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West's elders raised her to believe that work and luck could beat poverty and that racial prejudice could not hold her back. She could see the pomposities of their world, but she felt more comfortable with accomplishment and pretension than with the confrontational bitterness of black anger in the 1960s. Asked the reason for her relative silence during that period, she mentioned the Black Panther movement with agitation. With such voices roaring anger, she had felt, her own would not be heard.
When she did resume work on The Wedding, she did not mock the black aristocracy of Oak Bluffs, at least not much. "Blacks needed an aristocracy," she says. "Those doctors and lawyers and their wives giving fancy parties were important." But racial ironies are the substance of her novel, and West sees them clearly. The half-white grandmother of a prosperous colored clan can barely bring herself to hold a cute, brown granddaughter. And the patriarch, a renowned doctor, is troubled that his light-skinned daughter is marrying a white man. The problem is not so much the fellow's whiteness; it is his profession, or lack of one, that rankles. The prospective son-in-law is a jazz pianist.
An awkward ending mars the novel, and too easy plotting weakens the short stories of the new collection. West's strength is as a witness to a long-gone world. She knows the feelings of a not-very-smart man who pushes himself to a law degree he doesn't really know what to do with and of a stone-broke father giving his small son a penny to buy a moment of joy. She gives a vivid picture of her own mother and muses, "I still cannot put my finger on the why of her. What had she wanted, this beautiful woman? Did she get it?" These are a writer's hard questions. Late news is that West, writer, is at work on her next project, a nonfiction history of Oak Bluffs' black upper crust. ยน