Her writing is more descriptive than Barbara Pym’s, but the sarcastic humor did remind me a bit of Pym.
Rating 3.5/5
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