Celestial
and Roy are a young black couple with a promising future until Roy is
wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to twelve years. The book concentrates on their relationship during
their separation. Roy stays focused on
his love for his wife while Celestial tries to move forward with her life,
helped by her lifelong friend Andre.
When Roy is released, can he and Celestial regain what they lost, what
was stolen from them?
The book examines
marriage, “a peculiar institution.”
Celestial and Roy have been married for only a year before their lives
are torn apart. Celestial thinks of
their marriage as “a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with
silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.”
Theirs is not like the marriages of their parents: “Their marriages were cut from less refined
but more durable cloth, something like cotton-sack burlap, bound with gray
twine.” Later, she writes to Roy that “our
delicate cord . . . has been shredded by your incarceration.” They are not like his parents who “lived under
one roof for more than thirty years . . . grew together and grew up together .
. . That’s what a marriage is. What we
have here isn’t a marriage. A marriage
is more than your heart, it’s your life.
And we are not sharing ours.” Does
marriage require togetherness to survive or is Celestial correct in suggesting
that her and Roy’s marriage was “a sapling graft that didn’t have time to take”?
Are modern
marriages different because people don’t understand true commitment? Celestial admits, when thinking or Roy’s parents,
“I feel like I’ve been playing at marriage.
That I don’t know what it is to be committed.” Andre
mentions, when listening to some old songs, “Those old cats sang about a kind
of devotion long since out of style.” Is
the “’Till death do us part” vow unreasonable, “a recipe for failure”? How much loyalty can be expected in
marriage? Roy keeps focusing on the fact
that Celestial is his wife and hasn’t divorced him, but Andre points out, “’The
bottom line is that she doesn’t
belong to you. She never belonged to you. She
was your wife, yeah. But she didn’t belong to you.’” Is marriage a necessary institution when “you
can’t trust the state to know anything about the truth of people’s lives”? For Roy, a divorce would be just another
decree from a state that wrongfully imprisoned him. How does one even recognize love when “Human
emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of
blown glass” and when “convenience, habit, comfort, obligation – these are all
things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes”?
Of course,
the book tells the story of a marriage that is damaged by the racial injustice
that continues to haunt the United States.
While in college, Celestial heard a speech by a black man who had been
wrongfully imprisoned for decades, but his story “felt like a lesson from the
past, a phantom of Mississippi. What did
it have to do with us, college students . . . ?” Yet Roy’s education and work ethic do not
shield him from wrongful conviction: he
becomes engaged in “a battle older than his father and his father’s father.” Celestial emphasizes, “’What did Roy do to
deserve any of this? He didn’t do
anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is basic.’” Roy’s father-in-law, who calls Roy “’a hostage
of the state . . . a victim of America,’”
also argues that “’Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.’” Roy’s father agrees: “’That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.’”
And there
is a warning. Ray speaks of how prison
has changed him: “Innocent or not,
prison changes you, makes you into a convict.”
And Andre realizes, “But someone was going to pay for what happened to
Roy, just as Roy paid for what happened to that woman [who was raped]. Someone always pays. Bullet don’t
have nobody’s name on it, that’s what people say. . . . It’s out there,
random and deadly, like a tornado.”
Given the incarceration rate of black men in America, these observations
are ominous.
The book is
narrated by three characters: Roy,
Celestial and Andre. Because we are
privy to their thoughts, we come to understand their choices, though we might
not necessarily agree with them. Each of
them makes mistakes but each is also wronged, so I found it impossible to pick
sides. At different times, I was angry
with each one and sad for each.
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