Abandoned by Booklikes

It's funny, I remember watching this mini-series starring Halle Berry when I was a kid. I really didn't like it since I thought her character was a fool. I also thought her promotion for the mini-series was weird. She was talking crap about the white man she was engaged to in the mini-series and how not attractive he was compared to the hot black man that was also attracted to her. This is a weird segue into reading this book and wondering if Halle Berry actually read it before agreeing to star in this.

Dorothy West's book gives us a really fantastic look at an upper class African American family living on Martha's Vineyard during the 1950s. The main premise is that the Cole's family is dealing with the fallout from their daughter Shelby being engaged to a white jazz musician from New York. Her family rightfully wonders why she didn't choose someone that is more among their class (i.e. having a respectable profession like a doctor, lawyer, teacher, etc.). 

Reading this book I was instantly drawn in just because it reminded me a bit of reading "Hidden Figures". You get to read about another subculture of African Americans in the part of the country/world that I just didn't expect them to be. 

This book also touches upon colorism very well too. The Cole family is light skinned and they all (mother, father, etc.) run around using that as a weapon against others who are dark skinned. Shelby being the youngest and most beautiful finds herself questioning her upcoming marriage when the darker skinned Lute pressures her to be with him instead of with Meade (her fiancee). West also explores Shelby's parents marriage as well. 

What I found fascinating though was that you would probably start this book rooting for Lute until you get into it and find out what is really going on there. 

West goes back and forth between past and present and you find out about the Cole matriarch (a white woman) who ended up marrying a black man after the Civil War. Ohh boy, there was some self hating going on there. And you can see from her and her disdain for "blackness" how that affected her children and grandchildren. 

The writing was lyrical at times. West definitely has an eye for words. I can see why she was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

“Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.”

 

“Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks... But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.” 

I thought the flow was fantastic all the way through. I found out afterward that Former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the one who ended up editing this book and pushing West's name out there again in the 1990s. 

The book being set on Martha's Vineyard definitely had me imagining a lot of things. Maybe it's my own bias, it didn't even occur to me that African Americans could be wealthy (for that era) and live among others back in the 1950s. We do get to see the toll though that the Cole family has with straddling the world of African Americans and white people though. 

If I have one complaint it's that this book felt fairly short. I got to the end and went that's it?