Tragic No More: Mixed-Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity

2. The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time

23 CHAPTER 2 The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding’s movement into television media represents shifts in post–Civil Rights era politics.The changes include the nature of “positive” racial imagery, the politics of identifying with an elite class, and the repression of themes threatening contemporary investments in “racial authenticity.” The important differences between film adaptation and the literary text include how they work through themes of racial passing, intra-racial prejudice and the politics of racial visibility more generally. I analyze the book with the miniseries to build an argument about the politics of translation across fields and genres. What are the stakes of adapting a work of literature to commercial television? In The Wedding as commercial television, there is a tension between the generation of “positive” images—as defined in the historical moment of the late 1990s—and racial ambiguity. Halle Berry is the black/white woman figure in whom this tension is, at least provisionally, resolved. Although racial alliances are based on more than skin color, the film cannot quite accommodate that, given the imperative of having identifiably “black/er” characters albeit embodying the light-skinned ideal, especially as regards women. On February 22 and 23, 1998, the ABC network broadcast an Oprah Winfrey–produced miniseries adapted from West’s novel, published in 1995.1 The Wedding focuses on a group of African Americans who spend 24 chapter 2 their summers in “the Oval,”an exclusive “colored”vacation enclave in the segregated Martha’s Vineyard of 1953.2 It is significant the miniseries was broadcast during African American History Month and shortly after Valentine ’s Day, for the narrative is about an African American community rarely depicted on television, and revolves around a central plot concerning an “interracial”love story.Dynamics of race,color,and class are critical factors in narrative.3 West’s story of this privileged group of well-educated professionals emphasizes that they are segregated not only by prevailing social convention,but also by choice.They feel superior to African Americans of lower socioeconomic classes as well as to many “white” people.4 Taking place over a 24-hour period,the story focuses upon the Coles family , the most successful in the community. Although the miniseries preserves the main plot of the novel, its narrative emphasizes aspects of West’s story corresponding to a distinctly post–Civil Rights era agenda with regard to media representations.Oprah Winfrey’s introductory remarks to the first night of the two-part broadcast highlighted The Wedding’s portrayal of professional and genteel African Americans, images that explicitly depart from conventional television narratives depicting blacks in situation comedies or, in prime-time dramas, as members of the criminal urban underclass.5 In this respect, the miniseries corresponds to the post–Civil Rights era investment in producing film and television that not only includes African Americans, but also challenges demeaning representations. The notion of a black television audience positively identifying with the insular African American elite of mid-century represents a significant transition in the politics of representation. The critique of the black middle class which emerged in Black Power rhetoric of the late 1960s and early 1970s signaled a rupture between strategies of assimilation long associated with the black middle class and a radical rejection of that ideology in favor of direct confrontations with institutional racism. Although West had by then begun work on The Wedding, she instinctively sensed that the shift in attitudes might limit her reading audience. Interviewed in 1987, West confirmed as much: It was fear of such criticism that prevented me from continuing work on my novel The Wedding . . . (this time) coincided with the Black Revolution,when many Blacks 25 The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time believed that middle-class blacks were Uncle Toms . . . I thought it was a good book that should be read, and I felt that if it received a negative review, no one would read it . . . During that time white publishers were very intimidated by militant Blacks . . . It was then that the revolution was at its peak, and I cared very deeply about its goals, and, therefore, I couldn’t go on writing the novel.6 What made the 1990s a more fortuitous period for the publication of The Wedding and a good time to broadcast the television adaptation? Images of middle-class blacks have shifted significantly...