I’ve never understood America’s fascination with British royalty. But the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has captured my attention — along with the rest of the world.
This past Monday morning when I glanced over the headlines I may have missed over the long Thanksgiving break, of course all the top stories were all about Prince Harry and Meghan.
My initial reaction was one of apathy. Why should we care what the British Royals are up to? What do these pending nuptials have to do with the everyday life of the average American? Hell, how does this engagement affect the everyday life of the average UK citizen?
Apparently, a lot of people do care about the Royals. An African-American female friend told me that her social media feed was buzzing with excitement about the history-making event: a black girl becoming a real-life princess.
After talking to my friend, I decided to actually read one of the articles about the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle engagement. A New York Times piece revealed several things I didn’t know — mainly, that Meghan is American.
But the main detail in the article that jumped out to me is that Prince Harry and Meghan will be known as the Duke and Duchess of Essex once they’re married.
Reading this detail, I had a sense of deja vu and art imitating life. I flashed back to early drafts of my novel “The Chloe Chronicles” from the ‘90s. In that version of my novel, a character named Gigi, who is a mixed-race young woman like the main character Chloe, runs off and marries a duke she meets while the girls are attending a prep school in London. Where do Gigi and Duke D'Arbanville live after they elope? Essex.
Or maybe it was Sussex. It was one of those British places that end with “-ex.”
Why, you ask, did I write a plot line involving a young nobleman if I don’t care about royalty? Well, the Duke D’Arbanville character in the early draft of “The Chloe Chronicles” is a villain who abuses Gigi. I was trying to show that just because someone is rich and famous doesn’t necessarily make him “Mr. Right.”
My novel aside, another detail about Prince Harry and Meghan that is of even greater interest to me is that I am now seeing my own family reflected among British royalty. I'm an African-American man who grew up with three white stepparents and four biracial siblings. The fact that a young woman who resembles my sisters is marrying into arguably the most famous family in the world is pretty cool.
And seeing a cross-cultural union among such powerful people with a global profile is important in these times where we all seem to be so divided.
So, as someone who never really cared much about the Royals, I guess I’ve come to realize that what they do and the example they set for the world is kinda important after all.
(I will be publishing a new, updated edition of "The Chloe Chronicles" in 2018. Check my website, Chrisbournea.com, for details.)
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