An American Marriage

It is the Labor Day weekend, and Roy and Celestial Hamilton drive from Atlanta (where the couple lives) to Eloe (a rural town in Louisiana) to visit Roy’s parents, Big Roy and Olive. Roy narrates the opening chapter. The couple have been married for eighteen months. They met when they both attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College, introduced at a student mixer by a mutual friend, Dre Tucker. Roy, now a textbook sales rep, makes a comfortable living. Celestial creates one-of-a-kind dolls—she has already been profiled in a magazine as one of Atlanta’s up and coming artists.

For Roy, his wife is “the perfect balance in a woman, not a button-down corporate type, but she wore her pedigree like a gloss on a patent-leather shoe” (8). Although not from poverty (Roy’s parents run a successful sporting goods store), Roy is aware of his in-laws’ wealth (Celestial’s mother is a school district assistant superintendent; her father is a retired high school chemist who had stumbled into a formula that kept orange juice fresher and had made a fortune). The couple moved into Celestial’s childhood home (the parents, suddenly millionaires, deeded the house to them and relocated to a grand Victorian showplace). Roy is proud that he completed college, left home, and is now poised for long-term career success. He is ready to start a family. The long marriage of his father and mother provides Roy a template for a successful marriage. Celestial is not so sure. She fears Roy is still a “playboy” (35).

At Big Roy and Olive’s house, discomfort ensues. The couple have decided to stay at a hotel on the outskirts of Eloe, even though Big Roy and Olive have offered them their home. Adding to this subtle slight, when Olive admires one of Celestial’s dolls, rather than making it a gift, Celestial laughs and says Olive could not afford one of her dolls. Later, on the way to the hotel, Roy, in a moment of honesty, tells Celestial that his family is “more complicated” (22) than she suspects: Big Roy is not his biological father. His biological father is only a name to him—Othaniel Jenkins. Celestial is hurt by the disclosure. She argues he should have shared this secret long ago: “You tell me that we’re making a family, that I’m the closest person to you, and then you drop a bomb like this?” (24). The two bicker until Roy leaves to cool off. He meets an older woman with her arm in a sling struggling to get ice from the hotel machine. Roy helps her, and then he walks her back to her room. He opens up to her about the fight he and Celestial had. Because the woman cannot work her room’s only window, Roy steps in long enough to open the window for her before he heads back to his own room. Before he leaves, however, he cautions her that her doorknob is not working properly.

Celestial then assumes the narration. She recalls settling down into the hotel bed with Roy, their fight quieted, and how blessed she feels to be married to such a man. Suddenly the door bursts open, and the room floods with police officers. In a half-sleep blur, Celestial gathers that a woman had been raped in the hotel and had identified Roy as her attacker. It is the woman Roy met at the ice machine. The police, all white, drag Roy out into the parking lot and cuff him. The subsequent trial baffles Celestial—there is no DNA evidence, no corroborating testimony. Yet Roy is convicted and sentenced to twelve years in state prison. Roy howls like only a “grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso, and finally through his mouth” (39).