Her Father’s People
Danzy Senna took an unsentimental journey to flesh out heritage.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
For years, Danzy Senna thoughtfully explored issues of race and identity in fiction, including her novels Caucasia and Symptomatic. And then one day the author, walking through Harvard Square, found herself surrounded by signs, buildings and businesses bearing the names and images of Boston’s most prominent families. DeWolfe, Quincy, Howe—they were names of Senna’s forebears via her mother, poet and professor Fanny Howe.
The display reminded Senna, ’92, how much she had always known about her mother’s people—and how little she knew about her father’s. In 1968, Carl Senna, soon to become the youngest editor at Beacon Press, and Fanny Howe married—a commitment that was headily symbolic (personal but also political) in that Carl was black and from Southern poverty, while Fanny, ’62, was white and raised with Mayflower privilege. Their wedding photograph, Danzy Senna writes, showed “the ‘Negro of exceptional promise’ taking the hand of the descendant of slave traders.”
As Senna contemplated those names in Boston, she thought, “What about my father’s side?” After all, “he gave me both my first and last names. Yet I knew so little about him.” So begins her nonfiction book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which seeks to bring some balance to her family history, and to a larger narrative that reflexively puts whites at the center of the American story and blacks at the margins.
Senna says she did a lot of growing up in the five years it took her to write the book. Single and living on the East Coast when she began, today she is married to novelist Percival Everett, the mother of two sons, and settled four years in Los Angeles, a city about as far away from the blueblood obsessions of Boston as it’s possible to get.
With her father as her guide, Senna made forays into the Deep South and met relatives she never knew existed, unearthing a story that was as illuminating as it was inconclusive. “People tend to devalue black history and culture, which is why my father never told me about himself,” she says. “He was a political activist and writer and intellectual. But he didn’t value his own personal history.”
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is at once small-scale and big-picture. Senna plumbs the childhood anger and sorrow she felt over her parents’ famously bitter divorce in 1976 and her alcoholic father’s intense but erratic presence in her life; she empathizes with her accomplished grandmother’s struggle to overcome poverty and invisibility in a Jim Crow society. “This is the hardest thing I ever had to write, because I knew it would upset people,” Senna says. “When you write a memoir, you have to accept the fact that you might lose somebody for good.”
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Senna has more, not less, extended family than she did before, and feels better armed against the forces of racial oppression and obsession that would undermine her sons. Learning details about her father’s black lineage has grounded Senna. The different parts of her heritage, she writes, “seem not segregated at all, but rather interlocking pieces of the same incomplete puzzle.”
A Poet Honored
Fanny Howe—the author of numerous poetry collections, novels and essays, including In the Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (published by Graywolf in March)—has won the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The $100,000 award praises Howe’s lifetime achievement as “an experimental writer who can break your heart. Live in her world for a while, and it can change the way you think of yours.”
Howe, ’62, reared her three children, including author Danzy Senna, ’92, during Boston’s turbulent school desegregation; and she often has written about race, culture and activism. Five of her novels about these times are collected in the volume Radical Love. She says Americans are still notoriously reluctant to talk about race. “The self-consciousness is so great—on some level we’re not allowed to speak.”
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Book Excerpt: The Flight to Connecticut
Excerpt from Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna
In 1975 my mother left my father for the last time. We fled to Guilford, Connecticut. It was a rich town, but we rented an apartment in a tenement that the town’s residents referred to only as “the welfare house.” The backyard was a heap of dead cars. We lived on the second floor. Below us lived the town’s other nonwhite residents, a Korean war bride and her two half-Italian sons. Beside them lived an obese white woman and her teenage son.
I don’t know if we were officially hiding out from my father there—or if he knew where we were all that time. In my memory it seems that a long time passed before we saw him again, long enough for me to forget him. And I remember the day he reappeared. I was five, and I heard the doorbell ring. I raced in bare feet to see who was there. I saw, at the bottom of the dimly lit stairwell, a man. His face was hidden in the shadows, but I could make out black curls, light brown skin.
“Hi, baby,” he called up to me.
I stared back.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t know who I am?”
I knew and I didn’t know. I had memories of the man at the bottom of the stairwell, both good and bad—but I could not say who he was. I only knew that I had known him, back there in the city, and the sight of him now made me uneasy.
My mother emerged behind me in a housedress. I heard a sound in her throat—a gasp or a sigh—when she saw whom I was talking to.
“See that?” the man shouted up at her. “See what you’ve done? She doesn’t even know who I am. My own child doesn’t recognize me.”
I began to cry, perhaps recalling now all that we had fled. My mother shushed me. “It’s your father,” she said, gathering me into her arms. I turned to watch him come toward us up the stairs.
Thirty years later, and he’s still asking me that question. “Don’t you know who I am?”
From Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna, published in May 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright 2009 by Danzy Senna. All rights reserved.
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Book Excerpt: Savvy Could Not Save Them
Excerpt from The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe
When I met my second husband in Boston we circled each other while my house was being dismantled for my mother’s return to Ireland and we drove around in my father’s old car I had inherited from him. I sat outside many nights with the car heater on and Motown, waiting for him (twenty-four years old, a student) to come down from his mother’s place, an act that he protracted as if wanting to see if I would wait or if I would be jumped and murdered. My waiting was not an act of fidelity from his point of view, but something sinister, perverse. For I was the embodiment of the untrustworthy. Just the way certain women marry and then harass a man in order to punish some other man before, I was harassed for my genetic connection to the vile actions of slave-selling merchants, their cold white women and then for the feminine in general. I could not win.
I had made yet another mistake, this time out of desperation. Unable to come to terms with the real and the social, I thought his savvy would save me. For three years I stood with my mouth open and my hands dropped to my sides: not so much a victim as a stooge: stupid, scolded, cowardly, corrected, belittled, bullied, framed, persuaded, humiliated, instructed. I was amazed that it was happening with my consent, and yet it was. In a stupor of fear, I let it happen. He did not respect a single word I said, but insisted on countering me. How I loved the story by Richard Wright, “Bright and Morning Star,” where the man, the wife, and his mother are as one person, and race among them meant nothing.
For the sake of hope’s survival, I became all mother to my children instead; in my servitude to them lay my liberation from him. Through them I became childish again, wandered around with disdain for the authoritarian world, left home for hours to sit in parks, sat by their beds and read to them, or pulled them into my bed to sleep in a bundle. I understood women who had many children. They accepted me, they liked to play, they were outcasts who spent their days in parks.
Roxbury was a near ruin, once respectable in the Malcolm X days of his youth, now a collection of stone projects that held families packed into two rooms, just like in Russia before Stalin came along and nationalized housing and gave people space. The city was full of talk about HUD and segregation. It was a city segregated not just by race but by ethnicity between Italians, Irish, Chinese, WASPs, Jews and then broken down into categories of money and job affiliation, so the Jewish doctors were in one place, the Jewish shopkeepers in another, et cetera. The cops were still paddies but there was a burgeoning Irish middle class and even rich elite that was beginning to take over the political reins of the city, steal them from the old WASPs, who were never very bright bulbs anyway, but canny with their own interests, like storybook foxes, self-satisfied and successful thieves. . . .
We married in October 1968 and from 1968 to 1972, we had a rhythm, and a hope. But then it smashed to an end as if it had been tied to a post underwater and the strength of continual oceanic (or social) banging broke it up, and we were each tossed free to suppress the ugly memories of our days together.
Excerpts from The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vacation. Copyright 2009 by Fanny Howe. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
