Detail Shot, 10.6.23

What does one wear to a wedding being put on by a family suffocating under the social expectations of a cohort they propagated and pruned, under the weight of history, under a bunch of unnecessary melancholy? I'm reading Dorothy West's The Wedding for answers, and none are forthcoming. I'm looking four generations back from the titular bride, and all I'm seeing is a bunch of grit—derogatory—in the face of systemic and self-imposed personal difficulties. But there are some shirts.

First we have Old Sir, a plantation marse who takes up with a woman he used to own following the end of the war and makes a child with her. "There were more of his clothes in his woman's house than in his own," West writes. ("His" woman, well put.) When he descends into slovenly old age, he and the woman's little "butternut girl" took to mending the resulting stains and rips and such. After he works the woman to death, passing along to her a viral condition she nursed him from and letting her condition curdle on the floor while he recuperated in her bed, he throws himself in her grave and abandons to the girl to her own ends. She makes a way by taking in washing, often bringing "one of Old Sir's old shirts beautifully folded in the basket on her arm to show the quality of her work."

Next we have Preacher, an itinerant man of God who homes in on the butternut girl after boarding her in his travels. On the back of her labor and some of his own, they establish a homestead that provides enough for him to buy "a pair of new shoes for the first time in his life" and be "delighted to find that shoes you were sized for wouldn't pinch your feet or shift around when you walked the other people's castoffs did." But the castoffs he didn't mind were the old shirts of Old Sir. "They were many years old and many times mended, but they were Sunday white and suited Preacher fine."

From Preacher and the butternut girl come Isaac, whose glinting intellect catch the eye of do-gooder white schoolteachers from up north. They school him, and the sense of industry imparted by "the token fee tied in the corner of Isaac's handkerchief and pinned to his shirt for safekeeping" gets him whisked up north for a real-deal education back in Boston. On the other side of a bunch of indignity he becomes a doctor who fully absorbs the knowledge that he was "the receptacle for other people's hopes that went far beyond thoughts of his individual happiness." With such a romantic view of life, he picks a wife after an introduction from a colleague, a dinner, and the realization that "there were too many advantages: marriage gave a busy doctor a home where he could get a meal without waiting for a table a wife to mend his shirts, keep his social life in order, and give him sons to carry on his name." That marriage is so loveless that the passion of a night spent after a long gestation of her loneliness—after his ignored lust boils over, "he began to undress, ripping, tearing his clothes helter-skelter around him, a stubborn shoelace snapping, buttons popping"—is enough to kill him in his sleep.

The fatherless son left behind is Clark. By the time we get to him, the pattern is established. He also becomes a doctor and also finds himself in a marriage he doesn't enjoy very much. The grandmother of the eventual bride cleaves him from his chosen love to pair him instead with the mother of the bride because he's proven himself good stock. We get it by now, only needing to get a quick view of him in nondescript "evening clothes" worn when he brings his date home from the all-night, "final end-of-the-season" party. We don't need to get past his jacket to know that this is someone whose shirt is his, whose shirt has no holes, whose shirt we don't need to see being altered or repaired because it doesn't matter anymore. Who needs agency and change when you have a permanent, radiant destiny dragging you along towards cold, bourgeois contentment.