One mistaken identification, one careless follow-up, and like Roy, you can become part of the country's prison-industrial complex.“Compelling. It's just something that is." The possibility of being snapped up into the system is always there, hovering.Įven if you've never gotten so much as a traffic ticket. Like hurricanes if you live on the East Coast or earthquakes if you live out West. In creating her storyline, Jones wanted people to understand that for black Americans, "Injustice in the criminal justice system - it's just in the air.
Both sets of parents are heavily invested in his defense - and in the preservation of their children's marriage. Roy's incarceration has an effect far beyond him and Celestial. No one knows how long Roy will be behind bars, or whether he will ever be exonerated. She has a business to run (she makes one-of-a kind dolls, the kind museums collect.) and she needs to figure out what's going to happen for the rest of her life. How?īut Celestial is no Penelope she is a modern woman who can't just sit and wait for her man. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Then, on a visit to his parents in tiny Eloe, Louisiana, Roy is falsely accused of a terrible crime.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title An American Marriage Author Tayari Jones They marry soon after graduation and seem poised for success: he's a rising corporate executive, she's a promising artist. Roy and Celestial Hamilton are those people - a young African-American golden couple who met on the campus of their historically black college. It's a story of love and loyalty and race and justice and what happens when the unthinkable happens to "normal" people. And she said to him 'Roy, you know you wouldn't have waited on me for seven years.' And he said 'I don't know what you're talking about this wouldn't have happened to you in the first place!"Īnd right there, something clicked Tayari Jones found what she needed, and began work on An American Marriage.
The young man having the heated discussion? Jones says, "He looked fine, but she looked great. "The woman was beautifully dressed, cashmere coat, the whole nine." "I overheard a couple arguing," she remembers. Then, while she was in Atlanta visiting her mother, she found what she needed during a routine trip to the shopping mall.
But she was still searching for the inspiration for a novel she'd hope to write: one that involved an individual's encounter with the system, and the subsequent ripples that touch that person's community. She learned a lot about the American criminal justice system. During a fellowship to Harvard, writer Tayari Jones spent months and months studying the intersection of race and criminal justice.
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