Ten couples say ``I do'' in Brooklyn on ``Marry Your Baby Daddy Day''
By SAM DOLNICK
Associated Press Writer
September 29, 2005, 7:53 PM EDT
NEW YORK -- As ten grooms adjusted their tuxedoes one last time, Kendrick Edwards paced the small room inside a Brooklyn church basement, speaking urgently into his cell phone.
"I'm nervous, but I ain't got no choice now," he said into the phone. "But I'm all right."
Edwards and the other men in the room were minutes away from marrying the mothers of their children in a group ceremony organized to promote marriage within the black community.
Each of the 10 couples had children together and had been living together for years. The group wedding, held at the House of the Lord Church, was billed as "Marry Your Baby Daddy Day."
"The older I get, I see getting married as the way to go," said Garfield James, 34, who married Millicent Ellis, 35. "I want to raise my kids the right way."
Ellis and James have two daughters together, a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old, and are raising Ellis' 13-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.
The ceremony was organized by Maryann Reid, author of "Marry Your Baby Daddy," who said she was dismayed by what she said were too many single-parent families within the black community.
"Single parenthood is very much accepted as the norm and being married is looked at as unusual," she said. Thursday's ceremony "gives me hope that our future generations can possibly see this and break the cycle of broken homes."
Soul music opened the wedding, with the grooms dancing down the aisle in alternating black and white tuxedoes to roars of laughter and applause from friends and family.
Then the couples' children came in, the boys wearing miniature versions of their fathers' tuxedoes, and the girls wearing princess dresses.
As the resplendent brides made their entrance, camera bulbs lit up the room and mothers, brides, and even some grooms waiting at the altar began to cry.
The Rev. Herbert Daughtry married the couples, taking each bride and groom through the vows. He put off the much-anticipated, "You may now kiss the bride," until the very end, although Clayton Morgan couldn't wait and kissed Tanisha Forbes at the altar without permission.
The ceremony ended with the couples taking turns jumping over a broom, a tradition at many black marriages that symbolizes the beginning of a new life together.
After the ceremony, the relieved couples gathered in the church's ground floor, congratulating each other and hugging loved ones.
"If we can make it, so can you," said Morgan, clutching his wife's hand. "We're expecting rough turns in the path, but we'll get through them."
On the Net:
http://www.marryyourbabydaddy.com
That has got to be the funnist story I have read in a long time