Caucasia (1998) by Danzy Senna

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

Caucasia (1998)

by Danzy Senna

Boston, Massachussets

Massacussets: 15/30

   The 1001 Novels: A Library of America has slowed to a crawl during the big fall release season/awards shortlists on both sides of the Atlantic.   It doesn't help that I'm staring at a literal stack of YA and "domestic" fiction in my study.  I'm really not in a hurry to read any of this books I've got checked out from the library in pursuit of this project.  Caucasia is another volume from the sad families and their children genre that editor Susan Straight seems to prefer in her American fiction.  Senna is a professor of English at USC and she's married to fellow writer Percival Everett.  Senna comes from a mixed-race background- her mother Fanny Howe, is white, and her father, Carl Senna, is black.  They were married in 1968 (mixed race marriage was legalized in 1967) and split up in 1970.  Caucasia, and much of her other work, reflects the life experience of being mixed race, specifically written from the perspective of a child who can pass for white, as, I believe, is the case with Senna based on pictures of her online.

  Caucasia was her debut novel and it's about Birdie Lee, a young girl, like Senna, the child of a white mother and black father who split up.  Her mom, who is, lets face it, a bit of a drama queen, decides that she is being targeted by the FBI for her radical activities (unclear if that is actually the case), so she splits up her family, sending Birdie's black-looking sister off with her Dad to Brazil and decamping with Birdie to northern New England, where they end up spending most of the book in small-town New Hampshire.  I'm assuming this didn't actually happen to Senna since it is both presented as a work of fiction and because she wrote a subsequent memoir of her personal experience as a mixed-race child.

  Caucasia is another example of a book on the 1001 Novels: A Library of America written from the perspective of a teen although it is not YA fiction.   Like many issues related to race, growing up in the Bay Area in an upper-middle class millieu shielded me from many of the harsh realities of race in America.  It wasn't until I got to college in Washington DC that I realized that interracial relationships were in any way controversial.  Certainly, among on elementary through high school classmates there were plenty of interracial relationships- black/white, white/asian, black/asian, etc.  It just wasn't particularly unusual in that place and time.  I know better now, of course, and Caucasia is a good book for those looking for insight on the experience of growing up biracial in America.