Memory's Movements: Minstrelsy, Miscegenation, and American Race Studies

Abstract

Danzy Senna's splendid novel Caucasia (1998) tells the story of the biracial Lee sisters, Cole and Birdie. The girls share the same parents and ancestral roots but are torn asunder by the racial divisiveness of Boston in the 1970s. Cole, darker skinned, with curly hair and therefore seeming to belong to the girls' black father, remains with him; whereas Birdie, capable of white flight by virtue of her lighter skin and straighter hair, leaves with the girls' white mother. In short, one sister passes for black, the other for white. The novel is an allegory of American race relations in black and white along the lines of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The book begins with a memory: A long time ago I disappeared.... 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 .... ) 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 (1). This eloquent opening speaks to