How Close Is Too Close? Danzy Senna and Caucasia

The next installment of "How Close Is Too Close?" Exploring Danzy Senna. 


Fair Warning: I adore Senna's novel, Caucasia. It is one of the most effective and powerful novels I have ever read about America's tangled attitude towards race. And it is mostly not fiction, this tale of two sisters, Cole and Birdie, so close they have invented their own language. 
The sisters are the creation of a marriage between  two revolutionaries: Deck, who is black, a promising young literary lion from Louisiana; and Sandy, who is white, a Mayflower descendent, the daughter of a Harvard professor who is the lion's teacher and mentor. It's 1975, and Boston, a city previously divided into clear lines of white and black, is about to fracture into race riots, but these two hope to remake the world, both through direct action and their daughters. 


The girls get stuck in a Black Nationalist school, where the darker Cole flourishes, while pale, straight-haired Birdie Lee stumbles through Black Power classes. 

One of the most haunting scenes in the book happens early, when Birdie's father, more comfortable with the daughter who resembles him, is forced to take seven-year-old Birdie, instead, to the Boston Public Garden for some alone-with-Daddy time. Birdie notices the nicely dressed elderly white couple walking their fancy dog. They seem concerned or angry, as she reads the comics with her head on her father's lap. 
A moment later, two  policeman show up. "You can tell us, kiddie. He can't hurt you here. You're safe now. Did the man touch you funny?"
It's no wonder her father prefers to spend time with the African-American-looking Cole. 

The marriage soon ends, mostly because Sandy, the mother, wants to wade into the fight, a la the Symbionese Liberation Army, while father, Deck's, revolutions are more intellectual. The children are divided between the two, mostly by color.  Deck and his new "strong, black woman" girlfriend take Cole off to Brazil, while Sandy goes on the run from the FBI, taking little Birdie with her. "You've got a lot of choices, babe. You can be anything. Puerto Rican, Sicilian, Pakistani, Greek. I mean, anything, really." 

They settle on Jewish, with Sandy the widow of a Jewish academic, Birdie, his daughter. Birdie longs for her sister, longs to fit in, longs to be ordinary, and can never be so. 

Fanny Howe

This powerful novel was clearly written as a way to seek clarity and identity from a background of pain and confusion. Senna was and remains estranged from her father, (Carl Senna, author of The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights, and The Fallacy of I.Q.) whose brilliance disappeared into paranoia, drinking and rage. I don't know about her current relationship with her mother, the poet Fanny Howe. 

Senna continued to write about her family, this time as non-fiction. But more about that later. 

I know nothing about Senna's real sister and the brother she removed from the story, except that they were, she says, badly damaged by their parents' divorce. I only hope that this powerful novel provided some healing for the entire family, not just the extraordinary writer, Ms. Senna. 

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Danzy Senna, Caucasia, and How We Internalize Bigotry

A few years ago, I read an online review of Danzy Senna's first novel, Caucasia. I love that book. Though it is fictional, many if not most of the details come from Ms. Senna's real life. Her white, Mayflower-descendant mother really did marry her African-American, extremely poor and intellectually powerful father, and they really did have children who did not seem to match both parents (though the author also has a brother) and they really did have a nasty divorce, and the mother really did go undercover because of fear of being arrested over some of their activities together.

Still, this reviewer was irritated by what she felt was unbelievable: that one sister looked white, one black; that the white mother was sloppy and fat, the black aunt elegant and chic. She also did not find the section where the mother hides in Vermont and passes her daughter of as being Jewish, believable.

I found it all too believable.

I am still chilled by the scene, early in the novel, where the then- child heroine is taken by her father, to a park to spend father-daughter time. Usually, Daddy hangs alone with the dark-looking sister, or with the two of them together, so white-looking daughter is excited to have this time alone with Dad.

While father and daughter are at the park, an elderly white couple goes out of their way to talk with the little girl and stare, almost glare at her father. A few moments later, a police officer arrives to question the child. He does not believe the child when she insists she is with her daddy. The officer nearly roughs up the father, and they barely get away safely. 

We are white Jews who lived for several years in South Central Los Angeles. We had our people we knew well and trusted--people we considered family--regularly harassed by the police. There were times we would arrive home unable to get to our house because the home of our beloved neighbor, and adopted nephew, was surrounded by twenty-eight police cars, cops with assault rifles, and helicopters swirling overhead, all in supposed response to yet another prank phone call (this happened nearly every day at one point) by someone claiming that a white woman was being held hostage in the house (probably referring to this boy's white mother, hostage to none, believe me.)

The LAPD, many years later, settled his case for harassment. 

Given our experiences, I could easily imagine this scene, and understand the father's reluctance, after that, to go anywhere, ever, alone with his white-looking daughter, who feels his reality as rejection. Thus external racism is absorbed into our lives when we are too small to understand it in terms other than: I am not black enough to be loved, or I am too white to be cared for. 

I highly recommend Caucasia, though I was less taken with Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and You Are Free. Take a look at Caucasia. Though it's about the author's childhood, it still presents a nuanced exploration of race issues in our culture.