A Harlem Wedding

From The Unexpected Diva author Tiffany Warren comes a dishy and dramatic novel of the Harlem Renaissance and its most famous Black debutante, Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose spectacular wedding to poet Countee Cullen was the society event of the year — even though the bride and groom were not-so-secretly in love with other people.

A century ago, Harlem’s glittering social scene had a single princess: Yolande Du Bois, the only child of NAACP icon W. E. B. Du Bois. Yolande was bold, vivacious, and beloved by every gossip columnist. A true daddy’s girl, Yolande followed her father’s advice on everything, from where she attended college — Fisk, her father’s alma mater — to which sorority she joined, Delta Sigma Theta. But in matters of the heart, Yolande and her father did not agree.

Dr. Du Bois personally curated a string of handsome suitors from the “Talented Tenth” for her, but Yolande’s true love was jazz musician Jimmie Lunceford, the son of a working-class family from Denver, Colorado. Their romance was an open secret and more than a little scandalous.

Despite it all, Yolande ultimately married her father’s choice: famed poet Countee Cullen. Their lavish uptown wedding became the hottest social ticket of 1928. With three thousand attendees, sixteen bridesmaids, and Langston Hughes serving as a groomsman, it was truly a sight to behold.

But immediately after the wedding, Yolande’s carefully constructed fairy tale begins to crumble. Torn between the expectations of her father and society and her heart’s true desires, Yolande is forced to decide whether she must leave Harlem to create a more authentic life on her own terms.