For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: while Cole looks like her father's daughter, Birdie appears to be white. Although Cole is accepted easily by the other students, Birdie must try hard to fit in to make up for the lighter color of her skin, which keeps the other students from believing that she is the same race as they are.Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the civil rights movement in Boston in the 1970s. In this setting, they experience their first taste of the racism that their mother has been shielding them from and their father has been warning them about. Sandy is frustrated with Deck’s intellectualism, which never translates to action, while Deck sees Sandy’s secret revolutionary actions as risky and out of step with the times.Īfter being taught at home by Sandy during their first school-aged years, the girls are now sent to a public school that is predominantly black. But domestic life takes a bad turn when their parents Sandy and Deck, who frequently argue, finally split up for good. The girls spend much of their time playing together in their attic room, even inventing their own language, which continues to be their unique connection throughout the story.
In the opening chapters, Birdie’s and Cole’s lives are innocent and largely untouched by the racial strife that is still rampant in society.
The novel’s main plot follows Birdie’s struggles-to assume a false identity her mother has devised for her, to live in isolation from her father and sister, not knowing where they are or whether she will see them again, and finally, to take matters into her own hands by finding her lost family and returning to herself. Birdie and Cole are thus forced to choose a racial identity on the basis of their looks alone. This play of opposites is the source of much of the novel’s conflict: Birdie’s parents can’t accept one another as authentic, and this causes the family to break apart. Birdie’s father is black and her mother is white her father is an intellectual who has risen from tough circumstances and is obsessed with his theories about the origins and effects of racism her mother is a blueblood-turned-revolutionary who is more concerned with direct action against racism than in theory Birdie’s sister Cole has dark skin and Birdie has light skin.
The book describes the personal story of Birdie Lee, a young girl growing up in Boston in the mid-70s to early 80s. It was a national bestseller and won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Caucasia is Danzy Senna’s first novel, which was published in 1998.
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