An American Marriage

In prison, Roy urges Celestial to write. He prefers letters over the very public and humiliating protocols of prison visits. Please, he begs, “keep loving me” (59). Initially, Roy encourages Celestial to pursue her doll-making as a strategy for handling her loneliness. He refrains from talking much about prison life, only that he met an older prisoner named Walter who is also from Eloe. Walter takes Roy under his wing and helps him make sense of the world of incarceration. He becomes a mentor for Roy (Roy calls him the “Country Yoda”).

Celestial, for her part, shares how her childhood friend Dre has become her constant companion. She assures Roy that both she and Dre believe he is innocent and that her uncle, a trial lawyer, will work on an appeal. Roy and Celestial both understand the difficulties in being a “long-distance couple” (47). Roy begs, “touch me with your mind” (60).

Roy is haunted by their decision, during the trial, to abort a child they had conceived. Roy now sees sinister implications in Celestial’s decision: “When we decided to have the abortion,” he writes, “it was like we were accepting that things weren’t going to work out in the courtroom. And we gave up” (49). Celestial deals with her loneliness and guilt by turning to her doll making. When she happens to see a child walking down the street and swoons when she notices how the child resembles Roy, she creates a doll that resembles Roy and dresses it in prison blues: “Dressing the doll in these clothes was just a difficult [as other outfits] but it felt more purposeful” (64). That doll wins a national design contest. When Celestial is interviewed about the doll, she does not mention her husband at all. Roy demands, “Are you ashamed of me?” (65). 

More and more, Celestial turns to Dre for emotional support. Dre is an amateur photographer and Celestial sends Roy playful photos Dre takes of her. When Roy laments the abortion of their child, she writes to him that when she was eighteen, she left Howard University in Washington D.C. after only a year. She had an affair with a forty-something married professor and aborted a child they conceived. The trauma drove Celestial to return to Atlanta, emotionally shattered. As part of handling that depression, she first turned to dollmaking: “I felt like every time I made something to comfort a motherless infant, I was repaying the universe what I did” (55).

Two years into Roy’s sentence, with little hope in the appeal process and with the financial help of her father, Celestial’s business takes off. Her letters begin to taper off to the point that Roy writes to Celestial’s father and begs him to get her to write to him. It is then he is told by prison officials his mother died.

When Roy chances upon jailhouse hospital records and sees that Walter’s middle name is Othaniel, an odd name that is also Roy’s own middle name, he confronts his cellmate. The old man admits to Roy that he is, in fact, his biological father, and that he had requested a transfer to Roy’s cell to watch over him. He tells Roy how he had abandoned Olive when she found out she was pregnant. Roy is floored by the news. As his biological father admits, “When a woman tells you she is having your baby, your first mind is to get the hell out” (76).

When Celestial finally comes to visit, Roy feels only distance. He asks the question he fears: is Celestial involved with someone? She admits nothing. Only later, in a devastating letter, Celestial admits she has moved on, that she can no longer be Roy’s wife: “I’m not abandoning you. I will never abandon you…But I can’t be your wife” (82).

For the next two years, Celestial’s letters stop. Roy stews before finally telling Celestial never to visit him again. Then Celestial’s lawyer uncle secures Roy an early release: the conviction is vacated because of gross prosecutorial misconduct. Roy is exonerated but not declared innocent. He heads home to his wife.