Subversion of the tragic mulatto in “color television”

Early in Color televisionDanzy Senna's fifth work, the protagonist Jane Gibson completes her own literary work. Jane's second novel, Nusu-Nusu, Mexico (from Swahili, meaning “partial, in part”) is a sprawling story that connects several generations of mulattoes in the United States from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. This period could be understood as the heyday of the “tragic mulatto,” that figure in literature, stage, and film, usually a young woman who tries to pass as white but suffers psychologically from the threat that her African ancestry will be revealed.

Jane's novel, which she has been working on for ten years, will change her family's fortunes in Los Angeles: with a publishing deal in her pocket, she gets a tenured position at the Southern California college where she works; she and her husband, Lenny, can buy a house and raise their children, Ruby and Finn, near top schools and in relative comfort. Although Jane and Lenny both teach at colleges, they cannot afford a house in LA. Instead, they move from one apartment complex or back-alley ACU to the next.

When we meet the family, they tend a house on a mountaintop above Los Angeles. The house, which presents its street with a “semicircle of pristine forest, like a blind face,” while its residents occupy a space “staring into its own navel,” belongs to Brett, a novelist turned showrunner and director. About a decade before the novel's action, Jane and Brett, “the only two people of color” in their creative writing MFA program, developed “a fierce, almost sibling-like bond,” defending each other against the misinterpretations white students imposed on them and their stories.

While Jane struggles with her tome, Brett has become famous and rich writing a series about zombies. Brett is on location with his family, supervising the filming in Australia. He lends Jane his studio and gives her two studios to use: one so she can finish her novel, and another where Lenny can complete a series of abstract paintings for an upcoming exhibition in Tokyo.

Jane's writing thrives in Brett's office. Originally a “story about a 1950s actress who passed as white, loosely inspired by the life of Carol Channing,” Nusu-Nusu, Mexico Spanning 600 double-spaced pages, it traces the lineages of mulattoes, from the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson to the Melungeons, the first tribe of “tri-racial Americans,” Appalachians who isolated themselves, fathered children, and produced “generations of future Benetton models,” including the actress, “the great-great-great-granddaughter of that first Melungeon.”

At the end of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!Shreve, Quentin Compson's Canadian roommate at Harvard, dreams up the last Sutpen – the racially mixed Jim Bond – and other mulattoes, quadroons and octorons as conquerors of the Western Hemisphere: “Of course, this will not happen quite in our time, and of course, as they spread toward the poles, they will fade like the rabbits and birds, so that they will no longer stand out so sharply against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years I too, who respect you, shall have sprung from the loins of African kings.” Jane's fiction seems to follow Shreve's logic. But unlike the Canadian vision of future African relatives, Jane's story – with its main character, the “fragile, trembling 1950s film actress who [roams] the book in a negligee, barefoot and suicidal, worried about the colour of the baby growing inside her” – seems to bring the tragic mulatto back to life.

Jane's literary agent and editor reject this novel outright, encouraging her to turn away from “the whole mixed-race thing” and move on to a larger artistic field instead. This advice sounds metafictional: Senna has probably heard negative reviews like this one about her own satirical and terrifying explorations of mulatto life. Her narratives question and challenge tenuous notions of identity and black consciousness while also thinking deeply about the physical, material, and psychological consequences of anti-black structures in American life. This is especially true of her excellent and often witty memoir, Where did you sleep last night? (2009).

Color television reminds me of an idea in “What’s Wrong with Helga and Dave?” the short story that concludes Senna’s 2011 collection. You are free. Set in a multicultural apartment building, the Chandler, the story is narrated by a young, new mother, one half of a “mixed-race” couple. When she and her husband, Hewitt, move into the Chandler, their new neighbors see them as members of that “whimpering and defensive group of people known as interracial couples”: she, the white woman, he, the black man. But that's not the truth, the narrator explains, because she and Hewitt “each had one white parent and one black parent.” When they got together, the couple repeated their parents' stories: “We were supposed to be the next generation, all new-fangled and a melting pot, but instead we were like Russian dolls. If you opened up our parents' bodies, you would find a copy of their struggle, no matter how hard we tried to overcome it.”

Structurally, Color television is a series of nested stories: This is a family comedy about a writer's attempt to lead her family into middle-class stability. Think The Jeffersons, Different strokes, The Cosby Show. Senna, who has poked many holes in American racial fantasies, is perhaps even more aware of the strangeness of our class desires. When Jane still believes her novel will sell, she moves her family to a neighborhood she calls “Multicultural Mayberry” to look for her “forever” home. It is also the part of Los Angeles, Jane notes, where the original Halloween was shot. There is something dark and disturbing about Jane's desire to join the Southern Californian nobility.

The novel's title is the phrase Lenny gave to the “black trash” he and Jane watched after putting their kids to bed. They “could then be themselves” by soaking up Tyler Perry's “cartoonish version of success where a poor person gets rich overnight. All those marble floors and chandeliers and sweeping staircases.” But of course Jane wants to write her own version of that narrative. Embedded in the dark sitcom is a story of Jane as “the bad art lover.” Senna's extensive reworking and critique of the “theft” at the heart of Robert Kolker's 2021 novel New York Times Magazine The story hits us like a punch in the kidneys at the end of the novel.

Hurt and devastated after her novel is rejected, Jane learns from Brett that he has decided on the spot to write a screenplay for his new concept: a mulatto comedy. Angry that he is encroaching on her fictional territory, Jane approaches Brett's television agent without Brett's knowledge and asks for production meetings to pitch her own mulatto comedy. When she snags a meeting with hot screenwriter and producer Hampton Ford and sparks fly between them, Jane's prospects for money, security and a multicultural Mayberry seem back in sight.

The result is a fascinating character study of Jane Gibson, the liar. While imaginative storytelling is a professional necessity for writers, this skill should not be employed in developing and maintaining relationships, whether amorous, friendly, or business. Jane ignores this basic adult truth as she writes the subterfuge she uses to try to manipulate Brett, Lenny, and Hampton to obtain the accoutrements of her bourgeois desires. “Far from being a point of solidarity,” writes critic Doreen St. Félix, identity in Senna's art “is a beckoning emptiness, and deft comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.” Senna's diagnoses of ambitious pursuit and conspicuous consumption can be equally terrifying. There is also a lyrically rendered nightmare, a scene of near-violence that haunts Jane throughout the novel's second half.

For many of the young women who drive Senna's novels and stories, the most important jewel to be won is a shimmering, effortless, righteous blackness. But this is not something that can be acquired in a bargain or through proximity. In Senna's novels, attempts to gain something end up in sunken places: the protagonist in New people (2017), Maria ends her search for a perfect blackness, trapped and immobilized under her obsession. Late in Color televisionJane sits in a retirement home and sees her life's work flash before her eyes like prestigious black scum.

With the pace and narrative form of a tragicomedy Color television fulfills what the essayist, critic and novelist Albert Murray argued half a century ago: “American culture, even in its most segregated areas, is blatantly and irrevocably mixed. It is, despite all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, indisputably mulatto. In fact, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, so-called blacks and whites in the United States resemble no one else in the world as much as they resemble each other. And what's more, even their most extreme and violent opposites represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.” Blackness, a plurality in itself, is complex, intangible, and endless. Senna cyclically creates, deconstructs, and recreates blackness, using jokes and play to keep the gloom of it all at bay.•

Join Senna on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific Time as he sits down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Color television. Register for the Zoom call Hereand pre-order the book, which will be released on September 3rd.

Walton Muyumba is the author of The shadow and the deed: black intellectual practice, jazz improvisation, and philosophical pragmatism. He is a visiting professor in the departments of African Cultural Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.