MARRIAGE JUST A DREAM FOR SOME

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a music critic.

In fact, I spent 18 years reviewing and interviewing everybody from Gladys
Knight and Dolly Parton to Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder. I left the beat
(no pun intended) almost 10 years ago, driven by the realization that music
had become defined by attitudinal young men cursing into the microphone and
exceedingly fit young women whose only recognizable "talent" resided inside
their bra cups.

My radio is usually tuned to the news station these days, so it was pure
happenstance that I came across a singer named Kelly Price last week. She
was singing something called "He Proposed" and it stopped me, for reasons
that were not at all musical.

I mean, if I were to bring to bear the standards of my prior profession,
I'd say Price has a nice, though not terribly distinctive voice and a
slight tendency to over-sing. She's not somebody I'd ordinarily rush out to
buy.

The fact that I did rush out to buy it had less to do with the singer than
the song. In it, Price weaves a rapturous tale of how her man took her to
"a special place," and told her to close her eyes. "When I opened them up,"
she sings, "he was on one knee reaching for my hand. That's when he
proposed to me."

What struck me then and strikes me now is what a fantasy that image has
become. Particularly in the black community. Black people are, to put it
plainly, not marrying like they used to. That's probably due in part to the
same changes in social and sexual mores that have swept the nation as a
whole over the last 40 years. It's probably also due to the tragically high
rates of incarceration that have shrunk the pool of marriageable black men.

Whatever the cause, the effect is clear in Census Bureau figures tracking
the decline of black marriage. Indeed, according to a report issued just
last month, blacks are significantly less likely than their white
non-Hispanic counterparts to be currently married (57 percent vs. 35
percent) and are similarly less likely (43 percent to 25 percent) to have
EVER been married. Forty-three percent of black families are headed by
single women, 48 percent by married couples. By comparison, 13 percent of
white families are headed by women, 82 percent by married couples.

And at this juncture, I know someone out there is screaming for me to
acknowledge that the lack of a marriage license does not always equal the
lack of familial stability and that one can be whole without being hitched.
Consider these things acknowledged.

But the point here is that blacks' reluctance to embrace marriage is
symptomatic of a larger dislocation in the black family. That dislocation
is seen in the aforementioned crisis of incarceration -- one in three young
black men in prison, on parole or on probation. Seen in the almost 60
percent of black single mothers left to subsist on under $25,000 a year.
Seen in the fact that the majority of black children are born out of
wedlock and raised separately from their fathers. Seen in the pain of
high-income black professional women who cannot find black men of similar
achievement with whom to share their lives.

And it is seen, too, in an Essence magazine cover that once wounded me and
now haunts me. "Manless," it said. Manless.

It would be foolish to suggest that everything that ails black folk can be
found at the marriage altar. But it would be equally foolish, I think, to
underestimate the family and community stability that might be created, the
financial burdens that might be eased, the children who might be saved, if
more of us were willing to take a shot on forever.

Until we find that willingness, it will be difficult to listen to "He
Proposed" without hearing something unintentionally wistful in its words.
The picture the songwriter paints seems less a reality than a mirage.

And also, a painful reminder. The woman in the song is getting married,
after all. Many black women never will.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Contact him at 1
Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132 or lpitts@herald.com