Harlem Sings America : The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance endures in lyrical novels and prescient poetry. : THE WEDDING, <i> By Dorothy West (Doubleday: $20; 240 pp.)</i>

(Stoop) if you are abecedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations upon miscegenations.

--James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’

Many seasons back, a highly placed socialite of Creole extraction (“bright, light and damn near white,” as the saying went) was explaining why a certain talented, fair-skinned Negro lady just could not, and would not fit into “my social circle; we just can’t do anything with her socially.”

Then the refined Creole matron let the base of the bad air out: “You see Leon, she’s a white man’s child,” she reported ominously, which meant that this lady’s parents--given the laws against intermarriage in the South--were not married. The lady was not only a bastard: She was also engaged to a dark-skinned gentleman, whose features were “less than Greek.” This did it! Like Alabama Gov. George Wallace, this Creole socialite had to bar the way. The cardinal sin? Do not marry a dark-skinned man, or woman. The next sin against the cultural commandment was to marry a white man, or woman. “What could you do with them socially,” for upon that rickety ladder of Negro social respectability and position, there were certain immutable laws for mulattoes, quadroons, blacks, and others.

Few writers know the hard realities of black miscegenation and cultural assimilation better than Dorothy West, the legendary writer of the Harlem Renaissance, still alive and going strong at 88. In “The Wedding,” her first published novel since the 1948 printing of “The Living Is Easy,” she deftly satirizes a corridor of black Boston elite.

Or perhaps we should say e- lite , for the world she evokes with such stunning understanding and complex vision apparently rivaled the caste-bound, color-struck world of the colored Creoles of New Orleans.

“The Wedding” is a novel of manners, set in the early 1950s but mainly going back in time. Yet West has cast her drama on the cutting-edge of American history: in the last gasps of the old traditions, less than a decade before the rise of the black consciousness movement and the attempt to shed the shackles of “exquisite brightness and color-struck madness.”

West has continued a tradition started in the Harlem Renaissance of revealing how much of the soul of the African-American race is being lost to the plague of color and caste. The Renaissance asked us to return to the spirituality of the Southern Negro ethos: to sing work-songs, blues and to preserve certain African traditions. Jean Toomer’s “Cane”--the finest novel of the Renaissance--seethes with issues of class and social status based on the motifs of color and beauty, baseness and refinement. West’s novel shows why “the black is beautiful” commandment emerged from the depths of suppression, like a howling apocalypse.

Within the environs of “The Wedding,” Dr. Clark Coles and his wife Corrine, have flourished socially (but not privately). They exist on the tiny, isolated, strip of land (occupied by pompous upper-crust, fair-skinned Negroes) on the skirts of Martha’s Vineyard that West calls (as if to parody Fitzgerald’s “East Egg” in The Great Gatsby) “The Oval.”

The Coles’ daughters have elected to be the breakers of fiercely held traditions. The older girl, Liz, has married a dark-skinned black. However, she is saved from social oblivion because he is a physician. Liz’s younger sister Shelby is about to unstage her sibling’s outrage by marrying a white jazz musician, Meade Wyler, whom we never meet in the living flesh. We are 24 hours from the wedding bell.

If this isn’t socially unsettling (and thus wonderfully American) enough, then try this one on. A successful furniture-maker, who is dark-skinned and frantic for social entree, has recently taken a summer cabin within The Oval. He is the father of several daughters by white women he has scorned or divorced. Now Lute McNeil has emerged as a wannabe suitor for the hand of Shelby. He has sold himself on the idea that final social acclaim lies not with marrying (or is it simply bedding down?) Shelby Cole, who is fair enough to pass for white. We have the materiality then of a taboo-breaking opera, or tragic love story.

Yet West abruptly breaks away from the well-crafted early structure of her brief novel, and takes the reader into a long, galloping tale of the old south and miscegenation, with the intrigue of Shelby’s parents’ bloodlines as its center. All of this goes on much too long, and we really do hunger for West to re-route this surrey of a saga and get us to the church (and The Wedding) on time.

West does round up her cast of characters in the last third of the novel, wherein we discover that Clark Cole is actually a very unhappy man on the day before his daughter’s wedding. He has suffered through a marriage arranged around class and color, but not love. He has kept a beautiful, deep-brown-skinned mistress to help him make it through the night, over most of the years of his marriage.

A day before the nuptials, Dr. Coles receives notification of another wedding. His mistress Rachel (who has also worked as his nurse and assistant) pens him a letter revealing that by time he receives her “Dear John” missive, she will be married to someone else. Tired of playing “the other woman,” Rachel is wedding a common city worker, not particularly for love, but for security.

This crushing epistle drives Dr. Coles into a confessional tirade with his daughter Shelby, in which old dad acknowledges “Meade’s love” for his daughter; and then accuses her of never getting serious about any black men. With the fairly gripping bromide:

“I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because the man who should be the most important man in your life never found time to show you the love he felt. I’ve never seen you give your respect to a black man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because that’s some warped extension of this family’s social snobbery. And if that’s all true . . . then I will do anything in my power to make sure this marriage does not happen.”

Following hot on the heels of her father’s departure is a letter from Lute McNeil (who has been missing in action for nearly 200 pages). Lute tries to arrange a rendezvous with the bride-to-be. We are informed that Lute’s “been stalking Shelby all summer.” Because all of this occurs so late in the book, we are a little unsettled (though not shocked) by the sudden turn of events. We are aware that Shelby protests too much about her racial loyalties being in tack, despite the fact that she is marrying a white man. Lute captures some of her dilemma, and maybe hits Shelby in her cultural solar plexus when he says:

“You’re on the brink of turning your back on your family, your community, your race, all for some white-bread fantasy you don’t half understand.”

This is a good bit of dramatic irony, for Lute’s words really reflect the life he has lived.

Lute really is something of an African American Great Gatsby. His role in the novel’s last phases harks directly back to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece of the heartbreak of upward mobility.