Veil and Vow
GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Coeditors
Thadious M. Davis
Mary Kelley
Editorial Advisory Board
Nancy Cott
Jane Sherron De Hart
John DEmilio
Linda K. Kerber
Annelise Orleck
Nell Irvin Painter
Janice Radway
Robert Reid-Pharr
Noliwe Rooks
Barbara Sicherman
Cheryl Wall
Emerita Board Members
Cathy N. Davidson
Sara Evans
Annette Kolodny
Wendy Martin
Guided by feminist and antiracist perspectives, this series examines the construction and influence of gender and sexuality within the full range of Americas cultures. Investigating in deep context the ways in which gender works with and against such markers as race, class, and region, the series presents outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, including works in history, literary studies, religion, folklore, and the visual arts. In so doing, Gender and American Culture seeks to reveal how identity and community are shaped by gender and sexuality.
A complete list of books published in Gender and American Culture is available at www.uncpress.org.
Veil and Vow
Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture
Aneeka Ayanna Henderson
The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL
This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press and with the support of Amherst College.
2020 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Henderson, Aneeka Ayanna, author.
Title: Veil and vow : marriage matters in contemporary african american culture / Aneeka Ayanna Henderson.
Description: 1. | Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Series: Gender and american culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047734 | ISBN 9781469651750 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469651767 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469651774 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansMarriageHistory. | MarriageGovernment policyUnited StatesHistory. | Income distributionUnited StatesHistory. | African American familiesHistory.
Classification: LCC E185.86 .H4625 2020 | DDC 306.85/08996073dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047734
Cover illustration: Shawn Theodore, The Hope for a Gift, 2016. Used by permission of the artist.
To my ancestors and to the beautiful, nurturing forms of biological and chosen Black family.
Contents
Invocation
We are gathered here today in the presence of friends and loved ones, to join this man and this woman.
As I rode the train to high school at the ghastly hour of 7 A.M. in Chicago during the 1990s, I grew accustomed to seeing women outfitted in sneakers and notched-collar trench coats, schlepping dog-eared novels with cover art featuring striking images of Black women and men. These novels that peeked out of tote bags and coat pockets on the train platform seemed to emerge in unison as the train departed from the station. The chorus of texts by Terry McMillan, Sandra Kitt, and Sister Souljah, among others, heralded a late twentieth-century reawakening in the African American cultural imagination and revealed that writers and consumers had a keen interest in the representation of African American romance and marriage.
As the women on the train migrated from what I presume to be their suburban homes to their jobs in the city, McMillan also experienced her own migration as her readership expanded, with her work moving from small, cramped corners to vast, lucrative sections in bookstores. McMillans novels are often categorized as Romance in the few remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores that exist, while similar kinds of novels by African American authors are given less profitable real estate in General Interest or African American Fiction sections. Nevertheless, these hard-and-fast classifications belie the nuanced ways that these novels muddle what constitutes traditional romance. While they are not prototypical Harlequin texts or titillating bodice-rippers, they use romance tropes, and the protagonists are often in search of a husband or a monogamous partner. References to expensive vehicles, designer handbags, high-priced clothing, and other luxury items are interwoven in the texts, preceding and reflecting the reverence for Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, and other upscale designers in chick lit and mainstream romance, such as Sex and the City.
These accoutrements not only attract a growing middle-class African American readership but provide added pressure for main characters to have successful heteronormative relationships with satisfying endings, culminating in the marriage proposal. Political achievements such as the civil rights movement redouble assumptions about the inevitable marriage proposal, and it is an assumption about African American people that has come to follow a historical pattern. Much like the expectation for wedlock and socioeconomic progress imposed on newly emancipated African American people who found that slavery supposedly could no longer be blamed for social ills that plagued the black community, political and popular culture suggests that the last definitive hurdle for late twentieth-century African American middle-class protagonists enjoying the spoils of the civil rights movement is securing a monogamous heterosexual relationship.
Many of the late twentieth-century books I saw on the train, such as McMillans 1989 novel Disappearing Acts, employ romance tropes but pivot away from or revise the classic Reader, I married him or happily ever after (HEA) finale that characterizes romance and chick-lit genres, urging new modes of examining the representation of courtship and marriage in Black cultural production. The uncharacteristic rejection snarls the delicate line between the institution of marriage operating, albeit ostensibly, as a form of protection against racism, sexism, and poverty for some of the most vulnerable members of society and that same institution working as a mechanism that can make those members more vulnerable to state and intimate partner or domestic violence.
Taking this delicate line as its centerpiece, Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture argues that portraits of courtship and marriage in the popular and political imaginary are an indispensable mode of reassessing family formation and the ways in which matrimony has become an increasingly politicized endeavor. I worry this delicate but jagged line, to use Cheryl Walls term, by moving across and between print, sonic, and visual culture to explore what the representation of romance, courtship, and marriage means in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I analyze films such as The Best Man, songs by Anita Baker, fiction by McMillan, book covers, and other cultural ephemera. Rather than rehearse the sweeping generalizations in cultural production pronouncing marriage as wholly good or bad, I read against the grain an archive that registers as supposedly apolitical and unimportant, countering the assumption that romantic desires occupy a space of frivolity and escape. Underexamined and undertheorized, these texts mask the ways in which they have become central to our understanding of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American and American cultural imaginaries.
