Caucasia
by Danzy Senna
Riverhead Books, New York
413 pages, $12.95

A friend of mine, observing that I was having difficulty grappling with the everyday reality of racism, recommended that I read the novel Caucasia, which she praised as a thought-provoking exploration of racial politics.

I did, and she was right. In fact, the book is so absorbing that I had a hard time putting it down.

Caucasia is the first-person story of a young girl, Birdie Lee, and her observations of race and class tensions while growing up in a biracial family in 1970s Boston. It is a debut effort by Danzy Senna, who is herself biracial.

 Birdie’s father is a Black professor obsessed with questions of race from an academic perspective, and her mother a white revolutionary activist who totally rejects her privileged upperclass upbringing. Birdie’s older sister, Cole, whom she adores, is darker-skinned, while Birdie is light-skinned and easily mistaken for white. The siblings are so close that they speak to each other in their own invented language, Elemeno.
 
 

The young Birdie observes that she and Cole are treated differently. Their father, Deck, is more involved with Cole and takes pride in her African American appearance, but ignores Birdie. Yet Birdie gets unwanted attention from her white, maternal grandmother, who dismisses her sister. But she doesn’t really get that she’s not the same as Cole, and that the difference is skin color, until they go to school for the first time at the ages of eight and eleven. (Their mother, Sandy, is a teacher and has educated her kids at home.)
 
 

Meanwhile, politics, which originally brought their parents together, is now driving them apart. Specifically, Sandy and Deck came together because of shared intellectual interests and activism in the civil rights movement. But, as the movement begins to crumble under the weight of political differences within it and a crackdown against radicals by the FBI, Sandy becomes increasingly militant, while Deck retreats into theory and his writing. The marriage, like the movement, falls apart.

 When Sandy becomes a target of the FBI, the family is divided along color lines. The light-skinned Birdie goes with her mom and the darker-skinned Cole goes wih her dad — a wrenching separaton for the sisters. Cole and her father go to Brazil, where her father is convinced there is more racial equality. Birdie and her mom go underground to escape the FBI net.
 
 

Birdie and her mom drift throughout the Northeast, ending their flight in a small New Hampshire town where most of the people are white. It is here that Birdie herself “becomes white” — actually Jewish, to explain her darker hue. She and her mother begin a seemingly normal life as Sheila and Jesse Goldman.
 
 

While passing, forced to keep quiet about who she really is to survive, Birdie yearns to be part of the “visible world” of her junior high school. And she is easily accepted into a clique of white girls.

 But she comes to realize that she is losing her Black identity. This, and the emotional toll of dealing with the racism she sees around her, eventually become too much to bear. As Birdie says at the beginning of the book about this period in her life, “A long time ago I disappeared. One day I was here, the next I was gone.”
 
 

After five years of hiding, Birdie runs away from New Hampshire in search of her sister, father, and herself.
 
 

Her meetings with her two lost family members are revelatory. Her discovery of Deck is personally disappointing, but she takes away from it an insight he shares with her.

 “Race is a complete illusion,” Deck tells Birdie. “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.”

 Birdie’s reunion with her sister is more human and fulfilling, a completion for both of them, and no less mind-expanding. She tells Cole of her conversation with Deck, “He says there’s no such thing as race.” And Cole responds, “He’s right, you know. About it all being constructed. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

 This is a wonderful strength in the book, as Birdie and Cole come to grips with the idea that race is both real and not real, a creation not of biology but of society. This knowledge arms them with the determination to launch a life of conscious visibility, at once Black and white.

 An image Birdie’s father uses to characterize his biracial daughters is of the canaries used by miners to gauge the amount of poison in the air. “You’re the first generation of canaries to survive,” Deck says, “a little injured, perhaps, but alive.”

 Very alive! As a Chicana and Apache “canary,” existing and organizing in the real world, I found Caucasia invigorating and verifying — a beautifully written window on ever more multiracial and changeable times.

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