interracial memoir

In the end perhaps it is our errors, our failures, even more than our triumphs, that make us who we are. Maybe it is the failed marriages and the failed revolutions- if we do survive them- that forge our character and core identity. The fetus grow, impervious to the circumstances that conceived it. The fetus grow, oblivious to the ambivalence and calamity that await its birth.

Recently I read Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? I really love literary biographies; I usually can’t put them down.  And this one was no exception.  Perhaps because I admire writers so much and then learning some intimate details about their lives and history and how they came to be is like eavesdropping on a conversation your parents didn’t want you to hear.  But it is also deeper than that. I read biographies with envy too, wishing I had such detailed personal history.  Wishing I could re-trace the paths of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents.  Wishing I knew my racial past.  The truth of it, not just what my imagination tells me.  My adoptive parents’ histories are part of my personal narrative, but they are only a fraction of my story.  Reading Where Did You Sleep Last Night? nearly fell in the realm of fantasy for me.  Senna tells the story of her white blue blood mother and her black Southern father, their failed relationship, their family history and Senna’s own struggle to understand her family and cultural identity.  She also tells a little about her siblings and her current family – her husband (writer Percival Everett) and their young son.  Many mixed race (or bi-cultural) people will find this story fascinating: she explains how her parents came together in a time when mixed marriages – particularly black-white – were uncommon and only recently legal in the United States.  After her parents split up, Senna lived with her white mother and spent much of her time in white environments.  She is a very light-skinned woman and in fact was, is, often mistaken for white.  She describes the hostility she has encountered being out with her father; people often saw them for a couple, an older black man with a young “white” woman.  On her mother’s side, Senna had very little research to do. Many of her mother’s ancestors were prominent Boston citizens who had written at length about their family history, a history that includes a slave-owing past. Her father’s family history is difficult to uncover and many questions are left unanswered.  Much of the book describes Senna’s quest, with her father’s help, to learn the truth about her father’s mother and father.  Was Senna’s paternal grandfather an Irish American priest or a Mexican boxer? Her paternal grandmother was a talented and educated but highly secretive woman.  Senna discovers her father has a long lost half-sibling who was given up for adoption.  The details of this book are fascinating. Even more interesting are the author’s personal revelations: her difficult relationship with her father, her reaction and the reaction of friends to the light complexion of her infant son, the family dynamic when all her siblings and their spouses and children gather for Christmas.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Senna’s father, who spent most of his life engaged in racial politics as a writer and father, now lives in a white community, married to a Canadian in New Brunswick.  Senna writes: “In the Canadian Maritimes, [my father] is not just the only black man at the dinner party.  He is the only black man in the world.”  There are, of course, significant black communities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, but apparently her father does not live anywhere near one.

Finally, I must confess that it was not until after I’d finished the book that I realized the significance of the title.  I was unfamiliar with this Leadbelly song: