The morning after

I saw the royal wedding like millions of people around the earth of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I admit it was enthralling. There were others who were less appreciative and said it was an exercise in escapism. While the show was on, any remark that would have gone contrary to the joy and pride of the Royal Family of England was put aside. This was a time to rejoice and I would be a hypocrite if I did not think so too. But I kept that for the morning after when other thoughts would crowd in to say – hold a second – don’t fall overboard. To be honest I am a republican and I am on the side of all those who fought for more equality of opportunity in society.

This role was played by Meghan Markle’s mother, Doria Ragland, who sat primly on her own among the royals. We don’t really know what was going on in her mind but her being there to see her child in the transformation of a society built on the superiority of one class above the rest was enough to open many meanings. One comment said “her presence implied a lineage of black women – and represented the fraught lineage of a nation.”

Here’s one comment of one who was there which I chose to quote verbatim because it reflected my own thoughts.. “The day of the royal wedding, we could not keep our eyes off her. What was she thinking, as she sat in the pews of the five-hundred-year-old chapel, enveloped in history and irony? I mean the mother of the bride, Doria Ragland. A millennium of world-shifting encounters – of violence and of romance and of acts in between – produced this scene: the sixty-one-year-old Ragland, an American who teaches yoga and does social work in Culver City, California, sitting in the opposite and equivalent seat to Queen Elizabeth II. 

They’d agreed on green, the color of beginnings – Ragland in churchy, pastel Oscar de la Renta, the Queen in electric-lime Stewart Parvin. One is a descendant of the enslaved, a child of the Great Migration and Jim Crow and seventies New Age spirituality; the other, the heir to and keeper of empire. Blood had long ago decided what life would be like for both.”

The royal wedding of a divorced American actress and a prince of British royalty is itself a groundbreaking event. But love finds a way. This was one of them. It is presumed that it was “love that brought together their families: the House of Windsor and a one-woman house.” In this age of irony, one finds it hard to believe that there were no other factors except genuine attraction. This we will not know as yet.  The first thing that came to my  mind the morning after was it was a brilliant idea that would further the cause of royalty and the masses of ordinary people who adulated cannot blamed if that was not what was is their mind. In the struggle of who is supreme in human society, the winner in the royal wedding was royalty. It will be there for a long, long time because its patrons and followers know how to survive. “give them cake” came from another royal of another country that provoked a revolution.

That did not stop the ebullient American preacher, Bishop Michael Bruce Curry to say his piece. It was too American said one who disliked his speech that was equivalent to rabble rousing. As far as I was concerned the theme of his sermon was embarrassing with the audience of  royal members who had similar fabulous weddings that ended up in “disgrace and had less to do with unselfish love than selfish motives.”  I must admit though that the royals especially the front seat with Prince Charles and Camilla, were unperturbed. Whatever the American minister was saying about perpetual love had little to do with them.

When Curry spoke about the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the power of radical, social love, Meghan’s mother nodded and swayed when the East London choir sang Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.”

There is no argument that it was a beautiful wedding with centuries of royal tradition welded into a modern wedding. But modernity and the conflicts of history will continue to lurk. We cannot predict their future. No one would have thought of that watching splendor and solemnity of the Charles and Diana wedding would turn into ashes.

No one would deny the palpable emotion at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle when American Bishop Michael Bruce Curry delivered a passionate message just before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle said “I do.”

Bishop Curry, from Chicago, Illinois, burst with energy as he spoke of love, American slavery and even quoted Martin Luther King Jr.

Several members of the royal family sported priceless expressions as they listened to the American reverend speak boldly at the ceremony. Twitter followed Kate Middleton’s side-eye look at Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. The smirks from sisters Princess Beatrice and Princess faces were not unnoticed.

“I’m cackling because the Americans are listening to this sermon like, ‘Oh yeah, this is how this works’ and all the camera shots of the Brits have them looking around at each other like ??????? #RoyalWedding,” one Twitter user wrote.

This royal wedding is happening in the land that wrote the Magna Carta. A violent revolution equal to the French did not happen. It took time to bring up a long simmering discontent. As the saying goes, only catastrophe truly reduces inequality, according to a historical survey.

The English may have achieved Magna Carta  but royalty remained on top if with reduced powers.  The Magna Carta was a charter of liberties to which the English barons forced King John to give his assent in June 1215 at Runnymede. It is a document that constitutes a fundamental guarantee of rights and privileges.