Caucasia

“Before I ever saw myself, I saw my sister. When I was still too small for mirrors, I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence.” 

The beginning of Chapter 1 sets up one of the novel’s main premises, which is how Birdie identifies with her older sister Cole. Only when they attend school for the first time does Birdie realize that people perceive them as racially different. Their difference is crucial to their parents’ decision to split them up—Cole with their black father and Birdie with their white mother—and to Birdie’s identity conflict. 

“The Elemenos, she said, could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again. She said they were a shifting people, constantly changing their form, color, pattern, in a quest for invisibility.” 

The girls’ secret language includes a mythos of color-shifting people—a metaphor for Birdie’s ability to blend in with her surroundings. Like chameleons, the Elemenos use their color-shifting ability as a survival mechanism. This implies that remaining visible is dangerous. Birdie questions what kind of life she will lead if survival means having to disappear (7). The novel seeks to answer this philosophical question.

“My only proof that they had even been married was a snapshot I found stuck inside my father’s huge encyclopedia. It marked the page that delineated the three racial phenotypes of the world—Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid.” 

There is clear symbolism in having Sandy and Deck’s only wedding photo placed next to a page that lists different racial phenotypes. One of the novel’s central themes is that, even though race is a social construct, it is still a force that shapes people’s lives. Birdie’s failure to fit into these phenotypic categories is the source of all her difficulties in the novel. 

“She told me she had wondered about this fact: Why were Negroes so neat and tidy compared to white people? She had noticed this more than once. She had no particular interest in Negroes at this time—not in them or their cause. Just a sense that they were a mysterious race, full of secrets that the white world would probably never glimpse.” 

Sandy’s desires at the beginning of the novel are to help the black cause and experience black culture from the inside. When she meets Deck, black people are still “mysterious” to her. Her main motivation in marrying Deck, it seems, is to understand that mystery. Once she demystifies him and his people, Sandy returns to a life in a white community and arguably cares more about her own persecution than about the results of her activism. 

“Now that I had been knighted black by Maria, and pretty by Ali, the rest of the school saw me in a new light. But I never lost the anxiety, a gnawing in my bowels, a fear that at any moment I would be told it was all a big joke.” 

This passage is key for understanding the dynamics of Birdie’s passing and how it affects her psychology. The novel focuses on her mother’s paranoia, but Birdie lives with the anxiety of being an imposter. Thus, she can never relax, always figuratively looking over her shoulder, lest she drop her guard and reveal her true self. 

“She had found her island of anonymity, silence, contemplation, a rare moment where she was cut off from both Cambridge and Roxbury and was responsible for only herself and, of course, me. She told me at night, […] that she dreaded the melting of the snow, that day when the world would start up again, beckoning her to its aid.” 

During the snowstorm that precedes the family’s separation, each side of the family gets to experience a five-day period without the other. During this time Cole realizes she wants Carmen as a mother figure, and Sandy realizes she wants to leave her current life. This passage provides added perspective for Sandy’s motivation that is not about race but about a woman seeking to be free from her overwhelming responsibilities as a caregiver. 

“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.” 

After Birdie and Sandy move to New Hampshire, Sandy tells Birdie that survival rests on her ability to pass. Sandy’s transformation includes changing her name and backstory, dying her hair and losing weight, but she does not have to change her race. Sandy does not seem to understand the anxiety her reliance on Birdie creates, even after Birdie runs away. 

“‘We have a son a little older than you,’ he said. Then, with a knowing smile at my mother, he added, ‘He goes to boarding school, though. Exeter. I mean, the schools here are great till the kids reach a certain age. Then the locals start acting like locals, if you know what I mean. Chewing tobacco, loitering. Trailah pahk cultcha,’ he said, imitating the New Hampshire accent.’” 

Mr. Marsh assumes Sheila is part of his own class and shares his views about the locals. This passage is significant because although Birdie befriends Nicholas and becomes closer to the Marshes, the longer she stays in New Hampshire, the more she becomes part of the local culture. This passage is ironic, too, because Nicholas rebels against his parents’ expectations, gets kicked out of Exeter, and returns to the town, presumably for good.  

“I used to think that if I could just learn to cornrow, she would stay mine. Remember the way her hair looked that first time she got it done, at Danny’s His and Hers, so tight and gold and pretty? She was a gorgeous child, wasn’t she?” 

In this passage, Sandy reveals her feeling of inadequacy as a mother to Cole. Girls often learn beauty and grooming practices from their mothers, and as a white woman, Sandy cannot help Cole in that way, which weakens their bond. Sandy refers to Cole in the past tense, which could imply that she does not expect to see her again. 

“There was one particularly strange shop at the edge of town that never seemed to get any business, Hans’s Toy Shop and Doll Hospital. In the front window was a sad little display that included a G.I. Joe doll posed holding his gun pointed at the outside world; a battery-operated monkey with his cymbals poised to crash together; and a huge, black baby doll who wore only diapers and a T-shirt that said ‘Jackson’ across the front.” 

“There was one particularly strange shop at the edge of town that never seemed to get any business, Hans’s Toy Shop and Doll Hospital. In the front window was a sad little display that included a G.I. Joe doll posed holding his gun pointed at the outside world; a battery-operated monkey with his cymbals poised to crash together; and a huge, black baby doll who wore only diapers and a T-shirt that said ‘Jackson’ across the front.” 

“I used to fantasize that once I got back to Boston, I would write it up as a report to hand in to the Nkrumah School. I even thought up a series of potential titles for my report. ‘What White People Say When They Think They’re Alone’ ‘Honkified Meanderings: Notes from the Underground’ Or something more casual and funky—'Let Me Tell Ya ’bout Dem White Folks.’” 

In New Hampshire, Birdie tries to see her racial experience through an anthropological lens, like her father. The titles of her imaginary reports convey both the absurdity and pain of her situation. The first title, “What White People Say When They Think They’re Alone,” is the most telling because it refers to her discomfort at witnessing casual racism on a regular basis. Because she is passing, she cannot speak out against these comments. The passage harkens back to the theme of invisibility as the price of survival. 

“Carmen used to say to my sister that white boys were trouble. She said they might seem nice at first, but they can never forget your color. It’ll come up sooner or later, and then you’ll see that they always saw you as a black chick—a curiosity, a dabble in difference—nothing more.” 

This passage comes directly after Nicholas described his experience with a black prostitute in Amsterdam, saying that black girls are supposedly “good.” Nicholas sees Birdie as exotic, though not black, and Birdie realizes that if he knew the truth, he would become bored with her after satiating his curiosity. It also underscores the impossibility of Birdie having a relationship with a white boy in New Hampshire unless she continues to pass.

“‘Okay, Mum. I got it. I’m the daughter of a dead Jewish intellectual. My name’s Jesse Goldman. I never heard of anyone called Deck or Cole Lee, and we never lived in Boston and you never—’ I felt her hand slap my mouth, clamping it tight. A stinging on my lips. I wondered if there’d be a mark in the morning. I had said the names.” 

The night before Birdie’s first day of school, her mother reminds her that she needs to stick to her cover story. Sandy’s violent reaction to Birdie’s mention of her real family shows that, even when it is just the two of them, Sandy cannot tolerate the coexistence of their old life with their new one. 

“[T]he Bruce Springsteen poster over my desk, the horse calendar by the window, the makeup and perfume and blow-dryer cluttering the top of the dresser—the objects suddenly unfamiliar, like props. I slipped out of bed and fetched the box of negrobilia from the top of my closet.” 

One of Senna’s stylistic methods is her use of cultural artifacts to signify difference. This technique allows her to provide commentary on race without doing so directly, which can become heavy-handed. Most of the direct comments about race are dialogue, along with Birdie’s observations. By juxtaposing white and black cultural objects, Senna shows Birdie’s struggle between her two worlds. 

“Coming into New York was like being brought back to civilization after years on a desert island. I scrutinized the city people with a kind of hunger, eating up their wild styles and furious features, faces that unearthed some part of me that had been buried for so long.” 

Evoking place details is another way Senna signifies racial boundaries. This method reveals a subtext of segregation, the fact that racially different bodies occupy separate spaces. Places in which racial mixing occurs, like Dot’s communal house or her spiritual center, are seen as outliers, and exist on society’s fringes.

“‘See, baby, white boys have a primitive fixation on black men,’ he had told Cole, […]. ‘They envy black men and despise them and lust after them all at once. They want to be them, but first they have to destroy them.’ He had referred to black men as ‘them.’ He never brought himself into any of his theories. It was always about somebody else.”

Birdie recalls this conversation between Deck and Cole after Jim gets into a fight with the black teenagers in New York. It describes the duality of white men’s feeling that black men are mysterious and dangerous at the same time. The passage is also notable because it reveals Deck’s remove from his racial theories, as if he does not fit into a category. His usage of “they” speaks to his own identity struggle and fixation on race

“It was a strange solace I found at Mona’s. Even as she and her mother and Dennis referred constantly to niggers and spies [sic] and dykes and gooks, things seemed clearer there.” 

Another narrative technique Senna uses is to give Birdie limited insight into her motivation. In this passage, Birdie describes enjoying spending time around Mona’s racist family. She acknowledges that the space holds a certain clarity for her, but she does expand on why, or what exactly “clarity” means. 

“I wondered, as I passed the clear abandoned lake—silver, still, silent—if I too would forever be fleeing in the dark, abandoning parts of myself that I no longer wanted, in search of some part that had escaped me. Killing one girl in order to let the other one free.” 

This eerie, atmospheric passage shows how a scene’s setting reflects Birdie’s inner struggles. The descriptor “abandoned” occurs twice—in relation to the lake and in relation to Birdie. Her reference to “killing one girl” recalls Luce Rivera in Chapter 3, the murdered girl that Birdie’s classmates told her she resembled. In that chapter, her classmates called her Luce’s ghost, and here, she feels as if she is becoming one.

“My father had told me once that those lines were racial codes. He said green led to Jews in Brookline and Newton. Red to Cambridge Wasps. The blue and the purple to the suburbs, where the Irish and Italian townies lived. And the orange line, he had told me, led to Chocolate City.” 

When Birdie returns to Boston, she feels alienated from the city that she remembered through the lens of nostalgia. The city’s racial demarcations are more significant now because Birdie’s life consists of crossing racial lines. The subway “lines” are both literal and symbolic, since they are physical demarcations of racially divided neighborhoods and implications that people should stay with their own kind. They reveal the intentionality of racist urban planning, or redlining, which sought to keep African American and other minorities away from whites. 

“It seemed that in order to be as light as Dot, one couldn’t afford to believe in evil. Not the way my mother and father did. They believed in evil they could see, and evil they couldn’t. Dot believed only in good.” 

This passage gets to the heart of why the conversation about race is important in the first place. Race is a principle constructed to allow one people to subjugate another on false grounds of biological superiority. Like other forms of discrimination, racism is a vehicle for the ill-intentioned to target individuals who they see as different. Both Deck and Sandy devoted themselves to fighting that evil in different ways. Dot’s spiritual approach to identity strikes Birdie as incompatible with race consciousness; she does not think that it is wrong, but her statement implies that one abdicates their political responsibility if one chooses to see only the good in people.

“Our eyes caught, and I saw her as she had been and would always be, a long-lost daughter of Mayflower histories, forever in motion, running from or toward an unutterable hideaway.” 

Birdie’s observation recalls Sandy’s rules on how to spot a “Real Wasp” (154). For the first time, Birdie sees her mother in this light, caught in a bind of shame for her white Wasp identity but unable to escape it. The description implies that even if Sandy remains with Jim in New Hampshire she will never feel fully at ease.

“You’re right, Ali. I don’t have to act like this. I could do what I did for all those years and play the straight man. […] Shit, I got so good at playing that part of the positive brother I could have won an Emmy. But I’m not going back. This is the father you were born with, Ali. I’m sorry.” 

Ronnie Parkman’s choice to live as an openly gay man expands the theme of passing versus authenticity. His steadfastness in living as his authentic self, despite the threat of violence and his son’s disapproval, speaks to how important and potentially risky the choice to embrace authenticity can be. 

“But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. 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.” 

Deck says this to Birdie while she is on the verge of tears, telling him about her experience of passing for white. His dismissal of her experience shows that he cares less about her emotional reality than his own vague theories. His intellectualizing is a defense mechanism because he is the one who taught Birdie that race mattered in the first place. Along with Sandy, he instilled the importance of black identity in his daughters and taught them about the evils of racism. Deck is ashamed because he is partly responsible for Birdie’s passing.