Reading while white — how Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage slapped me in the face

We like to think we’re good people — thoughtful, caring, connected. But sometimes a piece of art accuses us, makes us feel not just implicated but wrong in so many ways. The indictment brings us up short, asks us to dig deeper and interrogate our received wisdom and casual taken-for-granteds once more. This happened to me while reading Tayari Jones’ magnificent novel An American Marriage.

It’s a captivating story, exploring the inner lives and complex characters of a whole community, especially around the two protagonists, Celestial and Roy. Part of the brilliance of Jones’ writing is how she inhabits each character — persuading you of Roy’s point of view in one moment, and then immediately convincing you of Celestial’s, even as they are arguing.

Of course they fall in love and marry and of course complications ensue.

My problem was that the situations called up the green-eyed monster, judgement, in me. I found myself saying, “No, he should do this;” “Oh, she should do that.” Life is full of practical and moral choices and I had my opinions, as any reader would.

Toward the end, as things came to a head, An American Marriage slapped me in the face. I found myself scolding Roy as he acted out in desperation. But I suddenly caught myself, realized how patronizing and yes colonialist all my reactions were. I could not tell him what I, a suburban-raised white boy, would do. Because, you see, this is a Black family, an African American family, in Georgia and Louisiana; this is a family buffeted by life in white supremacist America; it is a world where long prison sentences, grinding poverty, aggressions both micro and macro, define and enclose them.

I realized: Who am I to judge? Who am I to pester or bicker or hector the characters? What the hell do I know of this life, of these choices? I urge everyone to read this novel. But, white people, read it humbly, listen closely, enter respectfully with the idea of understanding something of what we don’t understand. “If you don’t know, now you know.”

Jones is writing a Black story for a Black audience. She centers Celestial’s world view with a quotation from Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Nikki Rosa”: “Black love is Black wealth.” The whole phrase from the poem goes like this:

I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth

Giovanni says, and Jones reminds us, that it is not the place of white people to inscribe or imprison Black reality with our own perspectives, whether these perspectives involve pity or contempt — or a combination of both. Oh yes I think white people can read this book, must read this book. But we need to enter the space with respect and self-awareness, or rather the willingness to have our selfness shaken up, turned over, and exposed.

Normally the dodge for this kind of encounter with the “other” is to say, “Well, there are universal themes here. We all have similar experiences.” Certainly there are universal truths. But in the pounding reality of this couple is the reminder that, “this is our reality, not yours.” The notion of universal themes, then, takes on the suspect mantle of “color blind” liberalism: “I don’t see race.” Oh, yes you do, and you pull that shit only when it’s convenient and self-serving.

This is a Black story and it is fitting that Jones names it an “American” marriage. The first thought for most “people who think they are white” is that it’s about white people, because, after all, Whites are the unmarked, the default “Americans.” Jones jerks white readers around with the irony. Yes, fool, this, this is America. It’s the novelistic reflection of Childish Gambino’s heart-shattering music video of the same name.

Tayari Jones has written a novel of great courage, the courage to tell this Black story in a completely straight-forward way. There is no lecturing, there is no roadmap. It is just this, the truth of her world. The only way to read it while white is humbly. The only way to react is not with patronizing, not with charity, but with a commitment to solidarity, to end this madness.