“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances”. This is a hard lesson that many people learn throughout their lives. Author Danzy Senna exemplifies this with her characters in her novel Caucasia. The story is about a mixed raced family living in 1970’s Boston, Massachusetts. Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a Black father, Deck and a white mother, Sally. Both parents’ are on different sides of the Civil Rights Movement. The sisters have an unshakable bond, developed in the isolation of her parents’ home. The sisters are deeply bonded; yet to the outside world they can't be sisters. Birdie’s light complexion and straight hair makes her appear to be white, while Cole has a dark
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Because of her appearance, Cole does not have the ability to pass as white; however, she does not know how to be the Black child society expects her to be. She is vigilant in her endeavor to learn the proper black ways, to talk, do her hair, and take care of herself. Cole begins to change after the children at the school begin to pick on her for the rituals she did not know to take care of her body, which was different from her mothers. The children at school laugh at her because her knees are ashy and hair is unmanaged. Cole steals Black cultural magazines, such as Jet and Ebony, from her school. She spends hours learning about Black culture and …show more content…
One obstacle he had against him was his appearance. Deck “was not very dark, and his features were not very African - it was only his milk-chocolate skin that gave him his race away. His face spoke of something other – his high cheekbones, his bony nose, his deep-set eye, and his thin lips” (Senna 34). Deck believes he needs to prove how authentically black he is, with the “added burden of having a daughter who passes for white” (Joseph 73). To combat this he begins to change. Birdie is the one who notices this change claiming, “he had discovered Black Pride (just a few years later than everyone else), and my mother said he was trying to purge himself of his ‘honkified past’” (Senna 10). She also notices that he father “always spoke differently around Ronnie. He would switch into slang, peppering his sentences with words like ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘cool’. Whenever my mother heard him talking that way, she would laugh and say it was his ‘jive turkey act’” (Senna 10). Deck also encourages to make the same changes by asking, “‘Birdie, Cole, do your papa a favor,’ he said, ‘Yell ‘Ngawa, Ngawa, Black Powah!’ at those two cats on the corner.’ He pointed to two young men who stood in front of a barbershop, and muttered to Ronnie, ‘Check them out, Nypical tiggers, wasting their lives away.’” (Senna
Because of her appearance, Cole does not have the ability to pass as white; however, she does not know how to be the Black child society expects her to be. She is vigilant in her endeavor to learn the proper black ways, to talk, do her hair, and take care of herself. Cole begins to change after the children at the school begin to pick on her for the rituals she did not know to take care of her body, which was different from her mothers. The children at school laugh at her because her knees are ashy and hair is unmanaged. Cole steals Black cultural magazines, such as Jet and Ebony, from her school. She spends hours learning about Black culture and …show more content…
One obstacle he had against him was his appearance. Deck “was not very dark, and his features were not very African - it was only his milk-chocolate skin that gave him his race away. His face spoke of something other – his high cheekbones, his bony nose, his deep-set eye, and his thin lips” (Senna 34). Deck believes he needs to prove how authentically black he is, with the “added burden of having a daughter who passes for white” (Joseph 73). To combat this he begins to change. Birdie is the one who notices this change claiming, “he had discovered Black Pride (just a few years later than everyone else), and my mother said he was trying to purge himself of his ‘honkified past’” (Senna 10). She also notices that he father “always spoke differently around Ronnie. He would switch into slang, peppering his sentences with words like ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘cool’. Whenever my mother heard him talking that way, she would laugh and say it was his ‘jive turkey act’” (Senna 10). Deck also encourages to make the same changes by asking, “‘Birdie, Cole, do your papa a favor,’ he said, ‘Yell ‘Ngawa, Ngawa, Black Powah!’ at those two cats on the corner.’ He pointed to two young men who stood in front of a barbershop, and muttered to Ronnie, ‘Check them out, Nypical tiggers, wasting their lives away.’” (Senna