An American

Marriage
J
a novel by

TAYARI JONES

ALGONQUIN BO OKS OF CHAPEL HILL

2018
 C E LE STI AL

M
emory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator. I
still look back on that night, although not as often
as I once did. How long can you live with your
face twisted over your shoulder? No matter what
people may say, this was not a failure to remember. I’m not sure it is a
failure at all.
When I say that I visit the Piney Woods Inn in my waking dreams, I’m
not being defensive. It’s merely the truth. Like Aretha said, A woman’s only
human. . . . She’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less.
My regret is how hard we argued that night, over his parents, of all
things. We had fought harder even before we married, when we were play-
ing at love, but those were tussles about our relationship. At the Piney
Woods, we tangled about history, and there is no fair fight to be waged
 An American Marriage | 29

about the past. Knowing something I didn’t, Roy called out “November 17,”
stopping time. When he left with the ice bucket, I was glad for him to go.
I called Andre, and after three rings he picked up and talked me down,
sane and civil as always. “Ease up on Roy,” he said. “If you lose it every
time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”
“But,” I said, not ready to let go. “He didn’t even — ”
“You know I’m right,” he said without being smug. “But what you don’t
know is that I’m entertaining a young lady this evening.”
“Pardon moi,” I said, happy for him.
“Gigolos get lonely, too,” he said.
I was still grinning when I hung up the phone.
And I was still smiling when Roy appeared at the door with the ice
bucket extended in his arms like a bouquet of roses, and by then my anger
had cooled like a forgotten cup of coffee.
“Georgia, I’m sorry,” he said, taking the drink from my hand. “This has
been burning a hole in my pocket. Think how I feel. You have this perfect
family. Your father is a millionaire.”
“He didn’t always have money,” I said, something that I seemed to say
at least once a week. Before my father sold his orange juice solution to
Minute Maid, we were like any other family in Cascade Heights, what the
rest of America thinks of as middle-­middle class and what black America
calls upper-­middle class. No maid. No private school. No trust fund. Just
two parents, each with two degrees and, between them, two decent jobs.
“Well, as long as I’ve known you, you have been a rich man’s daughter.”
“A million dollars doesn’t make you rich-­rich,” I said. “Real rich people
don’t have to earn their money.”
“Rich-­rich, nouveau rich, nigger rich — any kind of rich looks rich from
where I’m sitting. There is no way I was going to roll up on your father in
his mansion and tell him that I’ve never met my daddy.”
 30 | tayari jones

He took a step toward me and I moved toward him.

“It’s not a mansion,” I said, making my voice soft. “And I told you, my
daddy is literally the son of a sharecropper. An Alabama sharecropper at that.”
These conversations always caught me off guard, although after a year I
should have been accustomed to this fraught song and dance. My mother
cautioned me before I got married that Roy and I were from two separate
realities. She said that I would constantly have to reassure him that we
were, in fact, “equally yoked.” Amused by her language, I shared this with
Roy, along with a joke about pulling a plow, but he didn’t even crack a
smile.
“Celestial, your daddy ain’t sharing no crops now. And what about your
mom? I wasn’t going to have her seeing Olive as a teenage mother, left by
the side of the road. No way was I going to set my mama up like that.”
I closed the space between us, resting my hands on his head, feeling the
curve of his scalp. “Look,” I said with my lips near his ears. “We’re not
blackface Leave It to Beaver. You know my mother is Daddy’s second wife.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of shocker?”
“That’s because you don’t know the whole story.” I took a breath and
pushed the words out fast before I could think too much more about
them. “My parents got together before Daddy was divorced.”
“You saying they were separated . . . or?”
“I’m saying that my mother was his mistress. For a long time. I think
like three years or so. My mother was a June bride at the courthouse be-
cause her pastor wouldn’t perform the ceremony.” I have seen the photos.
Gloria wears an off-­white suit and a veiled pillbox hat. My father looks
young and excited. There is no indication of anything but effortless devo-
tion in their smiles. There is no evidence of me, but I’m in the frame, too,
hiding behind her yellow chrysanthemum bouquet.
“Damn,” he said with a low whistle. “I didn’t think Mr. D had it in him.
I didn’t think Gloria — ”
 An American Marriage | 31

“Don’t talk about my mama,” I said. “You don’t talk about mine, and I
won’t talk about yours.”
“I’m not holding anything against Gloria, like I know you wouldn’t
hold anything against Olive, right?”
“There’s something to hold against my daddy. Gloria says that he didn’t
tell her he was married until they had been dating a whole month.”
She explained this to me when I was eighteen, when I was leaving How-
ard University after a messy love affair. Helping me seal cardboard cartons,
my mother had said, “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasion-
ally this is in service of the good. Did you know that your father had cer-
tain obligations when we met?” I think of this as the first time my mother
had ever spoken to me as one woman to another. Wordlessly, we swore
each other to secrecy, and until now, I had never betrayed her confidence.
“A month, that’s not a lot of time. She could have walked away,” Roy
said. “That is, if she wanted to.”
“She didn’t want to,” I said. “According to Gloria, by then she was ir-
reversibly in love.” As I told this to Roy, I imitated my mother in the tone
she used in public, elocution-­class crisp, not the shaky register in which
she had shared this detail.
“What?” Roy said. “Irreversibly? The warranty was up after thirty days
and she couldn’t send him back?”
“Gloria said that looking back on it, she’s glad he didn’t tell her because
she never would have gone out with a married man and Daddy turned out
to be the One.”
“I can get that, in a way.” Roy raised my hand to his lips. “Sometimes
when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
“No,” I said. “The journey matters. Let my mama tell it. My daddy
lied to her for her own good. I never want to feel grateful about being
deceived.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But think about it 2.0. If your daddy didn’t
 32 | tayari jones

hide his situation, you wouldn’t be here. And if you weren’t here, where
would I be?”
“I still don’t like it. I want us to be on the up-­and-­up. I don’t want our
kid to inherit all of our secrets.”
Roy pumped his fist in the air. “Did you hear yourself?”
“What?”
“You said ‘our kid.’ ”
“Roy, stop being silly. Listen to what I’m trying to say.”
“Don’t try and take it back. You said ‘our kid.’ ”
“Roy,” I said. “I’m for real. No more secrets, okay? If you got anything
else, spill it.”
“I got nothing.”
And with that, we reconciled, as we had so many times before. There is
a song about that, too: Break up to make up, that’s all we do. Did I imagine
that this was our pattern for all time? That we would grow old together,
accusing and forgiving? Back then, I didn’t know what forever looked
like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in the Piney Woods, I
believed that our marriage was a fine-­spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We
tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure
to give way.
We climbed into the small bed, a little buzzed from our jerry-­rigged
cocktails. Agreeing that the bedspread was suspect, we kicked it to the
floor and lay facing each other. Lying there, tracing his brow bone with
my fingers, I thought of my parents and even Roy’s. Their marriages were
cut from less refined but more durable cloth, something like cotton-­sack
burlap, bound with gray twine. How superior Roy and I felt that night
in this rented room of our own, enjoying the braid of our affection. I am
ashamed at the memory and the hot blood heats my face, even if I’m only
dreaming.
Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they
 An American Marriage | 33

happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the
unpredictable effect of emotion. It washed over me sometimes when I was
browsing fabric stores or preparing a meal — I would think about Roy, his
bowlegged walk or the time he wrestled a robber to the ground, costing
him a precious front tooth. When memory tapped me, I let go a few tears,
no matter where I was, blaming it on allergies or an eyelash gone rogue.
So when my emotion filled my eyes and closed my throat on that night in
Eloe, I thought it was passion rather than premonition.
When we planned the trip, I’d thought we’d be staying at his mother’s,
so I didn’t pack lingerie. Instead, I wore a white slip, which would have to
do for our game of undressing. Roy smiled and said he loved me. His voice
caught, like whatever had taken hold of me had grabbed him, too. As silly
as we were, young as we were, we thought it was merely desire. This thing
we enjoyed in abundance.
So there we were, not sleeping yet spent, occupying some in-­between
restful affection state, full of possibility. I sat up in bed next to him, inhal-
ing the odors of the day — river mud, the musk of hotel soap, and then
the scent of him, the marker of his personal chemistry, and then my own.
It’s a fragrance that burrowed into the fibers of our sheets. I eased close
to him and kissed his shut lids. I was thinking that I was lucky. I didn’t
mean that I was lucky in the way that single women made me feel when
they reminded me how fortunate I was to find a marrying man these days,
and not lucky in the way of magazine features lamenting how few “good”
black men there were remaining, providing a bullet-­point litany of the
ineligible — dead, gay, in jail, married to white women. Yes, I was fortu-
nate by all those measures, but in my marriage to Roy, I felt blessed in the
old-­fashioned sense, in the way that anyone would be in finding someone
whose smell you enjoyed.
Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we
didn’t? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its
 34 | tayari jones

clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me

to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some
subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to his side with his heavy
arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake.
Did I want a child? Did I lie in bed that night imagining an eager clump
of cells dividing and then dividing again until I was somebody’s mother
and Roy was somebody’s daddy, and Big Roy, Olive, and my parents were
somebody’s grandparents? I did wonder what was going on inside my
body, but I won’t say what I hoped for. Is motherhood really optional
when you’re a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man?
When I was in college, I took on a volunteer position at a literacy orga-
nization and tutored teen mothers. It was hard work and tended to be
disheartening, as the young women seldom earned their diplomas. My
supervisor said to me over espresso and croissants, “Have a baby and save
the race!” He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “If girls like this are hav-
ing all the kids, and girls like you stay childless and fancy-­free, what’s going
to happen to us as a people?” Without thinking, I promised to do my part.
This is not to say that I didn’t want to be a mother. It’s not to say that I
did. This is only to say that I was certain that the check would come due.
So while Roy slept with confidence, I closed my eyes with trepidation.
I was still awake when the door burst open. I know they kicked it in, but
the written report says that a front-­desk clerk handed over the key and
the door was opened in a civilized manner. But who knows what is true? I
remember my husband asleep in our room while a woman six years older
than his mother says she slept lightly in room 206, worried because the
door didn’t seem quite secure. She told herself she was being paranoid but
couldn’t convince her eyes to stay closed. Before midnight, a man twisted
the knob, knowing that he could. It was dark, but she believed she recog-
nized Roy, the man she met at the ice machine. The man who told her he
had been fighting with his wife. She said that this was not her first time
 An American Marriage | 35

finding herself at the mercy of a man, but it would be the last. Roy, she
said, may be smart, and he may have learned by watching TV how to cover
his tracks, but he couldn’t erase her memory.
But she couldn’t erase mine either. Roy was with me all night. She
doesn’t know who hurt her, but I know who I married.

I married Roy Othaniel Hamilton, whom I met for the first

time when I was in college. Our connection wasn’t immediate. He con-
sidered himself a playboy in those days, and even at age nineteen, I was
not one to play with. I’d come to Spelman as a transfer student after the
one-­year disaster at Howard University in DC. So much for me leaving
home. My mother, an alumna herself, insisted that this was where I would
cultivate new, bone-­deep friendships, but I stuck close with Andre, who
was literally the boy next door. We had been close since we were three
months old, bathing together in the kitchen sink.
Andre was the one who introduced me to Roy, although it wasn’t quite
on purpose. They had been next-­door neighbors in Thurman Hall, on the
far side of campus. I often stayed nights in Andre’s room, strictly platonic,
although no one believed us. He slept atop the covers, while I huddled
under the blankets. None of it makes sense now, but this is how Dre and
I always were.
Before Roy and I were properly introduced, a sex-­breathy voice on
the other side of the wall pronounced his whole name. Roy. Othaniel.
Hamilton.
Andre said, “You think he asked her to say that?”
I snorted. “Othaniel?”
“Doesn’t strike me as a spontaneous utterance.”
We giggled as the twin bed thumped against the wall. “I think she’s
faking it.”
“If she is,” Andre said, “then they all are.”