THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502220388
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY RITA DANDRIDGE
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
THE WEDDING
DOROTHY WEST
Doubleday. 240 pp. $20.
DOROTHY WEST'S literary career dates back to the 1920s, the decade of the black cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. In 1934 she founded Challenge, the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine devoted to young black writers; and in 1937, she started New Challenge with Richard Wright as her associate editor. Friend and colleague to black literati such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and Claude McKay, West has awakened after a long silence.
The Wedding, West's second novel and a literary tour de force, appears 27 years after The Living Is Easy (1948), her first. Both novels are set in Massachusetts: the first in Boston, the second on Martha's Vineyard, home to West since 1943. In this latter setting she captures strong-willed, aspiring blacks whose tenacity and self-striving have transformed them from ordinary Southern migrants to a Northern middle-class cadre of black urban professionals.
What distinguishes The Wedding is its scope. Five generations of the Coles family, descendants of a white slave owner and his colored mistress, fill its pages. Internal family strife - marriages depleted, gone sour from too many loveless years and too many mistresses - vie for space with other conflicts and prejudices. Sexism and intraracism build to the fifth generation and encroach on the impending wedding of Shelby Coles, betrothed to a white jazz piano player, but spied on and wooed by Lute McNeil, a colored furniture maker, thrice married to white women and desirous of a mother for his three daughters.
The novel's most memorable event involves the young Shelby, reported as a lost colored child to authorities but overlooked and ignored by blacks and whites outside her neighborhood because she has white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. Not knowing whether she is colored or white, she fails to answer correctly those who inquire about her race.
This incident becomes the catalyst for Shelby's future dealings with people and for West's simple but telling theme: People should not be identified by the color of their skin or the texture of their hair, but by who they say they are. This theme operates in Shelby's decision to marry a white man and in her willingness to listen to Lute, who proves himself a liar.
The novel's strongest character, however, is a schoolteacher, the unnamed and unloved wife of Issac Coles, Shelby's grandfather. Trapped in an emotionally empty marriage, she does not let her ``unused nights diminish the meaning of her days.'' She buys and provides rental property for Southern migrants, patients of her physician husband who works for charity, while she grows ``money-rich.''
Circumscribed by racism and sexism, the African-American woman has fared poorly, West seems to say. If she does not know who she is as a young Shelby Coles, then she had better identify herself when older by resolute spunk. Her very survival depends upon it.
In this monumental historical novel, West manifests herself as a master storyteller. She sets the novel within a frame reminiscent of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The first and last chapters detail wedding preparations; the inner chapters telescope previous generations. Beautifully phrased similes, metaphors and zeugmas chime with a musical lilt equal to that of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. An occasional character unnamed or unaccounted for does not mar the storytelling.
Dorothy West once told me that she talks too much. As literary griot she tells it all here, and it sounds like a masterpiece. MEMO: Rita Dandridge is a free-lance book reviewer who lives in Chesapeake. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Jacket painting by FRANK STEWART
Jacket design by CARIN GOLDBERG
ALISON SHAW
Dorothy West's novel ``The Wedding'' chronicles five generations of
one family.
by CNB