Diversity Book Club: African-American Authors/Experiences

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: This beautiful book has been on display at so many bookstores I've visited over the past year, and I finally made time to read it.  Newlyweds Celestial and Roy believe they have it all - a home, jobs, love...but when Roy is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, their loyalties and strength are tested in ways they never imagined.  As the years pass, the nature of the love between Celestial and Roy necessarily changes - what he needs in terms of support and belief exist separate and apart from what Celestial needs on the outside for her life.  This book is clearly about racism, but also highlights the heartbreaking realities of mass incarceration - and what separation does to families.  I read this book close in time to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow which is a non-fiction education on how the United States' current system of criminal justice is the functional equivalent of modern-day racism, and how systemic and institutional racism have fundamentally decimated African-American communities.  An American Marriage also reminded me in many ways of Jesmyn Ward's haunting novel Sing, Unburied, Sing in which a young boy is raised by his black grandparents. His white father is in prison and his black mother is so consumed by her love for him, and unable to function in a world without him, that she remains ill-equipped to take care of her own child.  All of these books together really painted for me this painful world in which our ideas of retribution are so tangled up in our racism and blindness toward the next generations.  They books aren't full of much hope - though they are a testament to what families endure, and perhaps an illustration of the huge price we pay when we turn a blind eye to our so-called justice system.