The Wedding by Dorothy West

When she got lost, she was lost altogether, her identity deserting her, her name on doubting tongues, and her wholeness hanging by a tug of hair. There was no one to help her orient herself, and she could not communicate her need for help. In a world where everyone was adult and articulate, she was overwhelmed by the handicap of having to be a child. That she would ever coalesce into something concrete, with more sense than lack of it, seemed beyond the promise of prayer. She was still bits and pieces of other people: a frown she had no use for, a phrase stuck in a senseless sentence, a grunt like Gram's when the weather tied a knot in her back, walking like Gram when she had to place her hand on her hip to ease the pain of a rainy day, and echoing Liz's yeas and nays when half the time she felt just the opposite. Like most children, Shelby spent her days and hours trying on the most transparent parts of other personalities, gradually growing aware of their insufficiencies. Then slowly, at a snail's pace, and with a snail's patience, she would thread her frailties and fears, her courage and strength, her hopes and doubts, into the warp and woof that would cloak her naked innocence in a soul of her own.

The Oval is a community of black vacationers on Martha's Vineyard, proud and exclusive, named for the oval shape of the ring of inward-facing houses that compose it. Many of these "Ovalites" are descending on the island to attend the wedding of one of their daughters, Shelby Coles, to a white jazz musician named Meade. The marriage sets off old racial anxieties: could it be that, as Shelby's father and sister suspect, Shelby's upbringing among the light-skinned Ovalites has taught her to hate her own race? A neighboring interloper, a dark-skinned man named Lute whose presence on the Oval is suspect, decides he will get revenge on the Ovalites who spurn him by making a conquest of Shelby on the week of her wedding. Will Shelby, testing her own deep-seeded racial feelings, use Lute to conquer her own suspicions about herself?

I'm reading Passing right now with my juniors; I was struck by what a companion piece The Wedding makes. The Wedding is a late work by Dorothy West, one of the last surviving doyennes of the Harlem Renaissance, and it takes up many of the same questions about race, color, and class that Passing does. West keeps Meade--and the wedding--off stage, instead using it as a pretext to comb through the family history of the branches that have come together to make Shelby: Gram, the disappointed white matriarch; her desperate and sickly daughter who marries the self-made Hannibal; on the other side, the kindly doctor Isaac and his charity-crusader wife. And of course, Shelby's parents, including her father, who married a light-skinned woman like himself, though he has kept a darker mistress for decades. Like Passing, The Wedding understands the intimate relationship between colorism and racism: "passing" is, for the black upper class, a mark of unparalleled distinction. But chasing it requires a tightrope act: you can marry another light-skinned person for it, but to marry white threatens a wholesale dilution of the family's blackness. Ironically, perhaps, such distinctions are predicated on the same kind of one-drop blood quantum laws that kept white families' whiteness intact.

The strongest and most interesting part of The Wedding was, I thought, an extended flashback in which the young golden-haired Shelby chases off after a stray dog and becomes lost. The Ovalites are alerted, and then the larger Vineyard community, but even when Shelby is found, wearing the outfit in which she was reported missing, her rescuers assume that she must be a different lost child, a white one. Shelby herself is unable to make sense of this mystery, because she herself doesn't know if she's black or white. She knows she has a white grandmother, and black family, but how to cobble an identity out of these parts, no one has ever told her. This formative experience is an early wound in Shelby's identity, and reveals the shakiness at the heart of the racial logic that serves to keep the boundaries of the Oval tight. While each of the parts of the novel--which at times resembles a collection of stories, linked only in the sense that they are each about a member of the family--is good, I found myself wanting more of that central presence, Shelby's, to anchor the book more soundly.