First and foremost, Tayari Jones’ book “An American Marriage” is a love letter — a series of beautiful, tragic and heartbreaking love letters between two flawed and perfectly imperfect humans: Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr., a married and college-educated Black man wrongly incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, and Celestial Gloriana Davenport, his wife and alibi.
Time stands between them. Roy was sentenced for 10 years for allegedly raping a woman in a motel. (He didn’t. Celestial would know since she spent that night with Roy in an adjacent room.)
But time’s a cruel and hungry mistress, stealing years, intimacy, touch, children and shared experiences from a young Black married couple in their early thirties who were on the cusp of beginning the rest of their lives together.
How would their marriage have been different if Roy hadn’t been imprisoned? Who knows.
“But now,” writes Roy from prison, “all I have is this pen and raggedy ink pen. It’s a ballpoint, but they take away the casing so you just have the nib and this plastic tube of ink. I’m looking at it, thinking, ‘This’ is all I have to be a husband with?”
Jones’ gorgeous partly epistolary novel is an examination of love, sacrifice, injustice, family, communication, race and marriage, posing existential questions about what it means to be a spouse: How much of ourselves do we owe a significant other?
From Roy to Celestial: “Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.”
From Celestial to Roy: “A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.”
Celestial and Roy’s involuntary divorce isn’t easy. The couple had only been married about a year and a half before the incident. It gets lonely at night. And Roy’s best man and Celestial’s childhood friend Andre is there while Roy isn’t, to no fault of his own. Being Black isn’t easy.
Roy had a clean record, graduated from college, got a white collar job as a traveling salesman and married. Still, the courts convicted him and labeled him “a victim of America,” believing — beyond a reasonable doubt — the word of another woman over the word of his wife, an articulate Black woman.
Celestial, a master at code-switching, doesn’t tell the world that she’s the wife of an incarcerated Black man when interviewed about her art project — a Black baby doll in a prison outfit — for a magazine.
Roy doesn’t like this. But as his prison roommate, who Roy refers to as “Ghetto Yoda” in letters, explains: “She is a black woman and everybody already thinks she got fifty-eleven babies with fifty-eleven daddies; that she got welfare checks coming in fifty-eleven people’s names. She got that already to deal with, but she got the white folks to believe that she is some Houdini doll maker and she even got them thinking that this is an actual job. … You think she supposed to get up there talking about her man is in the hoosegow? Soon as she say that, everybody will start looking at her and thinking about the fifty-eleven everything and she might as well go on back home and work for the phone company.”
Jones is an extremely perceptive and compassionate writer, balancing a book told in three parts on three legs: the voices of Roy, Celestial and later, Andre. You root for all of them equally (even when they want different and very conflicting things).
“An American Marriage” is a gripping emotional book that you’d be apt to finish in one sitting, but it isn’t a book about happily ever afters. It’s a book that makes your bones ache, mourning what could have been if the raisin didn’t see the sun.
By Tayari Jones.
308 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $26.95.
2018.
Pass the Popcorn 