An American Marriage

As Dre drives along the backroads of rural Louisiana, he understands that he is at risk: a young black man driving a Mercedes through the Deep South is liable to be pulled over by white cops certain that young black men drive such cars only if they are stolen. More than a half century after the historic achievements of the civil rights movement that in many ways culminated in 2008 with the election of America’s first biracial president, Dre is still rightfully anxious over the deep-seated racist perceptions against young blacks.

Certainly, the novel portrays the promise and the inspirational example of the new generation of Southern blacks. Roy, Celestial, and Dre represent new opportunities for blacks in the so-called New South. Roy says early on, “We’re not your garden-variety bourgeois Atlanta Negroes where the husband goes to bed with his laptop under his pillow and the wife dreams about her blue-box jewelry. I was young, hungry and on the come-up. Celestial was an artist, intense and gorgeous” (5). They are upwardly mobile, educated, forward looking, and ambitious—not dreamers but planners. Before he is arrested, Roy anticipates only a career of brightest potential. Celestial, both headstrong and resourceful, is determined to find success as an artisan. Both the Davenports and the Hamiltons are successful families: economically stable and proudly rooted in their racial identity.

That family structure, that sense of stability and promise of opportunity, all prove an illusion in the legacy of white oppression. Roy is fed into a justice system that still, more than a century after Jim Crow, assumes a black man is guilty by default. The reality is sobering: the mass incarceration of black men under the age of 30 represents a glaring disparity within the American criminal justice system. Roy, a black man with no criminal record, no history of violence or antisocial behavior, is accused of a brutal sex crime against a woman, a taboo violation that taps into deep seated racist fears. With little evidence save the testimony of the woman, a jury (with only a single black, a woman) sends Roy to prison, destroys the promise of his career, shatters three families, and in the end (as Roy is released for prosecutorial ineptitude) holds no one accountable.

As Celestial admits, “[N]o black man is really safe in America” (39). Thus, An American Marriage is broader than a novel of relationships. Indeed, love and marriage, family and parenthood bear the collateral damage of a persistently racist society.  

Fatherhood, and the relationship between father and son, is critical in understanding the maturation of young blacks in America. Roy, buried within the Louisiana state prison system, reunites with his biological father, a career inmate who takes his son under his wing and mentors him through the difficult ways of survival in the brutal world of prison. Walter requests reassignment to be Roy’s cellmate and offers him wisdom concerning the reality of the world Roy left behind. That advice keeps Roy balanced and able to sustain the indignities and terrors of his imprisonment. As Roy admits in a letter to his wife as he prepares to tell her about this most unlikely reunion, “[Y]ou know I have a thing about fathers” (73). Roy yearns to be a father. The abortion of the child he conceived with Celestial gnaws at him—his reunion with Celestial is destroyed by her insistence on his wearing protection before they have reunion sex.

Both Dre and Roy, such disparate characters, share a special understanding of fatherhood. At critical moments throughout the ordeal of Roy’s imprisonment, release, and reclamation, Roy and Dre both turn to the wisdom, guidance, and moral authority of their fathers, underscoring the importance of that relationship particularly for young black men. After the death of his mother while he is in prison, Roy understands the depth of his emotional debt to Big Roy, the only father he has ever known. It is Big Roy who welcomes Roy back to the world. He counsels Roy through his tricky scheme to get some time alone with his estranged wife. Big Roy cautions Dre to give Roy the chance to talk with Celestial. In the end, it is Big Roy who sets Roy on the road to economic stability by going into business with him. Big Roy and Roy’s relationship, as well as Walter’s protection of Roy in prison, expose the myth of “black fatherlessness” perpetuated racist media. Fathers in African-American culture are both present and involved.

Dre, for his part, grew up without his father. Living next door to the Davenports, Dre cultivated a friendship of Celestial’s own father. Although he always preferred Dre to Roy as a suitor for his daughter, Celestial’s father assumes moral authority when he cautions Dre against pursuing a marriage proposal with Celestial when she is still legally married to Roy. Caught up in that emotional maelstrom, Dre seeks his estranged father, Carlos, now remarried and raising a new family. Carlos warns Dre that he has trespassed on another’s man world and that he needed to settle with Roy man to man.

For the African American community, fatherhood is a commitment. Fathers—and here we observe fathers, grandfathers, step-fathers, fathers-in-law (desperate, an imprisoned Roy writes a letter to Celestial’s father begging him to convince his daughter to visit him)—are resources of experience distilled into wisdom, counselors through difficult times, and, above all, exemplars of virtue and morality.