Caucasia Read online

  “Caucasia is a stunning debut from one of the most promising writers Boston has produced this decade. A well-crafted coming-of-age story that escapes the confines of race, all the while digging to its complex core…. Senna handles the painful story gracefully, telling it convincingly through the eyes of a girl not yet sophisticated about the workings of race in America, a girl who is a victim as much of her borderline-insane mother’s one-time good white liberal intentions as of the racism that eats at her spirit.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The final chapters of the book…are as taut and fast-paced as a thriller…. This hugely gifted writer has produced a powerful response to whites who desire reconciliation without confrontation—and to those complacent black pundits of the moment who, looking at an increasingly multicultural America, say, ‘Race problem? What race problem?’”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Danzy Senna makes a stunning debut with Caucasia. In her engrossing tale, two sisters growing up in Boston are so close that they share a secret language…. Senna finds a perfect-pitch voice for [her narrator] that blends innocence, wry humor and straight-out pain.”

  —Essence

  “Senna does a fine job of weaving difficult topics into a sensitive, absorbing read.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “This absorbing, affecting first novel explores the politics of skin color as played out in a biracial family…. Senna’s dynamic storytelling illuminates personal revelations that are anything but black-and-white.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “If you have tired of first novels in which the listless youth of America have listless sex, listen to listless music and listlessly consume junk food, Caucasia should interest you. It is a curiosity of recent American fiction that so few novels address race in ways that are moving, complex, realistic or lucid—or, for that matter, address it at all. Caucasia is an exception. It is not a feel-good book about the brotherhood of man; it explores both the centrality and the lunacy of racial identity in America. And it does so through the eyes of Birdie Lee, a character as peculiar, particular, believable and compelling as any you are likely to encounter.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Brilliant…a finely nuanced story that explores the matter of race through the eyes and the heart of another white black girl.”

  —Ms.

  “One of this season’s most buzzed-about new novels…Gripping.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Danzy Senna’s accomplished debut [transcends] the narrow limits of adolescent angst for a broader look at a historical period and a political movement—and at the ways that personal identity is formed and warped by the rigid categories our culture uses to define and understand race…. Senna, whose own background resembles that of her heroine, is sympathetic, dispassionate and skilled enough so that the bright human souls of her adult characters always manage to shine through their windy and deeply felt rhetoric. Without moralizing, she affectingly details the consequences, especially for children, of what Dickens called ‘telescopic philanthropy’—the burning passion to save the world or, specifically, that portion of the world that begins just beyond one’s own front doorstep. And she reveals some rather complex truths about how we forge identity, how much of our social selves we can choose and how much is chosen for us by what society assumes on the basis of our color and social class…. Caucasia leaves us at once satisfied and intensely eager for more.”

  —Francine Prose, Newsday

  “Blend Vladimir Nabokov’s fresh eye for the oddities of American life in Lolita with the scathing outsider perspective of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and you’ll get some idea of the topsy-turvy, eye-opening world of twenty-six-year-old Danzy Senna’s provocative, suspenseful, and often brilliant debut novel…. [Senna] raises important questions about identity and race…. Senna’s take on race is as complex as her characters are; she refuses to offer easy answers to Birdie’s struggle for identity.”

  —Swing magazine

  “Danzy Senna fuses the personal and the political in her first novel, Caucasia, a thoughtful and heartfelt story about the conflicts of an interracial family on the run from the FBI during the 1970s…. In addition to racial issues, Caucasia deals with the age-old dilemma of leaving the family nest. Birdie is a strong, appealing protagonist, and her fight to claim her identity makes her story unforgettable.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “A page-turner about race in America from its perplexing beginning to the satisfying conclusion…. Absorbing.”

  —Bay State Banner

  “An impressively assured debut…Senna’s observations about the racial divide in America are often fierce but always complex and humane.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Senna’s] first novel speaks eloquently.”

  —Boston Magazine

  “An ambitious debut novel that powerfully…addresses the conditions of those living in the great racial no-man’s-land—that is to say, the children of mixed marriage—who belong to both races but are often also rejected by both…. An accomplished novel that doesn’t offer any easy solutions but does poignantly evoke the pain and paradox of those caught in the racial crossfire.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Senna’s debut novel is as thematically and dramatically right as fiction can be, infused, as it is, with emotional truth. Like her strong-minded young narrator, Birdie, Senna is the daughter of a black father and a white mother, and the lighter-skinned of two sisters, and she writes about race, identity, heritage, and loyalty with wrenching poignancy. This courageous and necessary tale about the color of skin and the variations of love is full of sorrow, both personal and societal, and much magic and humor.”

  —Booklist

  “Caucasia provides a welcome introduction to a talented new voice. The book contains many of fiction’s classic themes, including the loss of innocence, a quest for identity, betrayal and the struggle for power within the family.”

  —Rocky Mountain News Book Review

  “Senna combines a powerful coming-of-age tale with a young girl’s search for identity and family amid a sea of racial stereotypes and cultural ideas of beauty.”

  —Library Journal

  “Danzy Senna is a superb new writer, who gives us here, with enviable aplomb and infallible accuracy, a tale of childhoods spent in the shadows of the good intentions and lost idealisms of the 1970s. Readers will be delighted not only by this unpitying, engrossing tale but also by the emergence of a fresh and robust American voice.”

  —Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List

  “A lucid and magnificent debut that destroys the myth of the ‘tragic mulatto.’ This isn’t a story about race. This is a story about the heroes and villains, gladiators and misfits, who live, flourish, suffer, and die behind the walls of America’s racial divide. Danzy Senna is a terrific writer. I admire her talent. I marvel at her honesty and courage.”

  —James McBride, author of The Color of Water

  “Danzy Senna’s Caucasia displays impressive powers—of exposition, description, and music. The narrator tells lucidly and poignantly the circumstances of being ‘it,’ caught in the middle, torn this way and that across America’s racial divide. It tells this story by the moving display of vivid pictures, nuanced by delicate shadings across the whole spectrum of color, in all of color’s manifestations and awful human consequences. It tells the tale of caste and class and kinship by the secret grammar of family, the showboat rhetoric of revolution, the percussive music made by one person in collision with another—from hate or for love.”

  —Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Age of Consent and The Duke of Deception

  “Caucasia is a remarkable, affecting story of the complica
ted legacies and imprimaturs of race, and in this sense is a quintessential American tale. Rich with eccentric, impassioned figures, this wonderful novel’s startling narrative of a young girl’s childhood among, in turn, black militants and white suburbanites is alluring and suspenseful, and considers the difficult questions of what truly is the ‘color underneath.’ Danzy Senna is a luminous, striking new writer.”

  —Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker

  “Danzy Senna is fierce. A race woman with a sense of humor. A homegirl with a searing intellect. Danzy picks up where Nella Larsen left off at the end of the Harlem Renaissance. She takes the ‘tragic’ out of the ‘tragic mulatto’ myth and replaces it with ‘brave,’ ‘witty,’ ‘adventurous,’ ‘observant,’ and ‘self-aware.’ Caucasia is a powerful, luminous book.”

  —Veronica Chambers, author of Mama’s Girl

  “This is a gorgeous novel of black, white, and those of us in between—bold, cunning, beautiful.”

  —Junot Díaz, author of Drown

  Also by Danzy Senna

  SYMPTOMATIC

  Caucasia

  Danzy Senna

  Riverhead Books, New York

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction, Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “The Gambler,” by Don Schlitz, copyright © 1977 by Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “The Piña Colada Song (Escape),” by Rupert Holmes, copyright © 1979 by WB Music Corp. & The Holmes Line of Music, Inc. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission, WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “Shining Star,” words and music by Maurice White, Philip Bailey and Larry Dunn.

  Copyright © 1975 EMI APRIL MUSIC INC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

  Used by permission.

  “Reasons,” words and music by Maurice White, Philip Bailey and Charles Stepney.

  Copyright © 1975, 1983 by EMI APRIL MUSIC INC. and EIBLIR MUSIC. All rights controlled and administered by EMI APRIL MUSIC INC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  Copyright © 1998 by Danzy Senna

  Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

  Cover design and illustration copyright © 1998 by Lawrence Ratzkin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Riverhead hardcover edition: February 1998

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: February 1999

  Riverhead trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-57322-716-2

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

  Senna, Danzy.

  Caucasia / Danzy Senna.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65086-8

  I. Title.

  PS3569.E618C3 1998

  813’.54—dc21 97-28911 CIP

  For F. Q. H.

  Caucasia

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  negritude for beginners

  face

  same difference

  the body of luce rivera

  golliwog’s revenge

  disintegration of funk

  phenotypic peek-a-boos

  from caucasia, with love

  the color of underneath

  soundtrack to a pass

  tintin in the congo

  ashes and elbow grease

  sit and spin

  plastic bubbles

  the brown and the pink

  compared to what

  chocolate city

  casts and die

  high soul burn

  wonders of the invisible world

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A long time ago I disappeared. One day I was here, the next I was gone. It happened as quickly as all that. One day I was playing schoolgirl games with my sister and our friends in a Roxbury playground. The next I was a nobody, just a body without a name or a history, sitting beside my mother in the front seat of our car, moving forward on the highway, not stopping. (And when I stopped being nobody, I would become white—white as my skin, hair, bones allowed. My body would fill in the blanks, tell me who I should become, and I would let it speak for me.)

  This was back when Boston still came in black and white, yellowing around the edges. You could just make out the beginnings of color: red-eyed teenagers with afros like halos around their faces, whispering something about power and ofay to one another as they shuffled to catch the bus; a man’s mocha hand on a woman’s pale knee. I disappeared into America, the easiest place to get lost. Dropped off, without a name, without a record. With only the body I traveled in. And a memory of something lost.

  This is what I remember.

  negritude for

  beginners

  face

  Before I ever saw myself, I saw my sister. When I was still too small for mirrors, I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence. Back then, I was content to see only Cole, three years older than me, and imagine that her face—cinnamon-skinned, curly-haired, serious—was my own. It was her face above me always, waving toys at me, cooing at me, whispering to me, pinching me when she was angry and I was the easiest target. That face was me and I was that face and that was how the story went.

  In those days, I rotated around Cole. Everything was her. I obeyed her, performed for her, followed her, studied her the way little sisters do. We were rarely far apart. We even spoke our own langauge. Cole insists that it began before I was born, when I was just a translucent ball in my mother’s womb. Cole would lean her high forehead down to the pale balloon of our mother’s belly and tell me secrets with her three-year-old gibberish genius, all the while using her finger to trace a kind of invisible hieroglyphics against our mother’s swollen flesh. Cole believed I must be lonely in there, frightened of the dark, and that her voice and scribblings would soothe me.

  Later we perfected the language in our attic bedroom in the brownstone on Columbus Avenue. Up there, amid the dust and stuffed animals, Cole whispered stories, one-liners, riddles to me to help me fall asleep. It was a complicated language, impossible for outsiders to pick up—no verb tenses, no pronouns, just words floating outside time and space without owner or direction.
Attempting to understand our chatter, my mother said, was like trying to eavesdrop on someone sleeptalking, when the words are still untranslated from their dream state—achingly familiar, but just beyond one’s grasp.

  My father described the language as a “high-speed patois.” Cole and I just called it “Elemeno,” after our favorite letters in the alphabet.

  My grandmother wanted us to see a child psychiatrist. She said it was my mother’s fault, for teaching us at home, in isolation, around the dyslexic kids, who were my mother’s specialty. My grandmother said we must have spent too much time around those “backwards children” and that was why we spoke in tongues. My father also blamed my mother for raising us in that kind of chaos. He said we were suffering from a “profound indifference” to the world around us. My mother said they both were full of shit, and left Cole and me alone in the little world we had created.

  Our world was the attic. Up there, we performed for each other with the costumes that were stuffed in a trunk at the end of the bed. The attic had a crooked and creaking floor, a slanted roof so low that grown-ups had to hunch over when they came up there to visit, and a half-moon window that looked out onto Columbus Avenue. Across the street sat a red brick housing project, and beyond that, we could just glimpse the tip of the Prudential. I had some vague understanding that beyond our window, outside the attic, lay danger—the world, Boston, and all the problems that came with the city. When Cole and I were alone in our attic, speaking Elemeno and making cities out of stuffed animals, it seemed that the outside world was as far away as Timbuktu—some place that could never touch us. We were the inside, the secret and fun and make-believe, and that was where I wanted to stay.

  I don’t know when, exactly, all that began to change. I guess it happened gradually, the way bad things usually do. The summer before I turned eight, the outside world seemed to bear in on us with a new force. It was 1975, and Boston was a battleground. My mother and her friends spent hours huddled around the kitchen table, talking about the trouble out there. Forced integration. Roxbury. South Boston. Separate but not quite equal. God made the Irish number one. A fight, a fight, a nigga and a white…