by Dorothy West
From the porch of the Coles’ house, Gram, Liz, and Laurie watched the crowd begin to disperse. Laurie began to cry, softly at first but then loudly. Her mother tried to quiet her, but she wailed on. Gram raised her head and studied the baby gravely. Then, without saying a word, she turned to her great-granddaughter and extended her hands.
Liz placed Laurie gently into Gram’s wrinkled arms with a small, sad smile. Gram cooed softly as she rocked the infant back and forth, her finger tickling its dark chin. She felt the baby grow quiet in her arms, and she thought of Josephine, whom she had held the same way so many years before. She could not turn the clock back. She could not change the past or do much about the present. But she could spend the little time she had left on earth making things a bit better for the future. Liz put her arm on Gram’s shoulder, and they turned away and walked back into the house.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DOROTHY WEST founded the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Challenge in 1934, and New Challenge in 1937, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, appeared in 1948 and remains in print. Her second novel, The Wedding, was a national bestseller and literary landmark when published in the winter of 1995. A collection of her stories and autobiographical essays, The Richer, The Poorer, appeared during the summer of 1995. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Dorothy West
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1995. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Anchor Booths and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition as follows:
West, Dorothy, 1909–
The Wedding / Dorothy West. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3545.E82794W44 1995
813′.54—dc20 94–27285
eISBN: 978-0-307-57570-8
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