My initial reaction before I began reading this was concern about reading a book about writing a book, especially one that bills itself as a black comedy. Some of the cheap shots did make me uncomfortable. Ultimately it’s much more complicated than that, taking comedic aim at the publishing world, academia, the television industry, while exploring aspects of dealing with racial identity. It’s worth stating that although race is a social construct because humans are all one race, it’s a hugely consequential construct and only those in the majority can pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Jane, the writer, focuses on people whose parents are different races, and has adopted the term mulatto, an old offensive term, rather than biracial, as that old term is more precise. Jane is referring to a mix of Black and White people, while she says “Biracial could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian.”
Jane’s second book was to be her ticket to middle class comfort through tenure and book sales. Her husband Lenny was a painter whose work would never sell; they have two young children, Ruby, and Finn. They move from one cheap apartment to the next in LA until they land a house-sitting gig for an old friend who made it big in TV just at the time Jane has a sabbatical. Meanwhile her book has grown into what Lenny calls “Mulatto War and Peace” and her ten-year-long project is unequivocally rejected by her agent. Jane lies about this to Lenny and secretly turns to working on a television script which she doesn’t seem to understand is on spec.
In her exploration of race Jane learns about Melungeons, “mixed race” people from the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. That made me think of our college friend from East Tennessee who assumed he was Melungeon, given his mother’s maiden name and where her family was from.
The author references “Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter from Paris, where he came up with the mathematical equation showing how many generations it takes to make a mulatto white.” How is it I was not conscious of this, living as I do in Charlottesville? He certainly would have been interested in the question; the enslaved Sally Hemmings was his late wife’s half sister and he later had children with her.
Jane ignored Lenny’s interest in moving to Japan. She says
…Black people who left the country in their desperate quest to “escape the American obsession with race” only became more obsessed with race themselves. Or rather, became obsessed with not being obsessed with race. Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an “out damn spot” situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.
There seems to be a distinction between Black people who are biracial and those who are not; that distinction looks like class differences. Jane’s parents were educated and activists, did not make much money and split up. Jane says she did not envy her White childhood friend’s whiteness, just her money. Lenny grew up in an upper middle class family but has chosen a path that is not lucrative.
I seem to be crashing around here rather than writing cogently about this complicated book. I will end here by saying the end of the book was more satisfying than I thought would be possible. And I acknowledge that the author has made me think about some complicated, important matters.
Danzy Senna, Colored Television, Riverhead Books, 2024, 276 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.