2
“Half of Everything and Certain of Nothing”
Cultural Mulattoes and Racial Property in Black, White, and Jewish and Caucasia
As whiteness is simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest, it is something that can both be experienced and deployed as a resource.
—Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property”
If this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers. A relation which others might describe as a kind of melancholia, but which I prefer to describe in terms of the afterlife of property, by which I mean the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend, a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril.
—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
In 1989, Trey Ellis published his exuberant, naively optimistic essay “The New Black Aesthetic,” which proclaimed the ascendancy of a generation of writers and artists who “grew up feeling misunderstood by both the black worlds and the white” but since “have liberated themselves from both white envy and self-hate” and taken their rightful places in the black creative vanguard.1 Ellis’s piece, a revision and extension of a college term paper, proved controversial. This was in part because of its narrow gender politics, which—despite Ellis’s insistence that this vanguard was the epitome of the new—largely repeated the same marginalization and exclusion of women that had characterized the “old” Black Aesthetic of the 1970s, and in part because of its inability to address black class conflict in any meaningful way.2 The “evasion of politics” identified by Eric Lott in his response to Ellis, what Lott then called “a refusal to spell out the bup/mass relationship,” seems closely tied to Ellis’s flawed but freighted concept of the “cultural mulatto,” and is worth interrogating here at the start of this chapter on mulatto bodies, class, and racial property in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century post-soul narratives—specifically Danzy Senna’s 1998 novel, Caucasia, and Rebecca Walker’s 2001 memoir, Black, White, and Jewish.3
In this chapter I explore class-driven tensions between the metaphor of the “cultural mulatto” and that of the “real” mulatto—highlighting the still-permeable boundaries between figurative and literal notions of a privileged black body with, in Walker’s words, “white inside.” Racial “property” and privilege are at the center of my inquiry here, given the ways that Cheryl I. Harris’s influential understanding of racial “whiteness” as property overlaps with and speaks to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of contemporary black subjectivity as the “afterlife of property.” These two conceptualizations of a kind of racialized capital, of race-as-(former)-property, both of which hail and implicate notions of materiality and privilege, collide in a very particular way in the (cultural) mulatto body. This body, which both possesses “whiteness” and is possessed by blackness, or rather by the history and the “ongoing state of emergency” and vulnerability that at least partially defines the “black” subject, is taken quite literally in Walker’s text but is interrogated and deconstructed in Senna’s.4 Indeed, in this chapter I argue, ultimately, that while Walker’s uncritical reliance upon the “truth” of the mulatto body serves to elide her memoir’s investment in class and association of whiteness with material privilege, Senna’s contemporary passing narrative highlights the costs of an embodied notion of racial subjectivity for a “black” subject whose body cannot be read as such. Her protagonist eschews the property of whiteness throughout the novel precisely because of its privileged investments, instead seeking to “belong” to blackness.
Before turning to these two narratives, I want briefly to unpack these notions of black and white “property” and then look a bit more closely at Ellis’s notion of the “cultural mulatto,” which masquerades in his essay as progressive but upon closer attention fairly easily gives up its troubled investments in racial biology and hierarchies of value. In this chapter’s first epigraph, drawn from her foundational 1993 essay “Whiteness as Property,” Harris writes of whiteness as both “an aspect of identity” and “a property interest,” meaning that for those understood to be legally “white,” “whiteness” can be both “experienced and deployed as a resource.”5 For Harris, a legally “white” person “‘used and enjoyed’ White whenever she took advantage of the privileges accorded white people simply by virtue of their whiteness—when she exercised any number of rights reserved for the holders of whiteness” (1734). As we will see, particularly in my discussion of Senna’s text, in practice these rights include everything from the right to particular kinds of social access and visibility to the right to police and discipline other (read: black) bodies.
As Audrey Elisa Kerr notes, however, writing about colorism and the folkloric significance of the “paper bag” in distinguishing lighter skin colors from darker ones among African Americans, “Because white America went to such lengths to (supposedly) remain distinct and ‘purely’ white, comparable demarcations of the margins and borders of race have been tested internally as part of a rhetorical curiosity about whether whiteness can work for blacks as well as it works for whites.”6 This notion of whiteness working for black subjects—in other words, serving as a deployable resource even for those who are not “white”—has a particular resonance in the case of the mixed-race subject, who presumably has a biological relationship to “whiteness,” usually one that is visible in his or her skin color and hair texture.7 One question we must ask about whiteness as property, then, is: To what extent can whiteness also be the property of black or mixed bodies? How might these bodies similarly deploy whiteness as a resource—and to what ends?
The notion of whiteness as a property interest, a usable resource—perhaps especially if we can imagine that resource to be usable by black subjects—collides with Hartman’s articulation of the black present as the afterlife of property, precisely because the black body as property continues to haunt our present moment. In writing about a dead slave girl, Venus, Hartman is ultimately concerned with the limits and failures of the archive, and indeed, in “performing the limits of writing history through the act of narration.”8 Yet her point that “our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom” speaks to the ways that blackness has historically operated as a sign or symbol of the less-than-human, of bodies that cannot possess even themselves.9 The ontological conflict between black bodies as property and black bodies as propertied, bodies that under certain conditions have access to (material) privilege, is at the center of my larger inquiry in this project, but the case of the mixed-race black subject casts this conflict into a particularly literal relief, as the narratives that circulate around the “mulatto” body centralize the notion of that body’s dual property interests, in both blackness and whiteness.
This duality is likely why Ellis finds the metaphor of the “cultural mulatto” so useful; the very usefulness of the metaphor, however, its biologically rooted simplicity, highlights its reductiveness and especially its inability to grapple with black class privilege. Ellis defines a “cultural mulatto” thus:
Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who often can get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.10
Yet while the phrase “cultural mulatto” may be a practical shorthand for a certain kind of “black” subject “educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures”—Ellis’s use of the word “educated” here suggesting, if not insisting upon, a personal history of privilege and access for said subject—it also reifies categories of “black” and “white” in a way that simply returns us to biology. Although the phrase’s emphasis on culture seems to sidestep biological race, the advancement of “cultural” as a modifier for “mulatto” suggests that the peculiar phrase “genetic mulatto” is a redundancy, that “real” mixed-race people are those in possession of a white parent. Ellis seems unaware of or uninterested in the ways both that so-called genetic mulattoes historically have had complex relationships to “blackness” (e.g., the “one drop” rule, black people as always already mixed race, etc) and that African American artists in generations prior to his own have claimed influences and been “educated” in cultures across the racial spectrum (see, e.g., Ralph Ellison’s “The World and the Jug”).
The class and gender politics of the term as Ellis lays them out are even more striking, however. There is a strange slippage in a subsequent passage from the essay, when Ellis moves between a celebration of cultural mulattoes’ freedom from racial self-consciousness (“We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black”) and a supremely self-conscious claim about race and class. Directly after his confident, collectivized refusal to please either blacks or whites, Ellis writes that “the culturally mulatto Cosby girls are just as black as a black teenage welfare mother,” insisting that “neither side of the tracks should forget that.”11 For me this sentence raises a number of persistent questions, most of which seem to present obvious answers: To what extent does Ellis’s formulation of “black teenage welfare mother” operate as a static, fixed sign for “impoverished black authenticity” that is granted, in Ellis’s binary, no interiority, no complexity, and no possibility for dynamism? In this sort of oppositional framing, can a “black teenage welfare mother” ever herself be a cultural mulatto? If not, why not? And why is the best example Ellis can come up with for a “cultural mulatto” the fictional, fantasized “Cosby girls”? Why, indeed, are we talking about “girls” and women at all, in this contestatory moment in Ellis’s argument? Ellis seems to have little problem bringing up actual black men by name in his piece, but in this strange moment of naming the stakes of who is “just as black” he switches over to two imagined (indeed, purely imaginary) female figures.
Ellis’s rhetorical choices certainly reveal the importance of women’s and girls’ bodies in masculine contests over racial meaning and social power—and as Habiba Ibrahim reminds us, “multiraciality gains clarity through gender,” so it is perhaps not surprising that Ellis reaches in the direction of the “Cosby girls” to make his point.12 But these lines suggest, too, that if the black creative vanguard has indeed sloughed off “white envy” and “[black] self-hate,” it has not yet come to as comfortable a place about its own material privilege. Thus Ellis uses the heavily class-inflected phrase “neither side of the tracks,” which calls for a kind of truce across lines of social class—the begrudging acceptance of blackness by the “whitened” (cultural) mulatto and the similarly begrudging agreement, from poor and working-class black people, that Ellis and his fantasy proxies, the Cosby girls, are after all “just as black” as their less-privileged counterparts. Although Ellis tries for a parallel with “neither side of the tracks,” the fact that one would never have to argue that a “black teenage welfare mother” was “just as black” as the fictional character Denise Cosby demonstrates the false equivalence and the poorly concealed class privilege of the “culturally mulatto” subject.
Keeping the material privilege of the cultural mulatto in view may allow us to better understand the nexus of privilege, power, and capital that historically has surrounded the “real” mulatto, and the way that both of these “mulatto” subjects occupy a vexed position vis-à-vis racial property. Particularly in the late 1990s, a moment of discursive upheaval for racial categorization—including, for instance, demands for a “multiracial” category on the U.S. census13—the question of to whom or to what the (cultural) mulatto body belongs is a particularly fraught one, taken up in varying ways by both Walker and Senna. Both of these narratives’ attention to class, race, and corporeality highlights Hartman’s “past that is not done” and points to the continued relevance of whiteness and blackness as forms of “property” that inhere in the body in figurative and literal ways.
Not Tragic
Rebecca Walker, the daughter of famed black novelist Alice Walker and Jewish attorney Mel Leventhal, writes early in her 2001 memoir, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, “I remember coming and going, going and coming. That, for me, was home.”14 Walker longs for multiple lives and cannot find satisfaction in any one place:
I am not rooted in the everyday. I move from place to place like a sybarite in search of pleasure, always thinking the final resting place will be just around the corner, at the end of this plane ride, behind the next door. I can never release myself from the mercurial aspects, can’t allow myself to stand on some kind of ground. (167)
Walker insists, however, that this chronic sense of displacement, while certainly a function of how she grew up, and with whom, is not stereotypically tortured or sad. A self-described “Movement Child,” she writes that she is “not a bastard, the product of rape, the child of some white devil,” and goes on to state categorically, “I am not tragic” (24). Invoking the trope of the tragic mulatta in order to distance herself from it, Walker here insists, like Ellis, on the newness of her subject position, a hopeful, transgressive multiraciality made possible by the interracial coalition building of the early Civil Rights movement.15
Yet for all of this newness, throughout her memoir Walker does make recourse to a very old narrative of racial authenticity (or perhaps, inauthenticity), namely, that of the “impure” mulatta body. This “impurity” depends upon the authentic biological presence of whiteness within the mixed-race figure, and this sense of whiteness within recurs at many points in Walker’s narrative. Indeed, Walker announces her interest in the biological on the very first page of the book, musing on the things that she has forgotten, “thousands of large and small omissions, bits of information I swear normal people have built into their DNA” (1). Aligning the notion of lapsed cognitive memory with a corporeal failure at the level of DNA, Walker thus begins her autobiography by highlighting her difference from “normal people,” those who are not so “amorphous,” who possess “the unbroken black line around [their] bod[ies]” that Walker believes herself to lack (2).
There is an interesting symbolic link here between the absence of “unbroken” blackness outside or around the body, literally a black surface or border, and the presence of whiteness within the body that Walker highlights repeatedly throughout her narrative. Discussing her maternal uncle and cousins’ use of the word “cracker” to describe things she does that “they think are strange or weird . . . not black” (85), Walker writes, “a part of me feels pushed away when they say this, like I have something inside of me I know they hate” (85, emphasis added). She wonders whether her “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, May Poole” (150), who was born a slave, would have seen Walker’s light skin, the visible badge of her white ancestry, “as a sign of danger, the evidence of brutality” (151). She feels physically inadequate in the face of the “undeniable blackness” (239) of a woman in a photograph in a boyfriend’s bedroom—a blackness as physical as it is undeniable, marked, for Walker, by the woman’s “dark chocolate skin” and “perfectly formed thick behind” (239).16 Thus, not only does this whiteness within deny Walker a protective cultural facade, as her performance of blackness is disrupted by behaviors deemed by other black people to be “strange,” “weird,” “not black,” but her light complexion operates as a visual reminder that her body lacks an “unbroken black line” of dark skin, the “undeniable blackness” that presumably would have signified safety to her enslaved foremother Poole.
Walker again makes recourse to biological betrayal, to her body’s internal makeup as a source of externalized, personal and racial alienation, when she writes: “There is an awkwardness to my body, a lack of grace, as if the racial mix, the two sides coming together in my body, have yet to reconcile” (255). Yet she notes with relief, in the next paragraph, that she can dance, that she has “rhythm”:
For black folks, “having rhythm” is like speaking a different language, and pity you if you don’t know the words. “Poor thing,” I myself have snickered about a mixed person with no groove, clinging to a rare, luxurious feeling of inclusion, “the mix just didn’t turn out right.” (255)
Curiously, ability to master the “language” of rhythm seems tied, here, not to so-called racial purity but to a fortuitous kind of impurity, a “mix” that succeeds rather than fails in particular ways. If Walker’s mixed ancestry leaves her visually “awkward” and racially rootless, it does not leave her “groove”-less. Yet while she recalls dancing with both parents, she still concedes the truth of her black friends’ and lovers’ assertions that her rhythm is derived from her mother, her blackness; she despairs of the praise, the “rare, luxurious” sense of inclusion, which requires her to suppress her white ancestry. “But where does that leave me?” Walker writes, “Ashamed of one half, grateful for the other?” (256). These “halves” are far more than metaphoric, linked throughout this section to the corporeal, mixed-race awkwardness that prevents Walker from feeling “at home in [her] body” (255).
Given this recurrent concern with biology, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that when Walker’s (black) lover asks her directly, “What does it feel like to have white inside you?” (304), Walker retreats into the constructedness of race. She reports, “My first response is, What is whiteness? And how can one ‘feel white’ when race is just about the biggest cultural construct there is?” (305). She goes on to note, “Is whiteness something I can feel on or in my body like a stomachache or a burn? No” (305). Here Walker refuses to articulate explicitly the notion of biological difference that she has raised, implicitly, throughout her narrative. And perhaps rightfully so; because race is “just about the biggest cultural construct there is,” it should be clear that the racial alienation that Walker has subtly linked to her physical admixture is actually attributable to other, sociocultural factors that shape how identity is performed and interpreted.
In the case of Walker’s incomplete or occasionally incoherent performance of blackness, one of these factors may well be material privilege. Walker associates her white, Jewish ancestry with her father’s “totally bourgeois lifestyle” (208), the “white, rich, Jewish kids” (207) at her Larchmont high school, and the wealthy white adult residents of Larchmont, who, when she walks down the street with her younger half brother and sister, mistake her for “the baby-sitter, the maid, the au pair” (230). And Walker frames her emotional identification with her Puerto Rican friend Theresa explicitly in class terms: “[Theresa’s] house . . . reflects how I feel inside much more than the calm, collected, solidly middle-class world of my father and stepmother and their new baby boy” (205). As Lori Harrison-Kahan notes, “Walker renounces her Jewishness in favor of being a ‘Puertoriquena’ because, in the world she inhabits, the most visible Hispanic population is working class and the most visible part of the Jewish population middle class.”17 Or, more accurately, upper middle class to lavishly wealthy; the Larchmont friend that Walker describes in the most detail, Allison Hoffman, lives in a house of “smooth gray stone and glass,” which “from the outside looks like it should be in an architectural magazine,” with a “Mercedes and Jaguar” parked in the carport (209). Uncomfortable with the entitlement that Allison exhibits, talking to her Latina maid, Maria, in a voice “a little too firm and dismissive . . . for someone our age to say to a woman so much older” (210), Walker instead seeks out “the mess, the drama, the darkness” (205) of Latinidad, embodied by Theresa—who in spite of Walker’s feelings of kinship toward her, nonetheless looks “faded, haggard, and slightly green” (212) against the backdrop of Walker’s own bourgeois home.
Like Ellis, Walker leaves these awkward issues of class and material privilege unexamined, instead allowing her so-called racial biology to stand in for a more nuanced consideration of how race and class complicate one another, how the presence of her beige body indeed disrupts the “calm, collected, solidly middle-class” and very white world of her father and stepmother, but also how continued access to this solidly middle-class privilege, and especially to financial support from her father’s family, shapes Walker’s interactions in both white and black spaces. In one instance, her “grandmother in Brooklyn” (read: her father’s mother) sends her money to buy a bicycle after her mother refuses, which then becomes an emblem of Walker’s regional and class difference from the kids in her mother’s urban San Francisco neighborhood:
Two girls, Sonja and Sandra, come down from the building up the hill. . . . Sonja is big. I don’t know it then but everyone in her family is big, strong, meaty. She has her hair in plaits and has on these big burgundy overalls with jelly shoes and pom-pom socks. The pom-poms are yellow and blue, she must have on two pairs, one over the other. I don’t remember Sandra too much, not her skin or her hair or anything in particular. Sonja is the one who tells me she is going to take my bike from me. Sonja is the one who asks me where I am from and am I new and says she should just take my bike so I could learn what it is like. I say, What what is like? (124)
Walker makes typical recourse to the body here, in this case the “big,” “strong,” “meaty” body of the working-class black girl, which sticks in Walker’s memory (unlike Sandra, who remains a nondescript blur for both Walker and the reader) only because she poses a threat. The class dynamics of Sonja’s resentment are clear, as Walker’s “newness,” her light skin, her shiny red bike, and the attention she receives from the “cute fine sexy [older] boy” (123), Michael, are all examples of her privilege over Sonja, a privilege driven as much by her access to wealth as her corporeal relationship to “whiteness.” The memoir is written from Walker’s childhood perspective, and Walker’s apparent innocence in the moment of Sonja’s anger (“What what is like?”) only highlights the stark contrast between the two girls’ subject positions more clearly, as Walker must learn, often painfully, of the existence of—and her relatively privileged place in—social hierarchies of race and class the constraints of which girls like Sonja have long chafed under.
Walker reencounters this dynamic throughout her early teenage years in San Francisco with her mother, repeatedly being dismissed or attacked as a “yellow bitch” (108, 156) and simultaneously “attaching [her]self to people who hated [her] as an act of self-protection” (156). She avoids this dynamic in New York, with her father, by not just spending time with Latino friends in a part of the Bronx that seems miles away from her father’s apartment in Riverdale, but by passing as a Latina: “The Bronx means . . . walking around with my friends Sam and Jesus and Theresa and Melissa and being seen as I feel I truly am: a Puertoriquena, a mulatta, breathed out with all that Spanish flavor. A girl of color with attitude” (200). Yet she “can’t imagine” her friends in her father’s apartment, where “nothing . . . looks or sounds or smells like my friends’ houses, . . . [nothing] would prove I am of color, that I am who I say I am outside of these walls” (202). And her concerns for her father’s safety when he drives her “down the hill to Theresa’s house” reveal a great deal about Walker’s experiences with urban blackness, a space that has been far less safe for her than el barrio:
He asks in that same way, Are you sure you’ll be okay? And I think to myself that I am going to be fine, but will he? I belong because my skin says I do, because people don’t question me, don’t look at me and think of all the wack shit that white people do. They don’t assume I have money or that I don’t respect them. I can walk like I know, I can cock my head to one side and look at someone like they better step off, but my father? I worry that he’s just another white man walking down the street, an easy mark. (202)
Walker’s worry about her father here masks the ways that these very assumptions attach to her own body. The very skin that operates as a sign of belonging among her Puerto Rican friends, marking her as a “mulatta” with “Spanish flavor,” is a sign of her position as privileged outsider in the African American spaces she frequents on the other coast. Indeed, while Walker has already suggested that her maternal ancestor May Poole would have seen her light skin as “a sign of danger, the evidence of [white] brutality” (151), this dynamic, in which (black) people look at her and think of (white) privilege, assume she has money, assume she doesn’t respect them, is clearly at play in the sometimes literally bruising interactions she has with poor and working-class black kids in San Francisco, who see in her light skin a “yellow bitch” who “thought [she] was better than everybody else” (156). Ironically, it is from one of these tormentors-turned-friends, Lisa, that Walker learns “to move like I know where I’m going, like I could be dangerous if talked to the wrong way, like I have brothers or uncles who would come out of nowhere to protect me if something should go down” (159)—in other words, to behave like “a girl of color with attitude.” Walker’s successful, gendered and raced, performance of this role thus depends upon her familiarity with and entry into spaces that initially view her with contempt precisely because of her class and color privilege.
We might also read Walker’s relationship to education, specifically her high school education, as shaped by class privilege and access. In this case, her mother’s increasing success as a writer enables Walker to attend an expensive private school once she realizes that she might leave her local public high school “know[ing] less than when [she] started” (251). The request she makes of her mother to attend private school is another moment that implicates the body simultaneously with class, this time calling attention to its adolescent vulnerability:
I don’t know where this comes from, really, this sudden exclamation, because it’s not like I’ve been thinking about it and it’s not like I know anybody my age who is actually in a private school. But I have just had an abortion at fourteen, and we don’t read books in my English class, only endless mimeographed handouts, and Michael’s friends in college work for minimum wage parking cars. (252)
While Walker’s early experimentation with sex is framed in the book as a function of her mother’s neglect (“Somewhere I feel like maybe I want my mother to find out that where I am may not be very safe and I want her to tell me to come home. I want her to tell me that I can’t go so far away from her while I’m so young” [158]), Walker’s abortion at only fourteen also suggests her figurative if not literal proximity to Ellis’s “black teenage welfare mother.” The distinction between Walker and that figure is, in part, a parent who has the resources to intervene. Walker’s mother agrees without hesitation to “schedule an abortion” (249), protecting Walker from “hav[ing] a baby before [she] was old enough to take care of it” (251); she similarly agrees to look for a suitable private school, protecting her daughter from an economic future that involves “work for minimum wage” like the alums of her public high school.
Ironically, this figurative proximity to black poverty follows Walker and her mother into the interview at the paradoxically named “Urban,” the “small, hippie private school” she and her mother choose (261); the headmaster, “without a hello, an introduction, a hi nice to meet you I’m so-and-so and your name is,” opens his meeting with the two of them by saying “the first thing I must tell you folks is that there’s just no financial aid available” (261). Walker takes a split second longer than her mother to recognize “the assumption, the train of thought he’s following,” namely, that “we’re black and so we must need financial aid,” but her mother’s icy outrage carries them both out the door. As they exit, Walker considers a question with an obvious answer: “I’m thinking about . . . what it would be like if my big white father were here with us, and his white Volvo was parked outside. Would it be different then?” (262). Here, Walker’s fantasy about her father’s mitigating presence necessarily includes the white Volvo, because in Black, White, and Jewish the covering protection of whiteness is also and always already a class protection.
In these scenes, Black, White, and Jewish almost inadvertently highlights the class politics underlying Walker’s racial alienation, an alienation that leaves her feeling not “at home” in her body (255). Yet even the solution to this alienation, as presented in the text, returns us to the corporeal, indeed, to the sexual:
When I am under Michael in the dark, when I have my head under the covers and am sucking Luca’s smooth, white penis, when Andre is stretching his hard, muscle-bound body over me as the fog seeps in the window above my head, when Ray Martinez grabs the back of my neck in the movie theater and pushes his tongue farther into my mouth, I feel all my fear and anxiety about being liked, fitting in, knowing where and who I am melt away. I feel I am finally just the soft part of who I am, the mushy part of Rebecca, the part underneath the hard outer layer whose face frowns and shoulders tense, who watches every move to know how to follow. Their attention is the salve that coats the wound, is the sound that drowns out all the people who don’t like black white girls, who don’t like white black girls, who don’t like me, the skin on my body having determined this long before I even had a chance to speak. (256)
For Walker, sexual attention from boys and men releases her from her cross-racial anxiety about fitting in, from all those who categorize her by her skin as a “black white girl” or a “white black girl,” a “half-breed race traitor” or “half-breed oreo freak” (271). It is unclear, however, how much this retreat into the “mushy part of Rebecca” is a way of avoiding the hard work of grappling with the meanings behind these labels, and their ties to various kinds of (bodily) privilege. Walker’s youthful sexual activity seems to offer a safer or more socially sanctioned means of controlling her body’s narrative. But it is unclear whether the costs of this manner of control are too high for her. By the end of her memoir, Walker asserts that “blood ties are less important, that all blood is basically the same,” but also, finally, situates herself again “somewhere between black and white, family and friend” (322), noting “I am flesh and blood, but also ether” (322).18 Taken together, these phrases call up her body, her mixed heritage, even as they seek to diminish its relevance—indeed, they suggest Walker’s ultimate inability to turn away from the corporeal, which after all underlies the “shifting self” of her narrative’s title.
“Black Like Me, a Mixed Girl”
Danzy Senna’s fictional protagonist, Birdie, from Caucasia, is similar to Walker’s younger self in that she is biracial and associates her white parent’s origins with privilege. And although Caucasia is not a memoir, Birdie’s observation that her mother’s lineage is written into the very structures of Boston—“there seemed to be remnants of my mother’s family everywhere—history books, PBS specials, plaques in Harvard Square” (100)—is remarkably similar to what Senna writes of her own famous mother (writer Fanny Howe) in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?:
I looked up and saw what I must have always known but had never really acknowledged: my mother’s history—and therefore mine too—was written everywhere. A subway map to Quincy Market. An advertisement for DeWolfe Realtors. Before me was Harvard’s campus, where my mother’s father and forefathers had studied, taught, and presided. Just a few blocks up was my great-grandfather’s ode to tobacco, engraved on a bronze plaque on the wall outside the century-old smoke shop Leavitt and Pierce. It was quite literally all around me: on street signs and statues, on subway maps and plaques.19
Senna makes this realization with a “rush of embarrassment, amusement, shame and pride, disgust and glee,” because the vivid, material presence of her mother’s history, of “privilege passed down through the ages” (16), brings with it awareness of a corresponding absence, “what was not there, the other half of me, my father’s side” (13). As she goes on to note, highlighting the seemingly unbreachable void of this absence, “one side is unusually—even compulsively—documented, and the other is a black hole that, when you call into it—Who are you?—only swallows the very question” (17).
Indeed, this chapter’s title is also drawn from Senna’s memoir. “Half of everything and certain of nothing” is a phrase she uses to describe her father’s uncertain ancestry, which involves not only multiraciality but also family secrets around his paternity. Senna’s father had always believed that his father was a Mexican boxer, Carl Senna (the reason he is named Carl Senna Jr.), but as the memoir reveals, he may actually have been fathered by an Irish priest who had a secret relationship with his mother (Senna’s grandmother) and who fathered several other children with her. Senna’s father’s origins are thus even more murky and couched in secrecy than she, or perhaps he, had believed; as she notes: “His is a tale as murky as the Louisiana swamp where he’d been born. He is neither a real Southerner nor a real Northerner. He is neither fully black nor fully Mexican nor fully white. He does not know his father; he has only a Mexican surname and a frayed news clipping showing a Mexican pugilist to possibly explain his light skin and mixed features. . . . Every descriptive statement you can make about my father can be contradicted by the sentence that follows. He is half of everything and certain of nothing” (124). This phrasing seems evocative of a larger state of being, one that Senna describes as somewhat universal to the American story—“It is, I realize now, my mother’s side of the family that is the anomaly. . . . Most Americans have an experience closer to my father’s regarding their ancestry. It is his family story in the end that feels more quintessentially American” (123)—but that we might apply to the (cultural) mulatto and to the post-soul “black” subject in a broader sense, a point to which I will return later.
While the Senna of Where Did You Sleep Last Night? thus seeks—through genealogical research and a kind of wandering pilgrimage South—to understand her father’s individual history as a means of better understanding her own, Caucasia’s central character, Birdie, is forced into a much more literal search for her father, Deck, and beloved older sister, Cole, after the family is separated due to the radical activism of her mother, Sandy. Believing that Sandy has no choice but to go on the run for fear of prosecution by the “Feds,” Sandy and Deck decide that she will take Birdie with her because of Birdie’s racial ambiguity and ability to pass:
The FBI would be looking for a white woman on the lam with her black child. But the fact that I could pass, she explained, with my straight hair, pale skin, my general phenotypic resemblance to the Caucasoid race, would throw them off our trail. The two bodies that had made her stand out in a crowd—made her more than just another white woman—were gone; now it was just the two of us. My body was the key to our going incognito. (128)
Crucially, here, though Birdie’s skin color and hair texture mark a “general phenotypic resemblance” to whiteness, her darker coloring needs to be explained away via the last name her mother chooses for them: “‘We’re gonna have to use our imaginations. You know, make up a history for you. . . . You’ve got a lot of choices, babe. You can be anything, Puerto Rican, Sicilian, Pakistani, Greek. . . . And of course, you could always be Jewish’” (130). While much has been made of Sandy’s claim that “Jews weren’t really white, more like an off-white . . . the closest [Birdie] was going to get to black and still stay white” (140), I am more interested in the options that Sandy raises and then rejects.20 Her easy rejection of her own initial litany of suggestions—Puerto Rican, Sicilian, Pakistani, Greek—cutting off Birdie’s hesitant contribution to the conversation (“Italian, maybe? I like spaghetti”) with the phrase “Jewish is better, I think” (130), begs the question of what makes Jewish “better.”
The “tragic history, kinky hair, good politics” (140) that, Sandy assures her daughter, mean she’s not really passing “for white, more like an off-white” (140) obscure the ways that Jewishness can be understood as both “whiter” and “wealthier” than the more recent immigrant identities Sandy first suggests. As Michele Elam notes, “Jews are persuasively associated with certain American myths of self-invention,” and, indeed, “stand in closest relation to, and as a vehicle of, whiteness in part because they best represent . . . immigrant achievement and assimilation.”21 And the stereotypical and anti-Semitic association of Jewishness with the acquisition of money, what Andrew Killick calls the “most widespread anti-Semitic stereotype,” is the implicit corollary to this association with (white) “achievement” precisely because of the material wealth to which Jews are perceived to have access.22 Indeed, Sherry Ortner has argued that “to be Jewish is to be, in deepest essence, middle class (whether one is ‘in reality’ or not)” precisely because “class comes in racialized and ethnicized packages in America and . . . race and ethnicity are actually crypto-class positions.”23 As such, Judaism is a far more materially appropriate choice for Sandy’s imagined foray across ethnic lines. Indeed, like Sandy’s weight loss and her “auburn hair and horn-rimmed glasses,” Jewishness—or more accurately, her daughter’s supposed half-Jewishness and her own positioning as the widow of the “incredibly brilliant professor of classics” David Goldman (130)—operates as “another piece of her disguise” (139), a way of transforming Sandy from an outlaw associated with (black) radicalism into a “tall, statuesque, blue-blooded woman,” (149), a more privileged and, seemingly by extension, whitened version of herself.
Sandy and Birdie, now renamed Sheila and Jesse Goldman, move first through a women’s commune in upstate New York before settling, for a while, in New Hampshire. Here, as Brenda Boudreau points out, referencing Rebecca Aanerud, Caucasia highlights the “constructed,” contingent, and contextual nature of whiteness, as the “tough,” working-class New Hampshire girls that Birdie/Jesse falls in with are very different from the Boston Brahmin world that Sandy/Sheila has fled.24 Still, class privilege, specifically white class privilege, paves the mother and daughter’s way to acceptance in the town. Sheila secures their rented guesthouse from the wealthy WASP couple the Marshes, a college professor and his wife, by not only dressing the part but proving to them that she “spoke their language” (149), while Jesse’s friendly, potentially sexual association with their teenage son, Nick (“You know Nick Marsh?” [221]), serves as her ticket into the group of “townie girls” led by Mona, a “blond girl” who lives in a trailer (signaling her family’s white, semirural poverty) with her mother, “a young, wiry, chain-smoking factory worker with spiky black hair and a foul mouth” (226).
While I read Birdie and Sandy as having contingent, provisional access to “privilege” at this point in the text, the two do not, to be clear, have a great deal of money—instead, in terms of material resources, they are likely very similar to the trailer-dwelling Mona and her mother. Yet the new arrivals’ class positioning nonetheless diverges from the townies’ significantly, precisely because of Sandy’s knowledge of and ability to engage in codes of elite self-presentation. Sandy uses bodily performances—thinness, conservative “preppy” clothing, and glasses—to signal her status and belonging among the wealthy, such that Walter Marsh privately avers, “I just can’t figure them out. The mother hasn’t a penny to her name, but you get the feeling she should” (194). His wife agrees: “I know what you mean. They’re a funny pair, but they both just reek of class” (194). After overhearing this conversation, Birdie feels “a surge of pride” at their approval, though she knows Sandy would perceive the Marshes as “classist fucks, old-money snobs” (194). Ironically, Sandy, whose class origins are situated squarely within the “old-money” world she now views with such contempt, is able to leverage her insider knowledge of white wealth to gain advantages for herself and her daughter despite their temporary lack of means.
Mother and daughter’s successful performance of (privileged) whiteness has profound effects on Birdie’s sense of self, however. In New Hampshire, the black racial identity that Birdie has tried to cultivate—an identity that, as Ralina Joseph points out, itself was largely performative, based on “commercial signifiers, such as Jergens lotion [and] Jet magazine”—begins to disintegrate.25 Birdie starts to forget what her father looks like; even as the cover story of “David Goldman” becomes clearer in her mind’s eye, she loses her memories of Deck’s face: “First his eyes, then his nose, then his mouth had faded until all I could see was the back of his head, his hands drumming on the steering wheel” (188). There is some irony, here, in Birdie’s only remaining image of Deck being him turned away from her. Just as he never really seemed to see her when Cole was present (56), once she has “passed” into whiteness, her relation to Deck’s blackness becomes one of seeking and never quite finding, of grappling with a sense of identity that proves constantly elusive.
Birdie’s box of “negrobilia”—a collection of racialized objects, some pulled together by Deck and Cole before the family was separated, some added later by Birdie—similarly begins to lose meaning:
At night I stared into my box of negrobilia, fingering the objects—the fisted pick, the Nubian Notion eight-track cassette, the Egyptian necklace, the black Barbie head—and tried to tell myself, “I haven’t forgotten.” But the objects in the box looked to me just like that—objects. They seemed like remnants from the life of some other girl whom I barely knew anymore, anthropological artifacts of some ancient, extinct people, rather than pieces of my past. (190)
These two failures—the failure of her memory and the failure of the individual items in the box of negrobilia to cohere into a narrative of Birdie’s past, let alone of her blackness—accompany her physical and cultural assimilation into whiteness, a moment in which “the name Jesse Goldman no longer felt so funny, so . . . make believe” (190). The objects in her box of negrobilia become meaningless out of their original context, reduced to discrete and unrelated “remnants,” and so, too, do her father’s features, no longer part of a coherent whole but fragments that gradually disappear from her conscious awareness. Indeed, her inability to recall her father’s face speaks to her own subjective disintegration, her intensifying “sense of watching herself from above” (190), looking at her own body “with the detachment of a stranger” (190). It would seem that her father’s physical absence shapes her (in)ability to understand her blackness, as a literal product of his body. Earlier in the text, Birdie notes that while Cole, as the darker-skinned sister, has inherited their father’s “kinky hair and small, round nose” (43), and indeed, that Cole’s “mischievous curls” are “nappier” than her father’s (56), the only bodily traits Birdie appears to have inherited from Deck are unrelated to phenotype: asthma and eczema (113). Still, both of these are chronic illnesses that disproportionately affect African American children, suggesting that Deck has racially marked Birdie, just in “invisible” ways.
What Birdie must grapple with in the narrative, and what Senna’s novel pushes us as readers to consider, is what it means to inhabit a body that does not immediately reveal its racial origins, such that blackness itself—and in particular, the individual subject’s relationship to racial vulnerability as signaled by his or her phenotype, what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the “tenacious gravity” of blackness—seems to disappear, or perhaps to fall silent.26 What steps into this silence, into the lack of visual evidence of the body’s interior (pace Elizabeth Alexander) racial meaning, is whiteness. As Senna notes in an early interview, “What’s become clear to me through my racial trials and tribulations is that at some point you do make a choice, not between white and black but between silence and speech. Do you let your body talk for you or do you speak for yourself?”27 Senna’s words not only equate whiteness with silence, and blackness with speech, but link silence to the white-skinned black body. While other texts examined throughout this book tend to understand the black body as a site of racial articulation, often with the enunciatory power to ground an otherwise shifting, materially privileged subject within blackness, Caucasia contends with a black body that misspeaks, and thereby silences, its racial investments. This silencing—and the concomitant whitewashing of her identity that comes with it—seems to trouble Birdie not simply because she is not allowed to belong to blackness, and to the black people she loves, but because of the property claims of whiteness within which she is enfolded instead.
In Caucasia, as in Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, so much of what “whiteness” is—in particular, the ancestral whiteness that stakes its claim on Birdie within and through her own body—is, or is situated within, material privilege. This is most directly articulated in the text through the character of Birdie’s maternal grandmother, Penelope Lodge, who “traced her family line back to Cotton Mather, the Puritan prosecutor in the Salem witch trials” (99), and who “was proud of the Mather link and liked to remind [Birdie] of [her] heritage every time [she] came over” (100). Cole, whose black appearance severs her from Penelope’s fantasy of a pure lineage, is never included in these episodes, despite the fact that Penelope is Cole’s grandmother too: “I thought Cole was the lucky one because she was allowed to stay locked in the guest room watching television while I had to sit under the old lady’s scrutiny, hands folded on my lap, listening to her tell me stories about how good my blood was” (100). The violence of this exclusion is not lost on Birdie, and when she returns to her grandmother’s house several years later, seeking money so that she can travel to California to find Deck and Cole, she explodes with contempt for Penelope’s racism:
You and all your ancestors are the tragedies. Not me. You walk around pretending to be so liberal and civilized in this big old house, but you’re just as bad as the rest of them. This whole world—it’s based on lies. No wonder my mother left. I mean, it stinks. (365)
Echoing Walker’s “I am not tragic,” Birdie here speaks back to the racial condescension that leads her grandmother to describe Deck and Sandy’s union, and the mixed-race black children it produced, as “tragedy in the making” (365).
Birdie’s internal dialogue continues to indict Penelope precisely for the old woman’s bigoted inability to get beyond the body and the “whiteness” she believes she sees in Birdie’s face: “My grandmother had always loved me more than my sister. Or maybe it wasn’t me she loved, but rather my face, my skin, my hair, and my bones, because they resembled her own. . . . She believed that the face was a mirror of the soul. She believed, deep down, that the race my face reflected made me superior. Such a simple, comforting myth to live by” (366). In offering this critique, Birdie speaks truth to power; the text reminds us of the grotesque contours of a belief system that enables Penelope to embrace one granddaughter on the basis of appearance while rejecting the other entirely on the same basis (“She had always referred to Cole as ‘your sister’ and my father as ‘your father,’ as if she couldn’t bear to say their names, couldn’t bear to admit their relation to her” [367]). Yet Penelope’s immediate response to Birdie is unsatisfying; instead of withdrawing under the assault of Birdie’s words or snapping back in mutual confrontation, she peers at Birdie, “genuinely concerned” (366), and recognizes the girl’s feverish and weakened state: “You’re sick. I should have seen it. You’re sick” (366). While Birdie is indeed sick, “shaking and sweating” (365), this reading of her body by her grandmother still suggests that Penelope understands Birdie’s speech as a kind of delirium. She is “sick,” meaning not herself, not responsible for her resistant words and actions. Not surprisingly, Birdie rejects Penelope’s pity, which seems to be just another way of staking claim on her “white” (read: fragile, innocent, protected) body.
Whiteness asserts its claim on Birdie’s body at other points throughout the text, again in ways that highlight false narratives of white innocence and fragility while downplaying or ignoring the vulnerability of black bodies in proximity. In one instance, Sandy tearfully lectures Birdie, after another young girl’s abduction and death in the area, not to go into Roxbury’s Franklin Park alone, because “there are perverts, crazies, dirty old men, and they want little girls like you” (66). Even at her young age, it strikes Birdie as “odd” that Sandy “hadn’t warned Cole not to go to the park, just [her]” (67). The text lingers over and emphasizes Sandy’s words, “Girls like you,” a phrase that seems to apply only to Birdie, presumably because of her noticeable physical resemblance to the victim, “Luce Rivera,” who is not described in the text except as “looking unsuspecting and utterly pure” (66). The irony of Sandy’s warning to Birdie—and a clear parallel or through line between Sandy’s unconscious racism and that of her mother, Penelope—is that Penelope echoes these sentiments when she discovers Sandy is sending the girls to Nkrumah, the Black Power school in Roxbury: “It’s crazy, child abuse, to send your child into a neighborhood like that. She could be robbed or killed or anything!” (106). And like Sandy, who fails to warn her visibly “black” daughter, Cole, of the dangers of “perverts, crazies, dirty old men,” Penelope’s use of the singular “child” makes clear that Birdie is the only one whose attendance at Nkrumah constitutes abuse, precisely because of Birdie’s “whiteness.” As Birdie adds, “I noticed she hadn’t asked about Cole. She didn’t care what kind of school Cole was going to” (106). Cole’s visibly marked “black” body devalues her and vacates any notion of her vulnerability, as a preteen girl, to sexual predators, even as Birdie’s “white” body takes on a kind of hyper-value as potential victim.
A prior scene actually takes this racial logic to its most extreme conclusion, as Deck and Birdie are accosted by two police officers as they enjoy an afternoon together in the park while Cole is at home, sick. Despite both Birdie’s and Deck’s insistence that they are father and daughter, the police refuse to believe them, even pulling Birdie aside to say, “You can tell us kiddie. He can’t hurt you here. You’re safe now. Did the man touch you funny?” (61). What seems crucial to me upon reading this scene—more, even, than the way the text highlights Deck’s vulnerability in this moment, his palpable fear of the police officers (60), his fruitless invocation of his status as tenured professor at Boston University—is the presence of an “older, well-dressed” white couple, walking a small gray terrier, the woman’s hair “silvery blond,” the man “wearing a trench coat and holding a cane” (59). This couple, revealed even in these minute details (leisure clothing that tends toward formal, purebred dog) to be upper class, watch Birdie and Deck long before the police get involved; indeed, they appear to have alerted the officers themselves to Deck’s potential “crime”:
When I tilted my head slightly to the side, I saw again that strange couple with their gray terrier, pointing at me. I didn’t move, just watched it happen with a lazy interest. They were talking to two men in uniform, the police on their beat, and then the four of them were trudging across the grass in our direction. (59)
In other words, the hand of white racial and class privilege has stepped in to turn the attention of the state toward a black body in need of disciplining and a contiguous “white” body in need of protection. The moment is telling in its revelation of whom, or whose interests, police actually serve. Thus even when the law is unable to act—since Birdie will not confirm that Deck “touched her funny,” will only reassert, however meekly, that he is her father, the police officers eventually desist—“the old couple didn’t leave” (61). Instead, their surveillance continues until Deck and Birdie leave the park: “As we walked the distance across the grass to our car, I turned to see them still watching us” (61).
Birdie’s instinct, partially stifled by her father, is to gesture rudely and shout at the couple; ultimately, her reaction speaks to the brutality of the mundane yet violative experience of being constantly watched, what Simone Browne calls “the facticity of surveillance in black life.”28 This intrusion destroys a rare moment of father–daughter connection and transforms Birdie and her father from relaxed and content with each other’s company to fearful and “tense,” all in the name of protecting an idea of whiteness as “utterly pure”—an idea that attaches to her body, because of her skin color. This is, of course, the violence that buttresses whiteness, that is necessary to enforce white racial and class privilege, a requirement of whiteness that Cheryl Harris calls the “absolute right to exclude.” As Harris notes, “‘whiteness’ . . . is an ideological proposition imposed through subordination,” specifically “the exclusion and subordination of Blacks.”29
Throughout Caucasia, even as she passes for white in New Hampshire, Birdie remains aware of this violence and refuses to embrace it. When I teach Caucasia and ask students how they read her character’s racial identification, a significant number of students (from across racial and ethnic origin spectra) insist that Birdie identifies as “both black and white,” despite the recurrence of moments like this one in the text, in which Birdie deliberately resists “whiteness” and its repeated claims on her body. Birdie’s active resistance to whiteness reflects what Joseph calls “Caucasia’s vehement argument . . . against the idea of black transcendence,” instead insisting upon Birdie’s continued relationship to blackness.30 Such instances of resistance, which unfold with regularity in Caucasia, might be read as what I called, in chapter 1, black bodily return, the emergence of the body in a privileged context as a means of resisting that context and reasserting blackness. In Birdie’s case, however, her white-appearing body complicates the possibility of her flesh alone offering such resistance—instead, Birdie’s resistance to whiteness, and to privilege, is most legible when coupled with her voice.
There are moments, for instance, when Birdie’s body seems almost involuntarily to rebel in the face of racist assault, as when she begins to wheeze asthmatically (recall her inheritance of asthma from her father) after her neighbor-turned-crush Nick Marsh tells her a racist joke (205). She reacts similarly, “breathing in little asthmatic wheezes” when her white girlfriend Mona wonders aloud if “black guys . . . got big dicks, like everybody says” (248). She also, in this moment, feels herself “floating” (248) above the scene, in another instance of dis-integration that marks her refusal to accept “Jesse Goldman” as the truth of her identity—even as her embodied performance of “Jesse” becomes more and more real. Yet other moments signal this refusal of privilege more directly, as when Birdie not only rejects whiteness but forcefully, defiantly claims blackness. For instance, when Sandy’s boyfriend Jim, after being let in on their secret, treats her father’s existence with a condescension befitting his position as a white man who believes (after time spent living in Jamaica) that he knows and has mastered blackness—“‘And yes’—he sighed, as if he were speaking to a small child—‘I know your father is black. I know everything, kiddo’” (271)—Birdie retorts, “Oh, you do know everything? That my father’s black? I feel so much better now. Did you know I was black too?” (272).
Indeed, Birdie’s vocal excoriation of her grandmother’s racial privilege near the novel’s climax is explicitly applied, in the text, to all of the central white characters: “The words were aimed at my grandmother, but also at my mother, Jim, Mona, and the whole state of New Hampshire” (365). This proud resistance to whiteness marks Birdie as a “black” subject and is a moment of empowerment for her character even as her body is ready to collapse from illness. Indeed, Birdie’s physical weakness in the scene, a weakness that her grandmother uses as pretext to dismiss her anger, might instead be understood as a racializing gesture or, again, a black bodily return, a moment when Birdie’s blackness finds expression through her body’s failure—insofar as “blackness” can be understood as a site of particular power because of its vulnerability, its proximity to a fragility that is truly human. I am thinking here of both Darieck Scott’s analysis of “a black power that theorizes from, not against, the special intimacy of blackness with abjection, humiliation, defeat” and Coates’s more recent words to his son, in Between the World and Me: “Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe themselves white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. . . . You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”31 Birdie’s physical weakness in the moment of her resistant speech might thus be read as a redoubling of her black voice.
Before I turn to a conclusion, then, I want to consider another, final moment in the novel that signals Birdie’s explicit resistance to whiteness, a moment when whiteness, as it so often does in this text, represents a specious narrative of innocence as well as a violent sense of entitlement (entitlement, especially, to the disciplining and compliance of black bodies). Shortly before Birdie finds the courage to flee New Hampshire in search of Cole, Jim takes Sandy, Birdie, and Birdie’s friend Mona on a pleasure trip to New York City. Early on, while waiting with Mona in front of a museum, Birdie encounters a group of “black and Puerto Rican teenagers” dancing to “some kind of talking music” (read: hip-hop) that she hadn’t heard in the six years she’d been away from the urban Northeast, an encounter that prompts her to trail “a few steps behind [her] mother, Jim, and Mona” on their way to lunch, “fantasizing for a moment that [she] didn’t know them, that they were strangers” (262).
This subtle distancing becomes more extreme when Jim gets lost in New Haven the next night, on a failed quest to “show [Birdie’s] mother a landmark near Yale, the school he had dropped out of once upon a time” (262). Jim circles “the same set of blocks four times,” and one member of a “huddle of teenagers . . . sixteen or seventeen, three black kids” that they pass hurls a rock at the car’s window, leaving “a small indentation, like a pellet wound” (262). Jim’s reaction is swift outrage:
Jim was struggling to free himself from his seat belt. He was breathing heavily.
My mother said, “What the hell are you doing? Just drive, idiot.”
“No way,” Jim said, wagging his finger close to her face. “I’m not taking that from a bunch of little fucking—” He didn’t finish his sentence. He was out of the car then and storming toward the boys on the corner, with his hands on his hips. My mother got out of the car and stood at the side, watching. She ran a hand through her hair and cursed under her breath, “Oh, Jesus, he’s stupid.”
Mona had gone pale. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Mrs. Goldman,” she called to my mother, “what’s he gonna do? Those niggers are gonna kill him.”
I punched Mona’s shoulder hard and hissed, “Shut the fuck up. What do you know?” The reaction had been automatic, and I stared at my balled fist now, as if it were somebody else’s. Mona gaped at me, open-mouthed, stunned. Then her face crumpled into a cry. (263)
In this moment in the car, as Jim, emboldened by a sense of (white) entitlement, storms off to confront the black boys, Mona and Birdie enact a kind of mirroring of the conflict taking place outside on the street. Mona figuratively finishes Jim’s aborted sentence, by filling in the “niggers” to which he does not give voice; in response, Birdie hits her, a reflexive moment of retaliation for Mona’s racism that triggers Mona’s tears.
On the street, Jim succumbs to a parallel shock and dissolution when his own racist assault is met with similar resistance, down to the punch:
“Who the fuck cracked my windshield?” Jim bellowed. “’Cuz you’re going to pay for it. Now speak up!”
“Can you believe this clown?” I heard one of the kids say.
A stocky boy with braids walked up and stood close to Jim so that they were face-to-face. “Why don’t you go home, man? You’re not in your neighborhood now. Take your little wife and your little girls and get the fuck out.”
I thought it was pretty sound advice. But Jim shoved the kid so that he stumbled into his friends, who caught him. Then I heard Jim say, “Listen, kid, don’t tell me where I belong. I used to live in Jamaica.”
There was laughter from the group, and it sounded almost jolly. But suddenly a punch was thrown. I don’t know which of the kids did it, but I saw Jim hurtling backward and falling heavily onto the pavement. (263–64)
Ignoring the warning from one of the kids that his assumed racial privilege, the privilege to control and discipline their black bodies, is limited in this unfamiliar space, a place where he is not only lost but unwelcome (“You’re not in your neighborhood now”), Jim asserts his right, as a white man, to colonize black spaces with his presence. His insistence on not being told “where [he] belong[s]” speaks to his belief that he can and should be allowed to move freely anywhere in the world, irrespective of whether he is welcomed by the “natives.” His reference to Jamaica, a black nation with a specific history of exploitation by whites for marijuana-fueled leisure, makes this entitled position clear, and the boys’ laughter in response, which Birdie at first mistakes for gaiety, reflects their derision and contempt for Jim’s condescension.32
What most interests me about this scene is Birdie’s reaction to Jim’s comeuppance at the boys’ hands: “I slid low in the seat. I was scared, but also embarrassed. Jim looked like a fool lying there, holding his face and groaning. I didn’t want the teenagers to think I belonged with these white people in the car” (264). This strikes me as a provocative moment for a number of reasons. For one, the text is unclear on how Birdie’s body figures into her embarrassment. Would she feel the same shame in a visibly “black” body, a body that could easily be identified as different from the “white people in the car,” or is her mere proximity to Jim’s foolhardiness the central issue? Clearly, seeing the black boys, Birdie identifies with them, not with Mona and Jim—as Birdie’s narration goes on to offer, “it struck me how little I felt toward Mona and Jim . . . how easily they could become cowering white folks, nothing more, nothing less” (264). But Sandy’s actions in the remainder of the scene suggest something of another potential role for whiteness and another way Birdie’s character might relate to it, without embarrassment. I quote the passage at some length:
But unlike [Mona and Jim], my mother didn’t seem frightened at all. She was back to her old self as she jumped out, stormed up to the teenagers, and dragged Jim to his feet. She said as she led Jim roughly to the car, “All right now. The fun’s over. Enough of this silliness.” The kids were still mumbling obscenities at Jim, but appeared satisfied with the one blow. They didn’t seem to know what to make of my mother, this tall white lady who didn’t behave in the least bit ruffled by their bravado. She didn’t say two words to them.
She just shoved Jim into the passenger side, got in the driver’s seat, and took off. . . .
Jim cradled his face in his hands, and only when we were well on our way north did he look up. He glanced back at Mona and me. His top lip was cracked down the middle and was beginning to bleed.
“I swear, I try to be liberal,” he said to no one in particular. “I try really, really hard. But when you meet fucking punks like that, you start to wonder. I mean, Jesus, what did we do to deserve that? We’re on their side, and they don’t even know it.”
My mother turned to him. She wore an expression of extreme disgust. She stared at him for a minute. Then she shouted, “You didn’t have to get out of the car, Jim. How idiotic was that? Trying to be a big man for a little crack in the window. They were children. Teenagers. Pranksters. I swear, sometimes your honky ass—”
She ate the words she was on the verge of saying and turned back to the road.
But Jim had heard enough. His face was the deepest crimson I had ever seen it. “What did you just say? My ‘honky ass’? Who were you rooting for, anyway? Those ghetto thugs, or me? I mean, fuck, Sheila. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.” (264–65)
Clearly, Sandy in this moment is not “white,” not in the way that Mona and Jim are. She evidences not a foolish bravado born of entitlement but actual bravery—calm in the face of potential disaster. She rescues Jim from his own idiocy, navigates the neighborhood that he could not, quickly finds the freeway entrance that had eluded him (265), and vocally resists his narrative of the black “punks” and “thugs” who refused to submit to his (white) authority.33 And her evident disgust for Jim’s thinly disguised “liberal” racism, evidenced in the epithet “honky,” also argues for reading her as a kind of race traitor in this moment. Even Jim’s “Who were you rooting for, anyway?” response suggests that Sandy is not properly aligned with the “side” of whiteness. It is interesting, then, that Birdie describes Sandy here as “back to her old self.” Her behavior recalls that of the fat, “wild” Sandy who had rejected her blue-blooded ancestry to marry a black man and work as a radical activist. Indeed, despite Sandy’s failures as a parent, her seeming inability to understand Birdie’s racial consciousness and frequent reference to only Cole as her “black child” (“It was as if my mother believed that Cole and I were so different. As if she believed I was white, believed I was Jesse” [275]), Sandy is the novel’s only character that suggests any redeeming possibilities for whiteness—although these possibilities exist only as that whiteness actively resists its own hegemonic power.
Yet Birdie, rather than personally embracing even this version of whiteness, as we might expect her to do as a mixed-race subject, instead continues until the conclusion of the novel to understand herself as black, or more accurately, as simultaneously black and biracial. As she looks at another biracial child on a school bus in the final pages of the book, Birdie’s words to describe her—“She was black like me, a mixed girl” (413)—are telling. This simultaneity, the both/and of “black” and “mixed,” replaces expected notions of black/white biracial self-identification, which assume the mixed body will understand itself to be “black and white.”34 In this characterization of Birdie’s racial identity, Senna’s novel recalls Naomi Pabst’s analysis of mixedness as a category of difference within blackness, like gender and sexuality, ethnicity/national origin—or class.35 Reconceptualizing mixedness as a subjectivity that exists within blackness deescalates questions of racial authenticity, particularly as these are tied to specious ideas about racial biology and the “white blood” circulating within the mixed subject that necessarily claims her away from one sort of racial property, Hartman’s black afterlife of property, in order to place her body under the covering protection of another, very different property interest. This sort of property, or perhaps more accurately this set of properties, are those that, via violent exclusion, inhere in “whiteness.” And particularly for a pale-skinned mixed body such as Birdie’s, whiteness as property remains perpetually at the ready to make its claim on her.36 That the character speaks back to this claim in her particular way in the text, a way that defies narrow notions of biological mixture and instead remains concerned with black interiority, allows us to think more deeply about the power within structures of racial identity, particularly for the “mulatto” subject.
By returning to the outmoded word “mulatto” here, I mean to point us back to Ellis’s concept of the “cultural mulatto” by way of reaching toward a conclusion. Where do Walker, Senna, and the questions of whiteness, blackness, and material privilege raised in their texts leave us in understanding the post-soul black subject? It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to understand only the characters in other texts touched upon in this book—Bertrand Milworth in He Sleeps, J. in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, Monk Ellison in Erasure—as, specifically, cultural mulattoes, given that in each case both of their parents identify, and are identified, as black. But if race is “just about the biggest cultural construct there is,” then wouldn’t Walker, and Senna’s Birdie, also be “cultural” mulattoes? Indeed, Birdie’s rejection of the conventional understanding of mixed-race as “white and black” in favor of “black and mixed” suggests that the most crucial figure in the phrase “cultural mulatto” is not “mulatto” but indeed, “cultural.” If, as Patricia Williams argues, “In the United States, being ‘black’ virtually always means some mixture of African, Native American, and European ancestry”—and it is worth noting here, quiet as it’s kept, that being “white” in the United States often does too—then not only should the very notion of the biological mulatto lose coherence during any conversation in which the constructedness of race has been acknowledged, but the question of how we understand race at all should attend more closely to who or what one claims than to the body’s meaning.37
The fact that it often does not, that we not only still rely upon biology in our consideration of race but also invoke it even in the terms—like “cultural mulatto”—meant to dismantle its power, suggests that even after questions of cultural authenticity and racial belonging have presumably been resolved, the specter of the “authentically” raced body may haunt us. And because class privilege is operationalized in the racial body, because whiteness-as-property has material consequences even for black people whose lived experiences are shaped, as well, by the afterlives of (chattel) property, the question of which bodies belong to blackness is always, at least in part, a question informed by our sometimes shifting and provisional class performances, and one that speaks to larger moments of subjective incoherence.
“Half of everything and certain of nothing”—Senna is hardly the first to make an argument about the essentially mixed or multiracial, “mongrelized” American national identity, and it seems no coincidence that what makes her father’s story “quintessentially American” is both the known and unknowable details of racial mixture and the instability, secrecy, and fundamental unknowability of the subject/self. We might consider how and why this sense of unknowability attaches to a specifically American context and whether—or how—the resultant complexities of identity are both bound by and excessive to the figurative and literal spaces of the United States. In the next chapter, I employ the theoretical frame of black geography to consider two other turn-of-the-twenty-first-century post-soul narratives, novels that depict the gendered complexities of race and class abroad. The contrasting backdrops of, on the one hand, sub-Saharan Africa and, on the other, Western Europe provide particularly dramatic foils for these two works’ exploration of privileged subjects in non-U.S. contexts and the ways that the black (American) and bourgeois dilemma might, in fact, travel.