A Harlem Wedding
My favorite historical fiction is the kind that breathes life into a revered figure from the past by telling the story of someone else whose life they shaped intimately. A Harlem Wedding does just that.
Yolande Du Bois is the only living child of W.E.B. Du Bois and a society darling who comes of age in the glittering Harlem world of jazz, poetry, art, and fashion. But she also bears the weight of her father’s war against racist America, in particular his faith in the power of the Talented Tenth—an elite class of Black artistic and intellectual giants—to channel African American cultural achievements into the struggle for social and racial equality. Expected to marry and procreate with the talented man of her father’s choosing, Yolande fights to determine her own professional and romantic fate. This is a story of battling wills, domestic betrayal, and the painful consequences of both, as star-crossed lovers are forced together or apart by wider forces of injustice.
The gift of this novel is the way it portrays the glamour and the intellectual and artistic revolutions of the Harlem Renaissance through the experiences of a young woman, at once anxious to make her father proud and defiantly forging her own path. We see the cost to her psyche of paternal and high-society judgement. We sympathize with her jealousies, her resentments, and her romantic and sexual longings, and we applaud her ambitions. We root for her freedom to love and live according to her own choices. Yet we also see where such freedom is denied, even within the dazzling worlds of avant-garde Harlem and Paris. Glitz meets grit in this warm and compelling book.
