43 pages • 1 hour read
An American Marriage
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Character Analysis
Celestial Davenport Hamilton
An American Marriage is told by three narrators who speak directly to us in discrete chapters: Celestial, Roy, and Dre each by turn contribute to the emerging narrative of their complicated triangle. Without authorial intrusion to direct our analyses of these characters, these characters define themselves much like characters in a play: by what they say and how they say it.
We want Celestial Davenport to be uncomplicated: we want her to be the loving and supportive wife of a husband victimized by the racist justice system, an innocent man wrongfully jailed for a brutal crime she believes in her heart he did not commit. Celestial refuses to be simply anything.
Understanding the contradictory character of Celestial Davenport Hamilton begins with understanding the long-term effects of what she is most reluctant to talk about: her two abortions. Those experiences, which she seldom explores, leave her in a disturbing complex of guilt and relief, isolation and anxiety. She cannot let either of the men in her life too close. Crafting dolls is her way of handling the trauma of her decision to end both of her pregnancies. The legacy of her two abortions leaves her both empowered (after all, she made the decision in both cases) and yet helpless, vulnerable, and unable to trust her heart entirely to any man.
Born to privilege, educated, articulate, and professionally directed, Celestial is a case study in the dilemma and challenges facing contemporary black women. Her business thrives and her reputation as an artisan grows even as her role of wife begins to thin into irony. Her heart wants contradictory things: the friendship and calming comfort of Dre, the boldness and hot volatility of Roy. She cannot wait for Roy to be released; but she cannot bring herself to slip off her wedding ring even after she accepts Dre’s wedding proposal. She is maddeningly inconsistent—and that, in the end, is the point. In the closing pages as she shifts back and forth in her profession of love for the two men who define her emotional life, that waffling reflects the integrity of her heart and her need to attend to the fullest dimensions of her own identity as woman, a black woman, and an artist. In the end, with her new pregnancy, she redeems the guilt of her earlier abortions and prepares now to experience sharing her heart not with a man but with a child.
Roy Othaniel Hamilton
Like Celestial, Roy is difficult to like. Early on, he is casually arrogant, terribly happy with how he has turned out. He is also scary, unpredictable, and volatile. He is remarkably shallow. He measures the worth of his identity through the metric of a successful career. He is aware he is not urban suave (Celestial, as he keeps reminding us, is high-bred). Although he loves his mother and his stepfather, he cannot shake his country roots, and that has put a considerable chip on his shoulder. In his tempestuous relationship with Celestial, he acknowledges his working class childhood, his fractured family, and his obsession with the spark and risk of flirting. He flies off the handle, he acts impulsively, and he reasons selfishly. He comes to us as an unrepentant Casanova who after a year or so of marriage wants only to establish the trappings of a socially conventional family by introducing a baby into the relationship even though, as his wife suspects, he is not entirely over the game of womanizing.
For all his protestations of love for Celestial, as she gets him to admit after he is released, he himself would never have waited five years for her. Given the absence of authorial frame, we are never entirely sure Roy did not commit the rape. No evidence is ever presented to indict anyone else. We have only his protestations. He is released not as an innocent man but as a victim of prosecutorial incompetence.
Prison, of course, alters his character. He protests his innocence—and discovers in the world of the Louisiana state prison system violence, brutality, and the keen anxiety over simple survival. That experience hardens him. He admits to Celestial offhandedly that he had been forced to kill a man in prison, although he never shares the details. After five years, his heart is as hardened as his prison-rebuilt body. In the closing showdown with Dre, his wife’s lover, Roy reveals the darkness of his character. At once hurt and crushed by the experience of Celestial’s infidelity, he is violent and confrontational, manipulative and uncompromising, desperate and insensitive. When Roy grabs the axe, the reader is not entirely sure he is not going to go for Celestial. In the end, through the intercession of his lover, Davina, Roy experiences an emotional calm that is both redeeming and solid. He comes home at last.
Andre Tucker
Of the three narrators, Dre must overcome the most complications to secure readers’ sympathy. That he does makes his character singular. Long before we meet him, he is, after all, the interloper. Dre does not actually talk until after Roy is released, and by then the reader already dislikes him. Before we read his poignant and soulful narrations, Dre, we assume, is a handy villain, callow and opportunistic. Roy’s best friend—indeed, the best man at Roy’s wedding—Dre moves in to claim Roy’s wife during his best friend’s incarceration and even moves into the house the two shared and asks her to marry him even though she is not legally divorced and indeed still wears her wedding ring.
Dre reveals a surprisingly gentle and loving heart. His long relationship with Celestial, dating back to their childhood, reveals an elegant friendship that transcends sexual need. Love is not simple for Dre—he appreciates Celestial’s dilemma, and his guilt over betraying his best friend drives him to seek the counsel of his own estranged father who tells him, “You have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans tied to a bridal sedan” (103). More than Roy, Dre is given to emotional exploration, thinking through the implications of his attraction for Celestial, courting the favor of her family, and driving to Louisiana to sit down with Roy after he is released.
He has a code of conduct that neither Roy nor Celestial understand. Unlike Roy and Celestial, whose hearts abide by a complex and contradictory logic, Dre’s heart is compelled, defined, and directed by the single certainty in his life—his love of Celestial. He refuses to ask Roy’s forgiveness for getting involved with his wife. Nor does he demand she stay with him when at the end she wavers between her commitment to her marriage and her need for Dre. Without irony, he admits to her, “You can never really unlove somebody” (288). That sincerity, that certainty, that love redeems Dre’s character from reader disdain. Dre, in the end, emerges as the novel’s embodiment of the terrors and joys of unconditional love.
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