Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff's Abeng and Danzy Senna's Caucasia.

However dissimilar individual bodies are, the compelling idea of common, racially indicative bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut into the favored forms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effectively denied by divergent patterns in life chances and everyday experiences.--Paul Gilroy, Against Race (25)

the invisible in me is counter to the visible.--Michelle Cliff, "The Black Woman As Mulatto" (12)

Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1986) and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) typify a recent literary uptrend: a dramatic increase in biracial fiction, memoir, and theory, in biracial discourses of passing, invisibility, and identity. Abeng, which received widespread critical acclaim, and Caucasia, the winner of numerous 1998 "Best Book" awards, introduce characters whose mixed race parentage holds true for a growing number of multiracial Americans. (1) Both novels offer biracial characters who resist racial labels while staying especially connected to "blackness." In Abeng and Caucasia, respectively, the white bodies of Clare Savage and Birdie Lee misrepresent identities that remain ascribed to, yet not confined by, "blackness."

The sharp rise of interracial marriages in the US parallels a growing number of multiracial organizations committed to promoting "a positive awareness of interracial and multicultural identity" (AMEA). (2) Many of these multiracial organizations have attracted criticism for disassociating themselves from minority issues and concerns. Their lobbying for a multiracial category on the 2000 Census, for example, perturbed many African Americans who suspected that "multiracial" was really an escape from "black." (3) Negative criticism notwithstanding, many mixed race people who express a desire to live beyond the confines of race categories politicize a multiracial identity that obscures blackness. Opposed to this kind of identification are mixed race individuals who--suspicious of the elitism associated with projecting a biracial identity--advance a black subjectivity. Yet, a distinct third group, increasingly represented by biracial writers who embrace a biracial subjectivity, remains inextricably linked to a black history and social past. (4) In her autobiography, Rebecca Walker writes, "I am tired of claiming for claiming's sake, hiding behind masks of culture, creed, religion." She continues, "My blood is made from water and so it is bloodwater that I am made of, and so it is a constant empathic link with others which claims me not only carefully drawn lines of relation. I exist somewhere between black and white, family and friend" (320). Refusing any entrapment in "siding" with received notions of "blackness" and "whiteness," Walker resists racial binaries, and offers an alternative to reading biracial individuals in opposing racial extremes, a practice repeated in history, literature, and popular cultural discussions of mixed race identity. (5)

Late 19th- and turn-of-the-20TH-century "mulatto" characters developed by African American authors were often tragic or one-dimensional. Two prominent examples are Rena Walden, who passes for white and dies tragically in Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and the eponymous heroine of Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1893), whose white identity radically changes when she discovers that her mother is black and then uniformly accepts blackness. By contrast, Abeng's Clare Savage and Caucasia's Birdie Lee want to be seen as young women of color despite others' attempts to bleach their pasts, presents, and futures. Unlike another of their fictional predecessors, Helga Crane of Nellie Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Clare and Birdie are not frustrated by flawed choices; rather, their frustration results from other people's expectations, which always derive from the whiteness of Clare's and Birdie's bodies. Clare wants her father to acknowledge her mother's blackness and Clare's own mixed race heritage, while Birdie struggles to balance being "black and proud" with connecting to her white mother's heritage. Yet, neither girl can map out her racial and psychological identity without investing in her corporeality.

Erasing Blackness, Effacing Clare

In Abeng, Clare Savage is a pale mixed race, 12-year-old Jamaican girl. Her father, "Boy," claims a pure-white lineage, but his family is intimately tied with black Jamaicans, and his own ethnic identity is mixed. His maternal grandparents are both mixed race people of white, Miskito Indian, and African ancestries, and his father is a white Italian. Clare's mother, Kitty, is also mixed race even though Boy denies it. The story follows Clare's emerging young womanhood: her first menstrual period; her friendship and female love for dark-skinned Zoe, who lives on her grandmother's property; and her increasing awareness of race, class, and gender politics in her community and culture, both of which harbor enduring effects of colonialism.

Clare's family members erase the "taint" of their blackness in their self-perceptions. The Savages, Cliff's narrator reports, defined themselves according to "color, class, and religion, and over the years a carefully contrived mythology was constructed, which they used to protect their identities. When they were poor, and not all of them white, the mythology persisted" (Abeng 29). The aunt and uncle of Clare's father, Boy Savage, teach him to believe in this mythology, and then he proudly passes it--lies and all--to Clare, his eldest daughter, for "[s]he was a true Savage, he assured her. Her fate was sealed" (45). Clare is never really her mother's daughter; even her maternal grandmother, Miss Mattie, always considers her to be her father's child. After Clare steals Miss Mattie's gun in order to hunt down an infamous wild pig, Miss Mattie senses that Boy should deliver punishment because "the girl was his child after all" (145, italics added). For her part, Clare is unsure where her allegiances should lie. She resists her father's pressure to claim an all-white identity:

   Her father told her she was white. But
   she knew that her mother was not.
   Who would she choose were she given
   the choice: Miss Havisham or Abel
   Magwitch? She was of both dark and
   light. Pale and deeply colored. To
   whom would she turn if she needed
   assistance? From who would she
   expect it? Her mother or her father--it
   came down to that sometimes. (36)

Knowing that a "choice would be expected of her," Clare resents feeling torn between the opposites that her parents represent: the aristocratic church of John Knox versus the Tabernacle country church; the city of Kingston versus the deep country of Clare's mother; her father's bourgeois idealism versus her mother's humanitarianism (37). Clare feels divided, pulled between her parents, particularly during their violent arguments about her father's drinking and infidelity. She thinks, "if he [her father] killed Kitty, then she would have to take responsibility, would have to call the police--become her mother and her father, the one dead, the other crumpled over his wife's body, raving, insane" (51). Fantasizing about this destructive possibility at once scares Clare and reveals that even in a desperate state, she would feel split between her mother and her father, pressed to choose a side.

Yet Clare's father's absolutism prevents her from feeling secure in "siding" with either parent. She thus always tries to maintain a balance within herself. Not choosing sides is especially difficult because her parents never seem to let go of their daughter's apparent duality, attributing her behavior to her divided racial make-up. On the one hand, when Clare gets punished for taking the gun from her grandmother, for example, Kitty wonders if "it was whiteness--and the arrogance which usually accompanied that state which had finally showed through her daughter's soul" (148). Boy, on the other hand, thinks, "Blackness was the cause of his daughter's actions" (149). Clare's parents see a racial split; they reinscribe a black/ white binary that Clare resists. (6)

Notably, in Senna's Caucasia, Birdie's parents think through a similar process in deciding to split up their children. However, rather than racializing their daughters' actions, they racialize the daughters themselves. When Birdie's father explains why he takes Cole instead of Birdie to Brazil, he admits, "Cole needed a black mother. It was important to her" (336). Such comments inadvertently suggest that Birdie's father views his daughters as racially different from one another. Thus, Birdie's father sees a racial split in his family in the same way Clare's parents see one within Clare.

Though Cliff does not attribute to Clare the qualities of the figure of the tragic mulatta, she often depicts the character as feeling "split into two parts--white and not white" (Abeng 119). Literary critic Belinda Edmondson hints at Clare's potential for psychological instability, a stereotypical feature of mixed race people since the early 1900s. (7) Edmondson argues that in Clare Savage's first and last names "whiteness, as masculinized epistemology, and femaleness which is aligned with blackness and historylessness" entangle (184). She claims that when Clare meets Miss Winnifred, "the mad white woman who had an affair with her black servant, we see the possibility of madness in Clare's future, the result of inexorable historical forces that cannot be assimilated into each other" (184). As Edmondson evokes the "mulatto" stereotype, she neglects Clare's potential as a biracial subject. For this critic, Miss Winnifred's warning to Clare that "only sadness comes from mixture" intimates what she sees as Clare's inevitably tragic future. Yet Clare's reply advances a mixed-race identity common among black Jamaicans: "there's all kinds of mixture in Jamaica. Everybody mixes it seems to me. I am mixed too" (164). Clare's response affirms Suzanne Bost's declaration of "mixture as the true and empowering nature of Jamaica people"; and it claims her connection with blackness in that she sees her biracial self as integral to Jamaica's mixture (681). As Senna writes in "To Be Real," "I have come to understand that my multiplicity is inherent in my blackness, not opposed to it, and that none of my 'identities' are distinct from one another" (18). Similarly, Cliff inscribes Clare's biracial identity as not distinct from (her) "blackness."

Boy Savage's arrogant display of whiteness provokes Clare to resist projecting a similar image. When she grows obsessed with the Holocaust, particularly with The Diary of Anne Frank, she is "reaching, without knowing it, for an explanation of her own life" (Abeng 72). Her attempt to understand why Jews were exterminated in Europe illustrates her desire to fathom the murder and cruelties against blacks. She questions her father about the inter-religious love in Ivanhoe; he confirms that "a Christian knight cannot be serious about his love for a Jew. She [the character Rebecca] is an infidel in Ivanhoe's eyes. She is dark and Rowena is fair. Rowena is a lady--a Saxon. The purest-blooded people in the world. Rebecca is a tragic figure" (72). Clare draws a parallel between Jews and blacks to understand the hostility and hatred shown both groups. When Clare asks her father what would happen if she married a Jew, he replies that she would be an outcast, even if her lover were only half-Jewish. Boy passes on his prejudice when Clare asks:

   "Then how come you say I'm white?"
   "What the hell has that got to do with
      anything? You're white because
      you're a Savage."
   "But Mother is colored. Isn't she?"
   "Yes."
   "If she is colored and you are white,
      doesn't that make me colored?"
   "No. You are my daughter. You're
      white." (73)

This conversation reveals Clare's unrelenting desire to acknowledge and define her "self" beyond the identity that her father demands and expects. If, according to her father's logic, a "half-Jew" is a Jew, then Clare reasons that "half-colored" must be colored. Despite her father's insistence that she is monoracial, Clare seeks a more encompassing self-interpretation. She concludes that declaring herself white does not make sense "with a colored mother, brown legs, and ashy knees" (73). Yet, for Clare to question her father's inflexible reasoning, she must go against her own inherent rejection of "race" to accept physical representations of "race." Clare succumbs to a racial one-drop ideology that would mark her as black when she asks her father, "doesn't that ["black" and "white"] make me colored?" But Clare also inherently resists the possibility of omitting her complete heritage: "She was of both dark and light" (36). At once investing in the corporeal and renouncing it, Clare creates an inconsistent space for herself and cannot make sense of her place in her community and the world.

The novelist herself recalls struggling with issues of racial and national identity as a child: "While most of the actual events of the book are fiction, emotionally, the book is an autobiography. I was a girl similar to Clare and have spent most of my life and most of my work exploring my identity as a light-skinned Jamaican, the privilege and damage that comes from that identity" (Contemporary Authors Online). (8) Some West Indian writers and critics do not necessarily accept Cliff as simply "light-skinned." According to Belinda Edmondson, some West Indian academicians and feminists believe "her discovery of a black identity is a foreign fashion that she has appropriated" (182). Nevertheless, Cliff's response reveals that she is used to having her identity challenged: "part of the difficulty of being light-skinned [is] some people assume you have a white outlook just because you look white" (qtd. in Schwartz 607). This "privilege and damage" dilemma is further defined by Toi Derricotte, a self-identified black writer who looks white: "When you look like what you are, the external world mirrors back to you an identity consistent with your idea of yourself. However, for someone like me, who does not look like what I am, those mirrors are broken, and my consciousness or lack of consciousness takes on serious implications" (40). In Abeng Clare's mirrors are more distorted than broken because, although most of the other characters think she looks white, Cliff portrays her as also having several black racial markers. Still, like the actual writers Derricotte and Cliff, whose racial identifications provoke skepticism, the fictional Clare's black consciousness can be easily challenged and critiqued by other characters because of the conflict between her consciousness and her color.

Just as Clare's father refuses to "see" Clare's blackness, so does her mother. A "mulatta" herself, Kitty is socially a racial contradiction. On the one hand, she has deep sympathy and love for black people; on the other, she is married to a "white" bigot. Kitty acts detached and "restrained--in both anger and warmth" with both of her daughters: "[s]he didn't believe in too much physical affection between parents and children" (Abeng 52). Part of this detachment seems to come from Kitty's having borne two children, one whom she assesses as looking white and the other near-white, like herself. Kitty's love is reserved for other blacks: "Kitty wore her love for Black people--her people--in silence, protecting it from her family, protecting the depth of this love from all but herself" (127). Particularly with Clare, who can pass for white, Kitty is remote and dispassionate. Only Black Jamaicans "touched her [Kitty] in a deep place--these were her people, and she never questioned her devotion to them" (52). Conversely, Clare "would never gain admission--she had been handed over to Boy the day she was born--swiftly, with the water, surrounded by a caul. And much too soon" (128). Thus, Clare feels invisible around her mother, an unwanted inheritance to be passed over to her father: "Perhaps she [Kitty] assumed that a light-skinned child was by common law, or traditional practice, the child of the whitest parent. This parent would pass this light-skinned daughter on to a white husband, so she would have lighter and lighter babies ... moving toward the preservation of whiteness and the obliteration of darkness" (129). Kitty negates her mother self by buying into the social custom that encourages racial passing.

Still, Clare yearns for a relationship with her mother and a connection to blackness: "Those moments and afternoons with her mother in the bush sometimes made Clare think--wish--that they were on a desert island together--away from her father and his theories and whiteness" (80). Such moments are similar to moments that Senna's Birdie spends "fingering the objects in [her] box of negrobilia" (Caucasia 119). In other words, both girls find comfort in their black identities despite living socially "white" lives. What Clare's father describes as her "dangerous concern for the 'underdog,'" evident "when she asked him about the Holocaust" reveals her resistance to being pigeonholed by her racial affiliations (127). Though Boy instructs Clare that she "came from his people--white people," Clare often sees herself connected to all people. Clare seeks to claim others who allow her to assert an identity that challenges the racial scripts that her father and mother impose, whether that means loving her dark-skinned friend Zoe or sympathizing with Jews who "were expected to suffer in a Christian world" apparently in the same way that "dark skinned people [were] expected to suffer in a white world" (77).

Clare's whiteness makes her disappear from the minds of her mother and others--even from her own psyche. In other words, Clare chafes against her parents' attempts to mark her as "white." Kitty promotes her daughter's invisibility by pushing Clare away from the darkness that Kitty cherishes so much. Kitty explains that her daughter's punishment, living with a Savage family friend, will be a valuable learning experience: "You have to learn once and for all just who you are in this world. Mrs. Phillips is a lady, and you are getting to the age when you will need to be a lady as well. She is from one of the oldest families in Jamaica" (150). Kitty tries to mask the white image she has of her daughter's bourgeois manners and behavior. "Mrs. Phillips can teach you to take advantage of who you are," she explains. "I can't do that for you.... Jamaica is a tiny little place. There are no opportunities for someone like you here" (150, italics added). In spite of Kitty's efforts, Clare resists "white-washing." Kitty's warning that Mrs. Phillips is "narrow-minded about colored people. You know, a little like your father" urges Clare to ask, "Then what do you want me to learn from her?" (151). Kitty reminds Clare about "many narrow-minded people in this world. You have to learn to live among them" (151). In other words, Kitty admonishes her daughter to learn to negotiate her visible identity, to lose her blackness, to be white, or, in Clare's mind, to be invisible.

Clare's color often makes her feel that she is not fully present, that she is just an image. When she visits her grandmother, she knows that she must inevitably greet guests in the parlor. During each visit, much comment is "made about her prospects, and how blessed Miss Mattie was to get herself such a granddaughter" (61). Clare knows this fuss over her arises because she is "golden. Her wavy chestnut hair fell to her shoulders without any extraordinary means. On this island of Black and Brown, she had inherited her father's green eyes--which all agreed were her 'finest feature.' Visibly, she was the family's crowning achievement, combining the best of both sides, and favoring one rather than the other" (61). Clare resents the special treatment and dislikes being fawned over: "She didn't want this. To have to answer questions and have her hair stroked while the women wondered at her. She wanted to leave" (61). Standing before the older women relegates Clare to the status of a doll--pretty, white, voiceless. Robotically, she indulges these women in the same routine during each visit. They see only a superficial image, not a person of complex identities.

Such instances of the exploitation of "mulatto" women and their vulnerability to an objectifying gaze recall the quadroon balls of late 19th-century New Orleans, where rich white men would choose prospective mistresses from a select group of mulattas (Williamson 23). As Ronald Hall, Kathy Russell, and Midge Wilson explain, "Pretty quadroons (one-quarter Black) and exotic octoroons (one-eighth Black) were in particularly high demand. Light-skinned beauties, called 'fancy girls,' were auctioned at 'quadroon balls' held regularly in New Orleans and Charleston" (18). White men admired these women for their subtle exotic beauty and their closeness to whiteness. While neither Cliff's Clare nor Senna's Birdie is sexually exploited, others' equation of their color with beauty exemplifies this earlier ideology of white aesthetic superiority. Birdie's white grandmother gives her affection and attention because of her "white" physical appearance. She compliments Birdie by claiming that the latter looks like a distant relative from England, and tells her, "you could be Italian. Or even French. Couldn't she, Sandy?" (91). Both comparisons refuse to see Birdie as (an oppressed) person of color. Though Birdie herself keeps silent, her mother's defeated response, "Yes, mother, she could be," underscores Birdie's grandmother's racial prejudice. Like Birdie's mother, Clare is also aware of social constructs that cause others to regard her as beautiful. She thanks people when they admire her, "well taught that compliments about the way she looked were to be accepted" even though she realizes the color preferences implicit in their praise (162). Clare and Birdie understand that the popularity of their looks comes from a cultural preference for whiteness.

Ironically, Senna's parodic essay "The Mulatto Millennium," interrogating the admiration of those "closer" to whiteness, seems to address Clare's predicament. (9) "I've learned to flaunt my mixedness at dinner parties," Senna quips, "where the guests (most of them white) ooh and aah about my flavorful background. I've found it's not so bad being a fetishized object, an exotic bird soaring above the racial landscape. And when they start talking about black people, pure breeds, in that way that used to make me squirm before the millennium, I let them know that I'm neutral, nothing to be afraid" (27). Senna's sarcasm backlashes against the fascination and admiration of "mixedness," and speaks to what Clare experiences when she is put in front of her grandmother's friends. "Sometimes I feel it," Senna continues, "that remnant of my old self (the angry black girl with the big mouth) creeping out, but most of the time I don't feel anything at all. Most of the time, I just serve up the asparagus, chimichangas, and fried chicken with a bright, white smile" (27). Senna's tongue-in-cheek ending encapsulates the layered dilemmas that mixed race individuals ponder. Can one acknowledge and take pride in one's multiple identities without exploiting any or all of them (or having them exploited)? Can Clare resist being put on a racial pedestal (by her father and others) without succumbing?

Despite Clare's resentment towards her white appearance, she sometimes expresses gratitude for the advantages it bestows: "she was a lucky girl--everyone said so--she was lightskinned.... She lived in a world where the worst thing to be--especially if you were a girl--was to be dark" (77). Clare recognizes the privileges afforded to Jamaican families like her own. While she generally assumes a biracial or "colored" subjectivity, she often albeit reluctantly accedes to an all-white identity: "An unease seemed to live in a tiny space in her soul--for want of a better world--and she was struck by what she told herself was unfairness and cruelty while at the same time she was glad of the way she looked and she profited by her hair and skin" (77). The moments when Clare takes advantage of her color indicate her emotional and psychological complexities as a biracial subject. Her choices intimate her identity as a multidimensional mulatta literary character who struggles against racial confines while occasionally yielding to them.

Clare's "near-white" skin and facial features cause people to judge her as white, even when she does not try to pass. Cliff signifies on and through her character's name, which connotes her color (clair, as in clear, pale, light-colored), and, moreover, recalls one of her vexed literary predecessors, Clare Kendry in Larsen's Passing. During everyday instances of unintentional passing, Clare feels invisible: her blackness, so hard to detect, is ignored. Her passing also has class implications. On one occasion a poor, dark-skinned black woman approaches two of Clare's classmates, "darker than Clare," to ask the time. These girls, not wanting to be associated with the woman's darkness or poverty, turn "away from her" and tell her to "mind her own business" (77). Striving to be recognized by her mother's people, Clare answers the black Jamaican woman and gives her some money. Afterwards, she looks at her classmates with disgust. In this one narrative moment, Cliff demonstrates how race, class and gender prejudices culminate, how they result in discrimination against an elderly, black Jamaican woman. Clare cannot comprehend how, in this case, bonds of color do not preclude class discrimination: "Clare did not understand enough about her world and her place in it to question why the old lady had approached the other girls and not herself." The narrator explains, "Nor could she understand why the two dark girls had responded as they had" (77). The girls reject this woman for reasons of color and class that have been culturally imbedded. Since Clare has been sheltered from the damage of race and class prejudices, she does not understand their rejection. Her classmates have been interpellated--as Althusser might see it--into a classist ideology that Clare resists: "That old lady, in her ragged clothes and mashed-down shoes was only a sad person--a sufferer--to her. Clare could not be expected to identify with the old lady or her darkness, her poverty or her position of sufferer" (77-78). And yet, Clare's attention to the older woman speaks to her desire to align herself with a history that she shares with the woman, one of "dark people expected to suffer in a white" world (77). Clare calls the girls "inhuman" although--or perhaps because--she does not understand her classmates' social motives for separating themselves from the woman's darkness and poverty. "It would take [Clare] years," the narrator observes, "to recognize the source of this word [inhuman]--to understand that while their act toward the old woman was a sad act, it had a foundation" (79). Clare's compassion for others makes her see things for what they are, without concern as to how her father, mother, or society may interpret it: "she did not analyze; she observed. And after that she made her judgment" (78). Clare's way of interpreting her surroundings follows her understanding of identity; she only reluctantly accepts the rules that her family wants her to obey, ultimately making choices about identity based on her own judgments of the world.

Clare, who wants freedom to identify with whom she chooses, thus resembles Caucasia's Birdie, who seeks to be more than a "doomed, tragic shade of black" (274). Birdie's vision of her cousin Taj's multicultural future symbolizes her own ideal life. Pondering the possibility of Taj embracing a biracial identity, she thinks, "Maybe her father and her mother would share her between them and she would become the perfect blend of two rich cultures [Indian and African American], moving effectively between the two worlds" (287). In reality both Birdie's and Clare's attempts to construct their own racial identities bring pain. Clare's parents effectively erase her blackness, mirroring the ways in which Birdie's identity disappears. For Clare's parents, "the images they had of their daughter collided with who their daughter was at this specific time in her life" (149). Both girls are invisible to their loved ones.

Invisible Mulatta

The first few lines of Caucasia (1998) suggest a strong thematic connection to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published 46 years earlier. Though the Invisible Man feels erased because he is black, poor, and therefore unimportant in the eyes of US whites, both he and Birdie suffer erasure. Birdie Lee asserts, "A long time ago I disappeared. One day I was here, the next I was gone. It happened as quickly as that" (1). Birdie's disappearance figures both literally and symbolically. Symbolically, Birdie's blackness disappears when she and her mother escape from Boston. Literally, Birdie physically vanishes from her school, her neighborhood, and her life as Birdie Lee. Birdie's disappearance parallels the figurative invisibility of the protagonist in Invisible Man. Both protagonists move from place to place, kept on the run by other characters' attempts to define them. The Invisible Man explains, "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" (Ellison 3). Racism and white employers keep the Invisible Man on the run while paranoia keeps Birdie and her mother running. Birdie recalls, "I was a nobody, just a body without a name or a history, sitting beside my mother in the front seat of our car, moving forward on the highway, not stopping" (1). Both Birdie and the Invisible Man feel that they are losing their identities. Birdie's perception of herself as "a body without a name or a history" recalls Fanon's sense of his corporeal self in a colonized condition. Under the white male gaze, Fanon feels erased. He writes, "In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema" (110).

Similarly, Birdie's body becomes erased under the white gaze when she passes for white. As Fanon explains: "Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (110-11). The paradox of "certain uncertainty" names Birdie's understanding of her surroundings. She knows that her body sits beside her mother in a moving car, yet she remains uncertain regarding the details of her own body ("without a name or a history"). Passing inhibits Birdie's self-identification. Like Fanon, Birdie exists "triply": she "occupie[s] space" and moves toward "the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there"; she disappears (112). Birdie's disappearance is marked by her awareness that her body has been manipulated in order to pass: "when I stopped being nobody, I would become white--white as my skin, hair, bones, allowed. My body would fill in the blanks, tell me who I should become, and I would let it speak for me" (1). Again, like Fanon, Birdie is identified by her body, even before she can tell her story. In describing a child's exclamation, "Look at the nigger! ... Mama, a Negro," Fanon explains that his "body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day" (113). In the same vein, Birdie's body is "given back" to her, white and unrecognizable.

Birdie embarks on her journey after her activist parents decide to split up the family to evade the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Each daughter pairs up with the parent she most physically resembles. While Cole flees to Brazil with her black father and his black girlfriend, Birdie must pass as the fictional persona that her white mother creates: she "becomes" Jesse Goldman, a white half-Jewish girl with a deceased Jewish father. Birdie and her mother jump from state to state, fabricating lies and watching out for police who never come. They finally settle in a small New Hampshire town where Birdie's unhappy immersion in working class white culture and her desire to return to her former life prompt her to run away to find her father and sister.

When she wants to avoid alienation, Birdie welcomes invisibility; yet, more often, she wishes for a stronger presence like her sister's. Throughout her wavering, Birdie always searches for "self." She recalls, "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" (5). Yet Cole's tan skin and curly hair do not show up in Birdie's reflection. Senna's Birdie, like Cliff's Clare, looks white. Before seeing a mirror, Birdie regards Cole's face as "me and I was that face and that was how the story went" (5). Birdie soon learns about their difference, however, when she overhears her mother refer to her as "a little Sicilian" (23). Such comments mark the beginning of Birdie's "body betrayal"--her feeling that her body decodes her, makes her invisible. In a moment of realization in front of the bathroom mirror, Birdie reflects:

   I tried to think what Sicilian meant by
   reading my own face. I glanced at my
   sister's reflection behind me.... Her
   hair was curly and mine was straight,
   and I figured that this fact must have
   something to do with the fighting
   [between her parents] and the way the
   eyes of strangers flickered surprise,
   sometimes amusement, sometimes disbelief,
   when my mother introduced us
   as sisters. (24)

Outsiders' ready acceptance of Cole as a person of color makes more difficult Birdie's acceptance of her own body. Their acceptance of Cole also renders Birdie overshadowed by her older sister. Birdie's body, the combination of her features and color, acts as an enemy informant, announcing to the world an identity that she resists. When Birdie's mother registers the two sisters in a "black power school," the secretary reacts coldly to Birdie. Later, Birdie's classmates challenge both her presence at Nkrumah Academy and her blackness: "Who's that? ... She a Rican or something? ... I thought this was supposed to be a black school" (36). Without Cole right by her side, Birdie cannot explain her connection to blackness; her body implies a different story. Her white skin pushes her out of black communal acceptance and into a (white) space where Cole is not.

Birdie's discomfort and confusion about her racial identity cause her to desire a kind of invisibility. Though Cole doesn't suffer from the same kind of public scrutiny, she also yearns for a space or a place where race holds no significance. To escape the hegemony of racial typology, Cole creates the imaginary land of Elemeno. Though Elemeno sounds like a child's rushed pronunciation of the alphabets L, M, N, and O, the word itself also approximates the sound of the word eliminate, as the concept suggests the elimination of racial categories. Cole tells Birdie that the Elemenos "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" (7). Cole creates an imaginary people who attempt invisibility as "less a game of make-believe than a fight for the survival of their species" (7).

A desire for a similar translucence notably takes hold of Abeng's Clare Savage when she and Zoe pretend to make "secret totems, in a language only they could decipher" (94). Clare's racially ambiguous features intensify her desire to be accepted in the black community. Though Clare struggles with her privilege, and though she sometimes "felt split into two parts--white and not white, town and country, scholarship and privilege, Boy and Kitty," she still "wanted them [she and Zoe] to be the same" (119, 118). In short, both Cliff's Clare and Senna's Cole seek to create "worlds" where they can ignore race issues, where others will not hold them to racialized authenticities.

Cole and Birdie's awareness of the volatile nature of race relations in their city makes the idea of disappearing particularly appealing to them: "It was 1975, and Boston was a battleground. ... Forced integration. Roxbury. South Boston. Separate but not quite equal. God made the Irish number one. A fight, a fight, a nigga and a white" (6). Racial divisions and related tensions surround them in their neighborhood and within their immediate family, especially when their parents' arguments turn racial. The power of the Elemenos "lay precisely in their ability to disappear into any surrounding" (7). Though playing make-believe captivates Birdie at seven years old, she still wonders, "What was the point of surviving if you had to disappear?" (7). In Abeng Clare also challenges the rigidity of race: "Why did everything seem so fixed? So unchangeable" (118). In questioning racial "rules" (including why people cannot be accepted for "themselves"), both Birdie and Clare evince an awakening to their biracial subjectivity. Birdie particularly challenges the idea that people have to disappear, pass, or somehow change in order to survive or live happily.

Other characters see Birdie's white skin instead of her individuality. Like Clare, whom Miss Mattie thinks is "only what she appeared to be, not of Miss Mattie at all, but of Boy's side of the family" (Abeng 145), Birdie seems to vanish symbolically because she is a mixed race person who looks white. Neither Boy Savage nor Deck Lee can see his daughter's blackness, though for different reasons. While Boy Savage wants to preserve his daughter's whiteness, Deck Lee struggles to find Birdie's blackness. After Birdie's parents separate, Deck seems to look through her rather than at her. Birdie attests, "He never had much to say to me. In fact, he never seemed to see me at all. Cole was my father's special one. ... She was his prodigy--his young, gifted, and black. At the time, I wasn't sure why it was Cole and not me, but I knew that when they came together I disappeared" (47). Even Cole's name connotes black (coal, colored) and thus Cole represents the blackness that Deck tries to hold onto despite his anxieties that he "sold out" by marrying a white woman. Birdie tries to impress her father during their visits by doing silly things to make him laugh or by showing off her knowledge of black history. Occasionally this trickery grabs her father's attention; Birdie becomes momentarily visible. One time after she tells her father, "Stay black, stay strong, brotherman," Birdie's father sees her, as if for the first time: "My father flashed me a fierce look of bewilderment, then burst into laughter as he ruffled my hair, as if he had just discovered I could talk when he pulled the string on the back of my neck" (63). However, such moments do not last long, and Birdie never stops feeling fatherless. This loneliness persists when Birdie's father leaves the country with his girlfriend and Cole, and it continues through Birdie's reunion with Deck seven years later.

When the teenaged Birdie reconnects with her father, he still ignores her. Birdie finds her father living in California and feels a familiar sense of disappointment and betrayal when she learns that he has been in the US for over five years and has not contacted her. When she confronts him about his absence, he answers her with his usual detached, theoretical jargon. Birdie divulges, "Papa, do you even know where I've been? Do you even care? I've been living as a white girl, a Jewish girl. I've waited and waited, and I kept the box of crap you gave me. But you never came" (334). Deck's response suggests that he still cannot see his daughter. He proposes that "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" (334). Deck's academic analysis of passing again evokes Birdie's invisibility: he ignores the pain she associates with passing for white. By dismissing and trivializing Birdie's passing as not really passing, as merely "switching" costumes, Deck invalidates her feelings of invisibility. In addition, his articulation of the social construction of race denies racial essence and discrimination. In effect, his neglect of mixed race issues heightens his daughter's real angst. Though Birdie also recognizes the fallacy of race as a concept, her understanding of its "real" implications mirrors how she thinks of her own body. Though she rejects the idea of the "bodily" as actual or valid, she nonetheless invests in its ability to mark her closer to blackness. Just like Boy Savage, who firmly commands Clare, "You are my daughter. You're white" (Abeng 73), Deck disregards Birdie's pain, and thus further erases her.

When Birdie passes for white, she vanishes from her old life. She and her mother suddenly trade in their lives as a multicultural family for one easier for whites to accept. Birdie remembers that "at the Wellington Diner in Maine, surrounded by the thick smoky scent of pine trees and the broad flesh of country women, I was knighted a half-Jewish girl named Jesse Goldman, with a white mama named Sheila--and the world was our pearl" (111). Birdie's momentary enthusiasm seems to speak back to Zora Neale Hurston's famous line from "How It Feels to Be Colored Me": "No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife" (153). Given Hurston's proclamation, "BUT I AM NOT tragically colored," three sentences before, Birdie's description of "the world" as "our pearl" seems to suggest her desire not to be tragically colored, even if it means passing. From the beginning, however, Birdie's life on the run lacks substance. She recalls, "In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete--a gray blur, a body motion, forever galloping toward completion--half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption" (116). Immersed in lies and deceit, Birdie begins to feel her black self fade away. Her lies slowly assume more and more "reality," particularly when she and her mother settle in New Hampshire. At times, Birdie's mother acts as if Birdie has no black or biracial ancestry. When she tells Birdie about her illegal activist activities, she explains, "Having a black child made me see things differently. Made it all the more personal. It hurts to see your baby [referring to Cole] come into the world like this, so you want to change it" (233). When Birdie's mother refers to Cole as her only black child, she erases Birdie from blackness, causing Birdie to feel racially invisible. Birdie thinks, "My mother did that sometimes, spoke of Cole as if she had been her only 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" (233).

When Birdie assumes the identity of Jesse, she begins to think of herself in the third person, as an embodiment of Fanon's third-person consciousness. Birdie is displaced from her own body: "I experienced a sense of watching myself from above. It happened only occasionally. I would, quite literally, feel myself rising above a scene, looking down at myself, hearing myself speak. I would gaze down at the thin girl, drawing patterns in the dirt, and watch this girl with the detachment of a stranger" (162). Here Birdie herself cannot distinguish her body from amongst whites'. Her invisibility mirrors the invisible man's effacement when others don't see him or see him as a black man indistinguishable from others. Birdie continues, "I would look at my own body the way that I looked at another's. I would think, 'You,' not 'I,' in those moments, and as long as the girl was 'you,' I didn't feel that I lived those scenes, only that I witnessed them" (162). Though Birdie doesn't literally vanish in the eyes of other people, she fades before her own eyes, becoming invisible within her own mind. Because Birdie self-identifies as a black person, or at least as one more black than white, her racial passing feels to her like a vanishing. Though others identify her body as white, she recognizes herself as black and "other," creating that "certain uncertainty" that Fanon describes.

Birdie strives to think beyond race. Like Clare, who questions her racial privileges despite being "carefully instructed by her father, primarily, and by others also, about race and color and lightening," Birdie stands against her mother's manipulation of her identity (127). When her mother begs her to return to their fictional life in New Hampshire, Birdie tells her, "My name's not Jesse. It's Birdie Lee" (283). Her statement reveals not only her budding independence from her mother but also her desire to assert her self-identity. She struggles to reject imprisoning labels of color while knowing she wants to "be black like somebody else," different from biracial girls like Samantha, who seems sad and trapped in her "cinnamon skin" with her "confused, half-nappy hair" (274).

Passing entangles and doubles since Birdie passes not just for white but also for Jewish. Initially, Birdie describes her Jewishness as "a performance we [Birdie and her mother] put on together for the public" (119). Birdie's mother justifies this false identity by trying to differentiate between passing for white and passing for Jewish: "she ... liked to remind me that I wasn't really passing because Jews weren't really white, more like an off-white. She said they were the closest I was going to get to black and still stay white. 'Tragic history, kinky hair, good politics'" (119). In a cruel twist, Birdie's attempt to pass for something other than black nevertheless subjects her to racial prejudice and discrimination. Ironically, while Birdie and her mother pass in order to hide, to disappear, Birdie's "Jewishness" makes her stand out. One day when some teen-age boys harass Birdie and her friends, one boy throws pennies specifically at Birdie. He shouts, "Fuckin' kike. I'm talkin' to you. Do you want another penny?" (209). An identity intended to protect Birdie and her mother from the "feds" makes her vulnerable to her peers. After Birdie remembers the Star of David necklace around her neck, she "realized then that they were throwing pennies at me because I was Jesse Goldman, daughter of David Goldman. I felt a pang of loyalty toward this imaginary father, and touched the necklace" (209). In effect, the advantages associated with visibility and invisibility reverse. As a biracial subject, Birdie dreams of others' complete acceptance in place of invisibility and racial rejection. In response to a friend's question about her religion, Birdie explains, "Well, not really Jewish," absolving her from social location within yet another ethnic or religious minority (210). Announcing a Jewish identity proves too socially debilitating for Birdie.

While Birdie "passes" for something she both is and is not (white), she also passes for something she is and is not (black). To "camouflage" her whiteness in the black world, Birdie must find ways to look more black. She needs her "white" body to make a "black" statement. When she goes to Maria's house, Birdie pretends she has a life like Maria's: "just a girl who lived and had always lived in this splendid pink-and-purple palace where all the furniture matched, a girl whose mother worked late nights as a nurse and whose big brother was in the Army. I imagined my name was not Birdie or Jesse or even Patrice, but Yolonda, and that Maria was one of my many cousins. I imagined myself Cape Verdean" (59). Birdie's fantasy becomes momentarily real to her when Maria does her hair. Using a curling iron and hairspray, Maria transforms Birdie's straight hair into a head of curls. As the girls lie atop Maria's mother's bed, Birdie relishes her new look, which enables her to "pass" for black: "The tint of the ceiling mirror darkened me, and with my newfound curls, I found that if I pouted my lips and squinted to blur my vision in just the right way, my face transformed into something resembling Cole's" (60). Birdie wants others to acknowledge her blackness, but she knows her curls will not last and that physical blackness will remain a fantasy. When Birdie turns 12, she realizes the futility of her dreams: "There had been a time when I thought I was just going through a phase. That if I was patient and good enough, I would transform into a black swan" (154). By depicting Birdie's painful awareness of the absurdity of her dream, Senna critiques the impossible standards by which is defined blackness. As a biracial subject, Birdie becomes entrapped into this restrictive criterion.

Both Birdie's voyage to find her father and Clare's hunting expedition mark their journey toward racial freedom. During her punishment Clare dreams that she and Zoe have a fist-fight and then make up. Though "[s]he was not ready to understand her dream," the image of Zoe represents her desired connection to her mother and to her black identity. The novel ends, "She had no idea that everyone we dream about we are" (166). In the same way that Clare dreams of blackness, Birdie wishes to become a black swan. Both girls trust the capacity of their racial possibilities to become realities. In part three of Caucasia, Birdie shows a new certainty about the intimate relationship between her mixed race and black identities. On one level, Birdie's decision to find Cole and her father signals her desire to end her mother's pretense. On another level, her search for Cole suggests her desire to connect with her sister racially, familially, and emotionally. It is ironic that Birdie relies on her body, whose white attributes caused her great anxiety and pain in Boston, to help fulfill her mission: "My body remembered the city. And, outside, deja vu hurt my eyes, made me squint as if to block out brightness, though the sky was gray" (251). Birdie does not simply say that she remembered the city; Senna underscores that her protagonist's body remembers Boston. Apparently, when Birdie feels nervous about her actions or ideas, she trusts the corporeal. For example, though Birdie knows she must find her aunt, she doesn't know how her plan will work. Later, she describes her walk from the donut shop to the subway station as an unconscious movement: "My body had led me to the T station" (251). The implication is that Birdie grants her physical body the authority to follow through with psychological decisions that nearly overwhelm her.

Finding her paternal aunt Dot helps Birdie reconnect with her blackness and with her various identities. Dot's philosophy makes more sense to Birdie than her father's theories, "which had been based on bodies and where they fit in the world" (273). On the one hand, Deck's theories hurt Birdie because they render her invisible and, in effect, homeless. Dot's theories, on the other hand, privilege the spiritual over the corporeal: "There's skin color, eye color, hair color, and then there's invisible color--that color rising above you. It's the color of your soul, and it rests just beyond the skin" (273). The idea of an invisible color attracts Birdie, particularly because her biracial identity often makes her feel erased. An invisible color (which Dot later describes as dark red for Birdie) gives Birdie a place in the world that does not reduce her to her color. Birdie ponders, "I wondered if I'd ever transcend the skin, the body. If I would ever believe in something I couldn't see" (273). The invisibility of Dot's color highlights Birdie's self-image.

Ironically, finding her father yields Birdie no insight about her body or racial transcendence. Instead, her initial meeting with Deck leaves her empty because he lacks tenderness. To explain how he has spent the last seven years, he points to his book: The Petrified Monkey: Race, Blood, and the Origins of Hypocrisy argues that "the mulatto in America functions as a canary in the coal mine. The canaries ... were used by coal miners to gauge how poisonous the air underground was.... [M]ulattos had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were" (335). (10) Deck surmises that "mulattos" had become less tragic over the years; thus, they proved a gradual improvement in US race relations. His chart of mulattos and their tragic deaths illustrate that the "fate of the mulatto in history and literature ... will manifest the symptoms that will eventually infect the rest of the nation" (335). Deck's theories indirectly speak to both Caucasia and Abeng. Birdie's and Clare's possibilities reflect the aims of the larger multiracial movement to "dismantle dominant racial ideologies and group boundaries and to create connections across communities into a community of humanity" (Nakashima 81). Still, progressive multiracial literature does not signal more progressive thinking any more than Deck's theories minimize Birdie's racial struggles.

Through talking with Cole, Birdie comes to a solid sense of herself as a biracial subject. Literary critic Michele Hunter argues that "the identification that occurs between the two sisters introduces a 'third space' of experience" that offers non-oppositional ways to think about difference (303). To be sure, their mutual connection to blackness also suggests possibilities for their mixed race identities. Cole tells Birdie that in Brazil she "yearned for America, for Black America, whose pathology she at least could call her own" (346). Ironically, though she resents the impositions both black and white America fix on her body and identity, Birdie yearns for black America without leaving the country. After their emotional reunion, the sisters discuss their father's new race theories. Cole reminds Birdie, "He's right, you know. About it all being constructed. But ... that doesn't mean it doesn't exist" (348). Cole's statement rings true with Birdie, who feels the strains of racial identification more profoundly than does her sister. Birdie reflects on the difficulties of racial categories:

   I thought of Samantha, in that thick
   forest, with her cheap white shoes and
   blue eye shadow. I thought of Stuart at
   the party, laughing along to all those
   jokes spoken to him in fake slang. That
   was how they had learned to survive.
   Everybody had their own way of surviving....
   And then I thought of me,
   the silent me that was Jesse Goldman,
   the one who hadn't uttered a word....
   I had become somebody I didn't like.
   Somebody who had no voice or color
   or conviction. I wasn't sure that was
   survival at all. (349)

Birdie's reflections on her own racial passing and Samantha's and Stuart's social passing reconcile her to her biraciality. She tells Cole, "They say you don't have to choose. But the thing is, you do. Because there are consequences if you don't" (349). Cole adds, "Yeah, and there are consequences if you do" (349). Birdie advocates disregarding the consequences of "not choosing." Her adolescence validates this choice because having tried to blur or ignore all kinds of societal boundaries, she knows that freedom comes in abiding by one's own self-image, not through conformity to social codes and color laws.

Canaries in the Coal Mine: A Conclusion

When Birdie notices a light-skinned girl on a school bus near Cole's house, she identifies her as "black like me, a mixed girl" (353). Similarly, when Miss Beatrice Phillips, Clare's temporary caretaker, reminds Clare that she is "colored," chastising, "You're not so pure yourself, you know," Clare silently acknowledges that she is black or mixed (158). Though both girls find race categories harmful and restrictive, they still recognize a profound relationship to blackness. The writer Itabari Njeri suggests that a black identity and a mixed race identity need not diverge: "every Black person with White ancestry should, no matter how they came by it, own it. That is not a rejection of African American identity, but an affirmation of the complex ancestry that defines us as an ethnic group" (38). Is it equally valuable for black/white biracial individuals to "own" "blackness," even if they reject race as "real"? For Cliff and Senna, for Clare and Birdie, the expectations from their communities or families that they act or identify as "white" both encourage their desire to live without racial scripts and urge them toward blackness. Sarah Willie, a self-described "multicultural" writer with "Black African ancestry" contends, "A defense of a multiracial identity is complicated because it entails simultaneously embracing community and individuality in a society where people tend to see that goal as two discrete goals, oppositional and conflictual" (278). Clare does not want to feel alienated because of her race and class status, and yet she maintains her individuality as biracial and black. Similarly, Birdie embraces the black community that she is both a part of and separate from, while wondering if she will "ever transcend the skin, the body" (273). Their desires seem inconsistent, yet manifest the artifice of race; it is both real and not real, palpable and obscure.

Clare's and Birdie's respective evolving biracial identities reflect and go beyond current trends with regards to multiracial identification. In Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America, Renee C. Romano contends that the majority of mixed race children before the 1970s were raised by their parents to identify as black. However, she writes that since the 1970s, "an increasing number of black-white couples have decided to raise their children as biracial ... rather than telling their children they are black" (279). While this move in part reflects changing social and racial dynamics over time, it also points to a slow shift away from blackness. Many critics of a separate multiracial racial category, for example, have noted that white parents of biracial children are leading the multicultural movement and deliberately leading their children away from blackness because of its stigma. (11) Lisa Jones poignantly asks, "As black/white biracials, when we distance ourselves from the African-American freedom struggle, from aging, though historically critical, ideas like 'black power' and 'black community,' do we fail to honor a history that brought us to where we are today? Is biraciality political sedition?" (59).

Cliff and Senna develop for their protagonists both tangible and abstract obstacles, including their respective physical bodies, their immediate and extended families, and their complicated social constructions of race. These narrative constructs frustrate Clare and Birdie, and keep them from identifying as "just black" or "all white." The unique racial projections of these literary characters thus offer identification possibilities that remain historically grounded in blackness without being imprisoning.

Works Cited

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Bost, Suzanne. "Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the 'Tragic Mulatta' Tradition." African American Review 32 (1998): 673-89.

Bowman, Elizabeth Atkins. "Black Like Who?" Black Issues 3.1 (2001): 24-27.

Chesnutt, Charles. The House Behind the Cedars. 1900. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988.

Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. New York: Crossing P, 1984.

--. "The Black Woman As Mulatto: A Personal Response to Margaret Walker's Vyry, Among Others." The American Voice 17 (1989): 10-19.

Contemporary Authors Online. "Michelle Cliff." 19 Sept. 2001. <http://www.galenet.com>

Derricotte, Toi. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: Norton, 1997.

Edmondson, Belinda. "Race, Privilege, and The Politics of (Re)writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff." Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 180-91.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1942. New York: Vintage, 1980.

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove P, 1967.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate of Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Guinier, Lani, and Gerald Torres. The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Hall, Ronald, Kathy Russell, and Midge Wilson. The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy. 1893. Boston: Beacon P, 1987.

Hernandez, Tanya Kateri. "'Multiracial Discourse': Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence." 57 Maryland Law Review 97 (1998): 139-56.

Howells, William Dean. An Imperative Duty. 1892. Ed. Edwin H. Cady. New York: Twayne, 1962.

Hunter, Michele. "Revisiting the Third Space: Reading Danzy Senna's Caucasia." Literature and Racial Ambiguity. Ed. Tera Hubel and Neil Brookes. New York: Randopi, 2002. 297-316.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. Ed. Alice Walker. New York: Feminist P, 1979. 152-55.

Jones, Lisa. "Is Biracial Enough? (Or, What's This About a Multiracial Category on the Census?: A Conversation)." Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex and Hair. New York: Doubleday, 1994. 53-66.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. 1928. Ed. Deborah McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.

--. Passing. 1929. Ed. Deborah McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.

McBride, James. "What Color is Jesus?" Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural Ed. Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn. new York: Pantheon, 1998. 181-96.

Menke, John G. Mulattoes and Race Mixture: American Attitudes and Images, 1865-1918. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1979.

Nakashima, Cynthia L. "Voices From the Movement: Approaches to Multiraciality." The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier. Ed. Maria P. P. Root. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996. 79-97.

Njeri, Itabari. "Sushi and Grits: Ethnic Identity and Conflict in a Newly Multicultural America." Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. Ed. Gerald Early. New York: Penguin, 1993. 13-40.

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Senna, Danzy. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead, 1998.

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--. "To Be Real." To Be Real'. Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. Ed. Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor, 1995. 5-20.

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Notes

(1.) Publisher's Weekly, for example, describes Abeng as an "honest, appealing narrative" with "depth and power" (65), and the honors paid to Caucasia include the 1998 BOMC Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and recognition as one of the School Library Journals 23 Best Adult Books for the Young Adult, one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Books of 1998, one of Glamours three Best Novels of the Year by a New Writer, and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

(2.) Romano notes that in 1960 the US Census found 0.4% of marriages to be interracial. This number rose to 2% in 2000 (3).

(3.) See Hernandez and Jones.

(4.) This particular biraciality has been articulated in Walker's "Higher Yellow," Senna's "To Be Real," and James McBride's "What Color Is Jesus?" Senna identifies as black but is "less interested in giving this answer" than in "examining the question itself." She asks, "What do we mean when we talk about 'identity'? I think it's important to interrogate the questioner. Why do we need to safely identify people? And what do each of my potential answers (black, white, mixed, just human) mean to you" (qtd. Bowman 26).

(5.) Throughout history, "mulattos" have been depicted in a black/white context. For example, many 19th-century writers and quasi-scientists viewed people of mixed race as immoral, criminal, and violent, attributing these deflects to "blackness." At the same time, many whites attributed to "whiteness" the supposed intellectual superiority of mixed race people. See Mencke, Frederickson, and Sollors for discussions of how mixed race people have been theorized and written about in US history and literature.

(6.) This reinscription parallels Mrs. Meredith's constantly remarking on the return of Rhoda's "ancestral traits," which she thinks reveal her niece's secret ethnic roots in William Dean Howells's "An Imperative Duty" (1892). This 19th-century short story exposes the psychological investment in assuming racial stereotypes that contemporary novelists such as Cliff and Senna explore.

(7.) See Williamson 96.

(8.) Cliff's identity encompasses various identifiers--ethnic, social, and literary. She is a feminist, a lesbian, a Jamaican creole, an American, a novelist, a poet, a short story writer, and a teacher. Her nationality and ethnicity render Cliff's status "ambiguous" among black Caribbean feminist writers. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946, she emigrated to the US when she was three years old.

(9.) Senna, who looks physically "white enough" to pass, has written about her own experiences as mixed race in essays such as "To Be Real." She was born in Boston in 1970 to a black journalist father and white novelist/poet mother.

(10.) Here, Senna signifies on Guinier and Torres, who contend: "Those who are racially marginalized are like the miner's canary: their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all" (11).

(11.) See Romano 284.

Sika Alaine Dagbovie is Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University. This essay is excerpted from a current Book project that examines mixed race identity in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Professor Dagbovie would like to thank Robert Dale Parker for his insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.