A young girl learns some difficult lessons in Danzy Senna's debut novel Caucasia. Growing up in a biracial family in 1970s Boston, Birdie has seen her family disintegrate due to the increasing racial tensions. Her father and older sister move to Brazil, where they hope to find true racial equality, while Birdie and her mother drift through the country, eventually adopting new identities (Sheila and Jesse Goldman) and settling in a small New Hampshire town. Birdie/Jesse tries to find her niche in this new world of eye shadow and gossip and boys, but she also wants to remain true to herself and find a common ground between her white and black heritage. She sets out to find her sister and reconnect with that part of her that has been lost for so long; the search takes her far from the settled, safe life she had in New Hampshire to a far more ambiguous, and unsettled, existence, one in which her own definitions of herself become muddled, and her search for her sister leads ultimately to a search for her own true identity.


From School Library Journal
YA-The time is the 1970s, the place is Boston, and the story is of a biracial marriage and the two little girls born of it. Cole, the first child, preferred by both parents, is beautifully black like her father. Birdie, the narrator, is light enough to pass as white. The wife is a "bleeding heart liberal" who has involved herself in civil rights causes against the wishes of her intellectual husband. Finally, the marriage ruptures. A general breakdown ensues when a gun-running political activity precipitates the need for the family to disappear. Cole is taken off to Brazil with her father to begin a new life in a black environment more open to people of color. Birdie is caught up in a series of wrenching deprivals when her mother insists on the need to go underground. There is a change of location, name, appearance, and in Birdie's case, a change of race; she is to pass as white. Money shortages, a complete lack of stability, the loss of a sister almost a twin, a feeling of displacement, the strains of adjustment, no sense of community or relationship, and the growing suspicion that her mother is psychotic make for disturbing adolescent years. Throughout, Birdie keeps alive her need to connect with her father and sister, and faces the knowledge that the liability of her sister's blackness to her mother and her own unwelcome whiteness to her father has brought the family to this sorry situation. It is her courage, her optimism, and her inherent loyalty that brings about a satisfying reunion for the sisters.Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This unusual first novel by a biracial writer combines a poignant coming-of-age story with a serious exploration of the racial issues that still divide this country. In 1970s Boston, sisters Birdie and Cole are forced apart when their activist white mother must flee the police. The dark-skinned Cole goes with her black father to Brazil, while Birdie, who passes for white, settles with her mother in New Hampshire. How Birdie copes with her frustrations and longing for her sister, and how the two are finally reunited, is the gist of this startlingly mature work, which is at once thought-provoking and tender. (LJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Elizabeth Schmidt
Throughout the novel, Senna superbly illustrates the emotional toll that politics and race take on one especially gutsy young girl's development as she makes her way through the parallel limbos between black and white and between girl and young woman.


The Boston Globe, Alisa Vald
...a well-crafted coming-of-age story that escapes the confines of race, all the while digging to its complex core... a stunning debut from one of the most promising writers Boston has produced this decade.


From Booklist
Senna's debut novel is as thematically and dramatically rich 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. Birdie and her sister, Cole, are close as only sisters can get, but they are forced apart when their daring activist mother, a Boston Brahmin, goes underground after a revolutionary scheme misfires. She takes the lighter of the two girls, Birdie, as cover and hits the road, severing all ties with the past. They finally settle down in a small New Hampshire town where Birdie endures the thoughtless racism of her schoolmates until her longing for her sister and father, and for acknowledgment of her mixed blood, induces her to hit the road once again, this time as a runaway. As Senna charts Birdie's odyssey and rekindles the fires of the 1960s, she poses tough questions about integration, intermarriage, and the status of mixed-race children. 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. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious debut novel that powerfully, if schematically, 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. The author, a young Boston-raised writer, is herself the product of a mixed marriage, which gives her first fiction an authenticity that compensates for a plot that's often more a series of instructive set-pieces than a seamless narrative. Set in the late 1970s and early '80s, the story takes place against the rise and decline of black power, as well as against radical activism, both of which are vividly detailed and form part of the subplot. Birdie, the narrator, is the younger daughter of Sandy, a Boston WASP, and black intellectual and Harvard-educated Deck. The two fell in love, married, and were soon the parents of two daughters: black Cole and ``white'' Birdie. Both Sandy and Deck were involved in antigovernment political movements, but Sandy increasingly became the more radical of the two. Birdie recalls how, as she and Cole grew older, the hurts and difficulties of being neither black nor white accumulated: Cole was taunted for being white at her Afrocentric school, while the sisters' white grandmother favored Birdie at Cole's expense. And when their parents separated, and Deck went off to Brazil in search of a color-blind society, he took Cole with him. Left behind with her mother, Birdie describes the lonely years spent with Sandy on the run from the FBI. She also recollects her schooldays with bigoted New Hampshire whites and how, as a teenager, she finally escaped from Sandy and found a bittersweet reunion with Deck and Cole. An accomplished novel of issues that doesn't offer any easy solutions but does poignantly evoke the pain and paradox of those caught in the racial crossfire. (Book-of-the-Month Club Selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
"Lucid and magnificent." --James McBride, author of The Color of Water
"Senna's remarkable first novel [will] cling to your memory. There's Birdie, who takes after her mother's white, New England side of the family--light skin, straight hair. There's her big sister, Cole, who takes after her father, a radical black intellectual. It's the early seventies, and black-power politics divide their parents, who divide the sisters; Cole disappears with their father, and Birdie goes underground with their mother...Senna tells this coming-of-age tale with impressive beauty and power." --Newsweek
"[An] absorbing debut novel...Senna superbly illustrates the emotional toll that politics and race take on one especially gutsy young girl's development as she makes her way through the parallel limbos between black and white and between girl and young woman...Senna gives new meaning to the twin universal desires for a lost childhood and a new adult self by recounting Birdie's struggle to become someone when she can look and act like anyone." --New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant...a finely nuanced story that explores the matter of race through the eyes and heart of another white black girl."--Ms.



About the Author
The daughter of a black father and a white mother, both writers and activists in the Civil Rights Movement, Danzy Senna grew up in Boston and attended Stanford University. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards. She lives in New York City.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Black Like Me

"Maybe I had actually become Jesse, and it was this girl, this Birdie Lee who...was the lie....I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it....[it] affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and...the way I looked at the world and at other people."
—Birdie Lee in Caucasia

In the tradition of Nella Larsen's Passing, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and James McBride's The Color of Water, Danzy Senna's first novel, Caucasia, explores the complexity of racial discord in America. While Ellison wrote about being paradoxically marked yet "invisible" as a black American man, and Larsen grappled with issues of race, gender, and sexuality during the Harlem Renaissance, Caucasia describes the experience of the invisible sister who confronts biracial identity in post-civil rights movement America.

Birdie Lee, the protagonist of Caucasia, grows up in 1970s Boston with her older sister, Cole, her radical WASP mother, Sandy, and her intellectual African American father, Deck. Sandy was raised in nearby Cambridge -- the daughter of a Harvard professor and a socialite mother whose lineage extended back to Cotton Mather -- while Deck's more amorphous history originated in the depths of the Louisiana bayou. Although Sandy's practice of housing political exiles in many ways complements Deck's revolutionary theories about race, their explosive and intense relationship is a source of instability and concern for both Birdie Lee and Cole. Eventually, the marriage collapses, and Deck finds a new romantic interest, Carmen, a black woman who ignores Birdie Lee and favors Cole.

Birdie Lee's existence, her core, heart, and essence, revolves around Cole. As Birdie Lee recalls, "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." However, while Birdie Lee is phenotypically Caucasoid and can "pass" (as white), with her cinnamon skin and curling hair Cole clearly looks black. Birdie Lee instinctively understands that this is why

"Cole was my father's special one....his prodigy -- his young, gifted, and black.... Her existence comforted him. She was the proof that his blackness hadn't been completely blanched...proof that he had indeed survived the integrationist shuffle...that his body still held the power to leave its mark."

One day, while attending Nkrumah, the Black Power school whose motto is Black is beautiful, Birdie Lee's parents realize that their commitment to hiding subversive radicals in their basement is making them prime targets for "the pigs, the Feds, the motherfuckers in the big house." Eventually, Cole and Deck emigrate to Brazil (with Carmen), while Birdie Lee and Sandy disappear into the vastness of America. The key is that while the FBI would be searching for a white woman with a black child, Birdie Lee's ability to pass will enable them to live a chameleonlike and protected existence.

Birdie Lee and Sandy are thus transformed into Jesse and Sheila Goldman; Sandy reasons that a Jewish identity is the closest Birdie Lee will get to being black while passing as white. "Tragic history, kinky hair, good politics," she explained, "It's all there." For four years Sandy and Birdie Lee are on the lam between communes and motels, eventually settling in New Hampshire, where Birdie Lee, now an adolescent, becomes a typical teen -- experimenting with makeup, wearing skintight jeans, and flirting with boys. Sandy settles into life in the parochial, nearly all-white town and has a steady boyfriend. Yet for Birdie Lee, the continuing lie of their existence and identities becomes increasingly painful and complex, and the absence of her father and sister is absolutely intolerable.

Finally, in March 1982, a full six years after leaving Boston, Birdie Lee returns to Massachusetts, determined to find her father and sister. Although initially content to live as "a spy in enemy territory" Birdie realizes she has metamorphosed into someone she doesn't like, "somebody who had no voice or color or conviction."

Eventually, Birdie Lee locates both her father and sister, who are living separately in Berkeley, and she is heartbroken that her father hadn't searched for her merely because "it was too much of a time commitment.... [He] cared more for books and theories than he did for flesh and blood." However, finding her long-lost other half, Cole, brings Birdie Lee's physically, emotionally, and spiritually arduous journey to a joyous conclusion.

Perhaps the most trenchant observation in Caucasia comes toward the end, when Deck, still "mad and brilliant," pontifically proclaims his newly evolved understanding of race to Birdie Lee:

"...[T]here's no such thing as passing. We're all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It's a costume. We all wear one. You just switched yours at some point. That's just the absurdity of the whole race game."

While Birdie Lee intellectually agrees with her father's thesis, conferring with her sister provides the crucial epiphany: In Cole's words, "He's right, you know. About it all being constructed. But...that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

The questions of biraciality in Caucasia, inspired by Senna's own life, account for the poignancy, realistic complexity, and nuance intrinsic to the novel. Pitch-perfect period details and a superbly empathic protagonist -- upon whose body racial dissonance is literally played out -- form the backdrop to this evocative story. Without a doubt, Caucasia is one of the most sophisticated and compelling novels about race and identity to emerge in years.

—Gayatri Patnaik

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Maybe I had actually become Jesse, and it was this girl, this Birdie Lee who...was the lie....I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it....[it] affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and...the way I looked at the world and at other people." --Birdie Lee in Caucasia

In the tradition of Nella Larsen's Passing, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and James McBride's The Color of Water, Danzy Senna's first novel, Caucasia, explores the complexity of racial discord in America. While Ellison wrote about being paradoxically marked yet "invisible" as a black American man, and Larsen grappled with issues of race, gender, and sexuality during the Harlem Renaissance, Caucasia describes the experience of the invisible sister who confronts biracial identity in post-civil rights movement America.

Birdie Lee, the protagonist of Caucasia, grows up in 1970s Boston with her older sister, Cole, her radical WASP mother, Sandy, and her intellectual African American father, Deck. Sandy was raised in nearby Cambridge -- the daughter of a Harvard professor and a socialite mother whose lineage extended back to Cotton Mather -- while Deck's more amorphous history originated in the depths of the Louisiana bayou. Although Sandy's practice of housing political exiles in many ways complements Deck's revolutionary theories about race, their explosive and intense relationship is a source of instability and concern for both Birdie Lee and Cole. Eventually, the marriage collapses, and Deck finds a new romantic interest, Carmen, a black woman who ignores Birdie Lee and favors role.

Birdie Lee's existence, her core, heart, and essence, revolves around Cole. As Birdie Lee recalls:

"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."

However, while Birdie Lee is phenotypically Caucasoid and can "pass" (as white), with her cinnamon skin and curling hair Cole clearly looks black. Birdie Lee instinctively understands that this is why:

"Cole was my father's special one....his prodigy -- his young, gifted, and black.... Her existence comforted him. She was the proof that his blackness hadn't been completely blanched...proof that he had indeed survived the integrationist shuffle...that his body still held the power to leave its mark."

One day, while attending Nkrumah, the Black Power school whose motto is Black is beautiful, Birdie Lee's parents realize that their commitment to hiding subversive radicals in their basement is making them prime targets for "the pigs, the Feds, the motherfuckers in the big house." Eventually, Cole and Deck emigrate to Brazil (with Carmen), while Birdie Lee and Sandy disappear into the vastness of America. The key is that while the FBI would be searching for a white woman with a black child, Birdie Lee's ability to pass will enable them to live a chameleonlike and protected existence.

Birdie Lee and Sandy are thus transformed into Jesse and Sheila Goldman; Sandy reasons that a Jewish identity is the closest Birdie Lee will get to being black while passing as white. "Tragic history, kinky hair, good politics," she explained, "It's all there." For four years Sandy and Birdie Lee are on the lam between communes and motels, eventually settling in New Hampshire, where Birdie Lee, now an adolescent, becomes a typical teen -- experimenting with makeup, wearing skintight jeans, and flirting with boys. Sandy settles into life in the parochial, nearly all-white town and has a steady boyfriend. Yet for Birdie Lee, the continuing lie of their existence and identities becomes increasingly painful and complex, and the absence of her father and sister is absolutely intolerable.

Finally, in March 1982, a full six years after leaving Boston, Birdie Lee returns to Massachusetts, determined to find her father and sister. Although initially content to live as "a spy in enemy territory" Birdie realizes she has metamorphosed into someone she doesn't like, "somebody who had no voice or color or conviction."

Eventually, Birdie Lee locates both her father and sister, who are living separately in Berkeley, and she is heartbroken that her father hadn't searched for her merely because "it was too much of a time commitment.... [He] cared more for books and theories than he did for flesh and blood." However, finding her long-lost other half, Cole, brings Birdie Lee's physically, emotionally, and spiritually arduous journey to a joyous conclusion.

Perhaps the most trenchant observation in Caucasia comes toward the end, when Deck, still "mad and brilliant," pontifically proclaims his newly evolved understanding of race to Birdie Lee:
"...[T]here's no such thing as passing. We're all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It's a costume. We all wear one. You just switched yours at some point. That's just the absurdity of the whole race game."

While Birdie Lee intellectually agrees with her father's thesis, conferring with her sister provides the crucial epiphany: In Cole's words, "He's right, you know. About it all being constructed. But...that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

The questions of biraciality in Caucasia, inspired by Senna's own life, account for the poignancy, realistic complexity, and nuance intrinsic to the novel. Pitch-perfect period details and a superbly empathic protagonist -- upon whose body racial dissonance is literally played out -- form the backdrop to this evocative story. Without a doubt, Caucasia is one of the most sophisticated and compelling novels about race and identity to emerge in years.
-- Gayatri Patnai

SYNOPSIS

Pitch-perfect period details and a superbly empathic protagonist -- upon whose body racial dissonance is literally played out -- form the backdrop to this sophisticated and compelling debut novel. Birdy and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the civil rights movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world, they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. But then their parents' marriage falls apart, the girls are separated, and Birdie and her mother must assume a new and perplexing identity. Inspired by Senna's own life, Caucasia raises questions of biracialism that contribute to the poignancy, realistic complexity, and nuance intrinsic to the novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times

Haunting and deeply intelligent.

People Magazine

...[A]bsorbing, affecting...

Elizabeth Schmidt - The New York Times Book Review

Superbly illustrates the emotional toll that politics and race take on one especially gutsy young girl's development.

Publishers Weekly

Set in 1970s Boston, this impressively assured debut avoids the usual extremes in its depiction of racial tension. As children, Birdie and her sister, Cole, create their own secret language--Elemeno--to ward off the growing tension between their black father and their white mother. Finally, Mom and Dad split up one time too many, and no amount of Al Green records, Chinese noodles and slow dancing can bring them back together. Cole, whose complexion is darker than her sister's, gets caught up in her new, black nationalist Nkrumah School in Roxbury and in her father's new life with a black girlfriend. Birdie, pale enough to be mistaken for white, stays close to Mom, mourning her estrangement from Dad and especially Coleher mirror, protector and secret sharer. After her father and Cole move to Brazil and the feds start to investigate her mother's mysterious political activities, Birdie and her mother go underground, posing as the wife and daughter of sympathetic professor David Goldman. Senna's observations about the racial divide in America are often fierce but always complex and humane. If the story has didactic overtones, Senna's shaping of '70s detail and convincing development of her appealing protagonists more than justify its message.

Library Journal

Senna's first novel explores life in the middle of America's racial chasm through the eyes of a biracial girl who must struggle for acceptance from blacks and whites alike. Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a white mother and an African American father whose marriage is disintegrating. When their activist mother must flee from the police, the girls are split between their parents: Cole goes with her father because she looks black, Birdie with her mother because she could pass for white. Living in a small town and forced to keep her family, her past, and her race a secret, Birdie spies upon racism in all its forms, from the overt comments of the town locals to the hypocrisy of the wealthy liberals. 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. -- Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING