43 pages • 1 hour read
An American Marriage
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EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
The novel closes with three letters between Celestial and Roy settling the paperwork about their divorce in the months since Roy left for Louisiana. In Roy’s letter, he tells Celestial how his beating of Dre haunts him, how he understood that he could easily have killed the man with his bare hands. The degree of his anger scares him even now. He assures Celestial that he has used those same hands now to sign their divorce papers.
Celestial writes that she and Dre are still together. She will not marry him: “I don’t want to be anyone’s wife […] We’re living our lives together, a communion” (304). She reveals that she is, however, pregnant, a daughter, and she asks Roy to keep the three of them in his prayers.
Roy in turn reveals that he and Davina are engaged, sort of. They are living together but not interested in children. He reassures Celestial that he is back on his feet: “She and I are enough to be a family” (305). He struggled to find work, but now he and his father have opened a barbershop called Locs and Lineups. Life, he says, is mostly good. Sometimes he talks about getting out—going far away and starting fresh in New Orleans or Houston. He knows he will stay: “This is home. This is where I am” (306).
Epilogue Analysis
A narrative is assumed to be tight and tidy, a pre-designed construction with a clear beginning, a middle, and end. An Epilogue is, almost by definition, a risk. An Epilogue suggests that the story as it ended is still somehow incomplete. As Roy admitted in the previous section, no story ends, and similarly “home” is not where the heart is, but wherever one is.
As the narrative ends, we leave Roy and Celestial in the settling darkness of the bedroom that suddenly is and is not theirs. Roy has had his jolting epiphany: he cannot deny the five years in prison, that life is gone. He is frightened, uncertain, uneasy, and ready only to start living all over again without the woman he had always assumed would be part of his life. We are also suspended between possibilities, the future for these characters as open—and as terrifying—as it is for us.
The Epilogue works to settle many questions we have as we close the narrative. Both Roy and Celestial have found their way to a separate peace. Celestial, for her part, embraces what she had long resisted: her autonomy. She refuses to be a wife. Experience has taught her that a woman sacrifices critical elements of who she is to enter into that relationship. She is ready now, however, for motherhood in which love is not divided but shared. She is proud enough to be humble and humble enough to be proud; she is powerful enough to be vulnerable and vulnerable enough to be powerful.
Roy gets the last word. Roy now understands the depth of the damage that his incarceration caused him. He acknowledges what he is capable of doing, the animal within him. Because he has made peace with that reality, he is prepared now to govern, direct, and control his anger. Without irony or bitterness, he accepts Celestial’s new life and wishes her only the best. His relationships with his biological father and with Davina indicate he found peace. That contentment becomes the home for which he always searched.
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