The Wedding

by Dorothy West

  He began to walk backward toward the door, hearing the squeak, squeak of his policeman’s shoes on the polished floor. He withdrew in this awkward manner not because it was his wont but because he found he could not tear his eyes from Gram’s, gripped as he was by the implacable irony in them that seemed to strip him and pin him to the wall like a bug in a display case.

  The other Ovalites would relent, would make a bitter joke, in time even forget in their unceasing effort not to be hypersensitive, a condition of mind which affected that very class of cooks with which they refused to acknowledge anything in common. But Gram, not having to ask herself if she were drawing a hasty conclusion because she was colored, could be unforgiving to the end, all of her blood rebelling against her private enemy, a white man whose actions in no way confirmed the superiority of race.

  The door sighed after the chief. Gram took Shelby indoors, and Liz and the maids gave her bear hugs. The maids were smiling, but Liz was crying, though she didn’t know why except that a younger sister was better to have around than not, no matter if she followed you around and got in your hair. The dog came on his belly to beg Shelby’s pardon, and her endearments were the first kind words he had heard all day.

  Then there was a hot bath. Shelby wanted Gram to bathe her; she usually demanded to be allowed to wash herself without assistance, but today she just didn’t want to be alone. “Where’s Mommy?” she asked, her little body covered in suds. When Gram told her that Mommy had felt so sad that the doctor had given her something to help her sleep, Shelby only said, “Oh, Gram, I’m so glad you made them let you stay awake.”

  After the bath there was a light supper in bed, which Shelby was too tired to eat. Gram managed to feed her a few mouthfuls. Shelby didn’t feel silly, she just felt glad to be Gram’s baby. When the hot bath and the warm supper made it almost impossible for her to keep her eyes open any longer, she pushed sleep away until she could ask Gram the question that would not let go of her mind, no matter how hard she tried to shake it out of her head. Never before had she been forced to question who she was, who she really was, and the pain of not knowing threatened to tear her insides out by their roots. She was like an automaton, frozen in an eternal present of trembling palsy. Gram had grown aware of Shelby’s tic and wondered what had happened that day to cause this little nervous reflex, but she refrained from making her little great-granddaughter aware of it.

  Despite the warmth of being home, the clean, Ivory Soap smell of her body, the fresh feeling of hair brushed for the first time that day, the wonderful coziness of the bed, and Gram’s face hovering close by, smiling down—despite all these solid assurances, she was still not sure of herself, as if some part of her were still lost, still trying to find its way back to before. She did not want to wake up in the morning to all the pleasure that Liz had promised her and have the day spoiled by a queer feeling of incompleteness.

  “Gram,” she said, staring hard, “am I colored?”

  Gram’s expression did not change. “Yes,” she said, because there was no other answer, and to qualify it would not alter the fact but only confuse a child who preferred the simple truth.

  Shelby’s chest heaved with simple relief, not because she was black, but because she was something definite, and now she knew what it was. But a thought occurred to her, and she was anxious again. “Is Liz colored?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mommy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you colored too?”

  “I’m your gram.”

  The answer satisfied Shelby. All the people she loved were like herself. “Oh, Gram, I’m so glad we’re all colored. A lady told me I was white.”

  Shelby had been a child when she spoke those words, who spoke as a child and understood with a child’s understanding. 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.

  Her walk through the woods had started out as a triumph of self, a beginner’s step forward in independent action. But in her first adventure outside the concentric circles of her special world she had blended so completely with the passing crowds that she took on the color of their anonymity and could not find her way back to the road that separated the races. She walked in unreality, and no one gave her a clear, indisputable claim on herself until the Oval made her name a golden ball, tossing it from one mouth to another like seals having fun, with Gram letting it lie sweet on her tongue as if she could taste it. The joy of returning to kith and kin was greater than all her former joys. Love and likeness were equated in her mind. Never before in the Oval, which prided itself on its quiet ways, had Shelby seen such an outpouring of affection. She was everyone’s heroine; not that she’d done anything—it was enough that she was Shelby, one of the children they cherished. It was enough that she was a precious little girl whom they did not want to lose to the woods, to the sea, to the other side of town, to some dark place where she would leave no trace behind, no solid object to bury in a vessel for their grief. She wanted to throw her arms around the Oval and all it contained—people, cottages, little parks, birds sunning themselves on the roof slopes in tidy little rows after their baths, and squirrels playing like perpendicular kittens up and down and through the trees.

  For the first time in her life, Shelby saw this community as a whole. She did not want one face to change, one bird to fly away. She existed because they existed. Nothing was the same unless everything was the same; the interrupted heart never resumed its rhythm.

  Shelby slowly became aware of Jezebel’s excited barking. No, she was no longer six years old. She had been a child then, in the first embrace of belonging, equating love with order and homogeneity, identifying color as the core of character.

  Now, through falling in love with Meade, she had been forced to admit that identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity, and resistance to self-pity. The reality of the invisible spirit transcended the assumptions of the flesh, a great-grandfather she never knew might have said. Confrontation based on color had addled man since Moses married the Ethiopian woman and God made leprous the skin of the sneering man who challenged His right to move Moses to love.

  Shelby loved Meade too much to listen to anybody who wished she loved him less. His parents, from all present signs, refused to acknowledge that they were gaining a daughter and not losing a son. Her own parents could not understand why only Meade could make her happy because, just as his parents had done with her, they had tagged him with a dictionary definition, looking him up under “Caucasian” and boxing him inside the words they found there, when there were a dozen other words that could also describe him. There were other men in the world, of course, but Meade was like no other. That was love’s axiom and its paradox. Those who could not see what love saw must take it on faith that it was there. Meade had made Shelby the intimate of all his hopes and aspirations, pouring his mind into hers and encouraging her to s
hake off any thought of compromise. To ask for more from a man was to ask for too much. Wasn’t it?

  Shelby was well aware that her mother privately thought that she was throwing away her careful upbringing as a Coles, ignoring its obligations, dismissing its successes to live out a dream with a seed salesman’s son. “How many people can play a piano?” her mother had openly asked her, answering herself immediately: “Practically anybody who has ever been a child. It is a standard parlor accomplishment. Most of the young men you grew up with could play a tune at a party from the time they were seven. But tell me how many of them were fool enough to give serious thought to expanding this frivolous skill into a full-time occupation that could support a daughter of the Clark Coleses in a manner approved by her parents?”

  Shelby hadn’t even bothered to answer her mother, for she knew she would never understand that she couldn’t bear any of the men her parents saw as ideal suitors precisely because they paid more mind to who her parents were than to who she was. But Meade had never revered her as a sacred cow of the Coleses. She had been his girl, and her surname didn’t matter because he planned to change it in due time. He wasn’t marrying her parents. In fact she knew he saw them as the fat souls of a foolish generation, as dedicated to dead issues as were his own parents and their friends. With their meager ambition to succeed where success was assured, they crowded the un-creative highway to the good job, the good wife, the good life, the two point something children who had good college prospects. They had no hunger, no goad of discontent. They had never gnawed in a wakeful night with a hunger to overreach the coming day’s capacity.

  He had held out his hand to Shelby and she had leaped the wide gap between all that she had been brought up to be and all that Meade was striving to be. She would have to learn to live with his brand of faith in a double union with man and musician, in a duality of discipline and desire.

  Shelby sat up in her soft four-poster bed, stirred by her thoughts. She stroked the cotton sheets ruefully. Much as she loved her fiancé’s idealism, his idea of a comfortable standard of living had little to do with her own, and would take some getting used to. She stretched her arms out to the open bay window. On such a balmy summer day, on this Elysian isle, anything seemed possible.

  The sharp staccato rap of a knuckle at the door made Shelby wince. Once again Liz had beaten her out of bed. It was ever thus; even as little girls, Liz would scamper to the breakfast table and clamor for her morning meal, while Shelby could be made to budge only after the fiercest resistance. “You’re awake?” her sister said, sweeping into the room with a sisterly lack of ceremony. “Did you hear Gram and me? We had quite a set-to. She wants to see you, but wait until you’ve had your coffee. I saw her on an empty stomach, and she made me feel queasy.”

  Shelby plumped the pillows behind her back and held out her arms for Laurie. “I could hear voices, but the Oval was already beginning to babble. What’s wrong with Gram?” Liz handed Laurie over and curled up at the foot of the bed. The baby studied Shelby’s face intently. She reached her little hand out for Shelby’s bright hair, and her small round mouth shaped itself into a smile.

  “Oh, she’s perfect,” Shelby sighed. “Did you ever see such glowing skin? I can never decide what color she is. Tan maybe, with pink showing through the surface. And the softest brown eyes in the world. I’ve always thought brown eyes were for tenderness. And I love her black hair; it’s as black and shiny as a crow’s wing in the sun. Oh, Liz, will all my children with Meade be fair? Can’t one of them be Laurie’s warm color?”

  “I think it’s going to be curly,” Liz said contentedly. “Not plain old straight like mine, but a cross between Linc’s and mine. She is a wonder child.”

  Shelby gently blew on Laurie’s cheek. The baby’s face puckered up and quivered. “Someday,” Shelby whispered with mock solemnity, “some artist will capture this angel child on canvas and will win first prize at every exhibition.”

  Liz snorted. “Well, we’d win first prize for the fond and foolish, and Gram would be the first to say so.”

  Shelby remembered that Gram wanted to see her. “Do you know what’s on her mind this morning?”

  “I think she’s lost her mind,” Liz said flatly.

  “Oh, Liz!” Shelby protested.

  “Sorry. That was too harsh. But I do think Gram has suddenly gone senile, or is teetering on the brink. She had a dream or something about death, and now she thinks she’s going to die. And she wants to go down South to do it, to the never-never land of magnolias, because long ago she lived in a house where nobody but slaves were my Laurie’s color.” Liz shrugged and half rose. “Oh well. I’d better go take my bath.”

  “Wait. You’ve a right to be impatient with Gram. She’s been miserable about the baby. But I think that it’s more that it’s hard for her to accept her as a permanent member of the family without feeling replaced. All summer, everything’s centered around the baby and the wedding. All of our talk has been about the future. It’s made Gram retreat to the past. And the past may have confused her mind a little. She wants to go home because the old make their wishes dying wishes.

  The young always think the old are wandering in their minds. They think that death is a word the old play with just to be cantankerous, as with a dangerous toy. Gram had stated the facts as she had studied them in her mind, and Liz and Shelby were turning them into fancies. Only Hannibal would have seen, he whose quiet joy had been to listen to Miss Caroline, who was always divided in his mind between the present and the epic past, he who had no blood bond of understanding but would have understood the homing heart’s return to Xanadu, the separated flesh crying “take me” and both hands reaching out for help to return to the sweeter soil of memory. But Hannibal’s black hand, his sympathetic hand, would have been of no use in her self-deception.

  Liz snorted. “Gram will live to be a hundred. She’s past the age for cancer or coronaries. And now she’s getting too mean to die. She wants to pick up her marbles and go home. I guess it is easy enough for you to take Gram’s side, now that you’ve become the apple of her eye, the hope for her future. I only hope your kids won’t think they’re better than Laurie because their father belongs to the chosen race.”

  Shelby blushed vividly at Liz’s insinuation, and at her premature reference to parenthood. “Liz, I haven’t any kids. At this moment, I haven’t even got a husband. I didn’t know you felt that way about Meade.”

  “What way? I didn’t say how I felt. He’s not for me, but I honestly think he is wonderful for you.”

  “Why isn’t he wonderful for you?”

  “Because I’ve got a man of my own.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  “Well then, to be crude about it, I just can’t see a white man in bed. There’s nothing about a white man that excites me. Maybe I put too much emphasis on sex, but that’s what I think.”

  “Do you mean I don’t put enough?” Shelby said sharply.

  Liz groaned. “Here we go again. I was talking about me.”

  “Well, how do you feel about me?”

  “I wouldn’t have you any other way.” Liz chuckled, a small smile flitting across her face.

  “What does that mean?” Shelby demanded. “Tomorrow I’m going to be married, so please let’s not be cryptic. Do you mean I’m cold?”

  “Little virgin sister, don’t you know?”

  “How could I? … Oh!” gasped Shelby as she finally understood the meaning behind Liz’s words. She blushed in surprise and embarrassment.

  “You can ask the obvious question,” Liz said kindly. Shelby took a deep breath. “Wouldn’t you have married him even if you hadn’t been sure?”

  “Shelby, before I answer, will you remember something? You and I are two different people, neither of whom will always have the answer for the other. I’m your older sister, married, a mother, but still a long way from maturity. First off, I could never marry an artist. I wouldn’t care what color h
e was. Popping out of bed because an idea popped into his head and leaving me high and very dry.”

  “But would that mean I was cold and didn’t care? I thought it would mean I was understanding. Oh, Liz, now you’ve worried me.”

  “Don’t be a ninny. Who says I know best? Who says I’m good for Linc? I don’t seem to do very much of what he asks except go to bed with him, and after a while that may not be enough. I shouldn’t have spent the summer here. I should have stayed in New York and cooked my husband’s meals. I didn’t come to this island for my baby’s sake, I came because Mother has two maids. I was tired of being both of them at home.”

  “You’re not lazy, Liz,” Shelby said loyally.

  “No, maybe not, but I’m not a real wife either. I’m still a lover girl, who thinks the rest of marriage is a drag. I’m as worried as you are for a very different reason.”

  “When Linc comes, won’t he be here sometime today or on the first boat tomorrow? Why not go back with him? The summer is almost over.”

  “Linc’s not coming,” Liz stated flatly, trying without success to hide her keen disappointment. “I called him last night to tell him about boat connections, but he wouldn’t change his mind, as I’d hoped he would. So that, I regret to say, is that.”

  Shelby felt let down, but she said quickly, “Well, after all, Liz, my wedding’s very important to me, but the clinic is very important to Linc. You two didn’t have a fancy wedding, so I don’t see why I should expect Linc to be excited about mine.”