Dorothy West (1) (1907–1998)

Shelby Coles is getting married to a white man - a jazz musician. The Coles family lives on Martha's Vinyard in an area known as the Oval which is the home to the upper class Black families. Shelby's sister, Liz, is married with a child to a very dark Black man and the grandmother Gran has difficulty loving the child. The amount of darkness is an on-going stress with both sides of this family. The novel goes back to tell the stories of the great grandparents who were slaves and products of the white owner and the black slave. Each generation struggles with loving or diminishing their skin color. Shelby is actually a blonde and when she gets lost as a child, the police and neighborhood are looking for a white girl.

Race is really a central theme of this book, and not just race, but skin color. Older generations wanting to be white, the younger generations embracing their color. The only character I really had a hard time understanding is Lute, a social-climbing black man with three girls from three different mothers. He wants to marry Shelby because of her family. Interesting book.… (more)

Dorothy West is a master of character development. Every member of the Martha's Vineyard Oval community is meticulously realized by their actions and reactions to events surrounding them and by the subservient relationships they keep: black and white, man and wife, neighbor and stranger, parent and child, landlord and tenant. Strangely enough, there is harmony in the contrasts.
It is the wedding of beautiful Shelby Coles. Her engagement to a white jazz musician from New York City has her family in turmoil. Lute McNeil would like nothing better than to steal Miss Coles for his own. He already has three young daughters by three different white women, but in his obsessive mind Shelby would make the perfect mother for his biracial children. Even though the Oval is comprised of black middle class residents, the question of belonging is pervasive. The standard assumption that blonde hair and blue eyes means white race. Everyone uses color to get what they want. Example: the preacher uses the image of white children in danger of hurting themselves around a derelict barn in order to get a white man to give him a horse that was of no use to him. The preacher is really after the barn wood.
Dorothy West forces her characters to face the question of identity. The end of The Wedding will leave you hanging. Would Shelby have given Lute a chance if tragedy had not intervened? Were Shelby's sisters right in their warnings about misguided infatuation?… (more)