Early in Colored Television, Danzy Senna’s fifth work of fiction, the protagonist, Jane Gibson, completes her own literary work. Jane’s second novel, Nusu Nusu (from Swahili meaning “partly, partly”) is a sprawling story linking several generations of mulattoes in the United States from the late 18th to the middle of the 20th century. This stretch of time could be understood as the high period of the “tragic mulatto,” that literary, stage, and film character, usually a young woman, who attempts to pass as white but suffers psychologically from the threat that her African ancestry might be revealed.
Ten years in the making, Jane’s novel is going to change her family’s fortunes in Los Angeles: with a publishing contract in hand, she’ll earn tenure from the Southern California college where she works; she and her husband, Lenny, could buy a home and raise their children, Ruby and Finn, in proximity to blue-ribbon schools and in relative comfort. Even though Jane and Lenny both have higher-ed teaching posts, they cannot afford to own a home in L.A. Instead, they hop from one apartment complex or backyard ACU to another.
When we meet the family, they are house-sitting on a mountaintop above Los Angeles. The home, which offers its street a “semicircle of unbroken wood, like a blind face” while its residents occupy a space “staring into its own navel,” belongs to Brett, a fiction writer turned showrunner-director. A decade or so before the novel’s action, Jane and Brett, “the only two people of color” in their MFA creative writing program, “developed a fierce, almost sibling bond,” defending each other against the misreadings white students placed on them and their stories.
While Jane has been struggling with her tome, Brett has found fame and wealth writing a show about zombies. Away with his family on location, script-supervising a shoot in Australia, Brett lends Jane his spread, offering up two separate studio spaces, one for her to finish her novel and another where Lenny can complete a series of abstract paintings for a forthcoming exhibition in Tokyo.
Jane’s writing thrives in Brett’s office. Originally a “story of a 1950s actress who was passing as white, loosely inspired by the life of Carol Channing,” Nusu Nusu spirals out to 600 double-spaced pages tracing lines of mulatto descent from Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s offspring to the Melungeons, the first tribe of “triracial Americans,” Appalachians who self-isolated, procreated, and made “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 octoroons as the conquerors of the Western Hemisphere: “Of course it won’t quite be in our time, and of course if they spread out toward the poles they will bleach out like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won’t show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.” Jane’s fiction seems to follow Shreve’s logic. But unlike the Canadian’s vision of future African kinsmen, Jane’s story—with its lead, the “fragile, trembling 1950s film actress who [roams] the book in her negligee, barefoot and suicidal, worrying about the color of the baby growing inside of 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” in favor of more-expansive artistic territory. This advice rings metafictionally: Senna has probably heard negative appraisal like this about her own satirical and chilling explorations of mulatto life. Her narratives interrogate and challenge weak conceptions of identity and Black consciousness, while also thinking intently about the physical, material, and psychological consequences of anti-Black structures in American life. This is especially true of her excellent and frequently funny memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009).
Colored Television reminds me of an idea nestled inside “What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?,” the short story that closes 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 couple who are both of “mixed heritage.” When she and her husband, Hewitt, move into the Chandler, their new neighbors consider them members of that “mewling 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’ own histories: “We were supposed to be the next generation, all newfangled and melting-potted, but instead we were like Russian nesting dolls. When you opened our parents’ bodies you found a replica of their struggle, no matter how hard we tried to transcend it.”
Structurally, Colored Television is a series of nested stories: this is a domestic comedy about one writer’s attempt to move her family “on up” to middle-class stability. Think The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes, The Cosby Show. Senna, who has poked many holes in American racial fantasies, may be even wiser about the strangeness of our class desires. When Jane still believes that her novel will sell, she takes her family to a neighborhood she calls “Multicultural Mayberry” to look for their “forever” home. It’s also the part of Los Angeles, Jane notes, where the original Halloween was shot. Jane’s need to join the SoCal gentry is laced with something bleak and haunting.
The novel’s title is the phrase Lenny bestowed on the “Black trash” he and Jane watched after putting their children to bed. They “could be their true selves” then, taking in Tyler Perry’s “cartoonish poor-person-turned-rich-overnight version of success. All those marble floors and chandeliers and sweeping staircases.” But, of course, Jane wants to script her own version of this narrative. Nested inside the dark sitcom is a story of Jane as “the bad art friend.” Senna’s extended revision and critique of the “theft” central to Robert Kolker’s 2021 New York Times Magazine story lands like a kidney punch in the novel’s denouement.
Wounded and scattered after her novel’s rejection, Jane learns from Brett that while on location, he’s decided to begin crafting a script for his new concept: a mulatto comedy. Incensed that he would move into her fictional territory, Jane reaches out to Brett’s television agent, unbeknownst to Brett, seeking production meetings to pitch her own mulatto comedy. When she lands a meeting with the in-vogue writer-producer Hampton Ford and they click, Jane’s prospects for money, security, and Multicultural Mayberry seem to be in the offing again.
A fascinating character study of Jane Gibson, the liar, emerges. While inventive narrative design is a professional necessity for writers, that skill ought not be practiced in the development and maintenance of relationships, amorous, friendly, or business. Jane ignores this basic adult truth as she scripts the lines of prevarication she uses in her attempts to manipulate Brett, Lenny, and Hampton to garner the accoutrements of her bourgeois longings. “Far from being a point of solidarity,” writes the critic Doreen St. Félix, identity in Senna’s art “is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.” Senna’s diagnoses of aspirational striving and conspicuous consumption can be equally terrifying. There’s also a lyrically rendered nightmare, a scene of near violence, that stalks Jane throughout the novel’s second half.
For many of the young women who drive Senna’s novels and stories, the most crucial bauble to gain is a shimmering, effortless, righteous Blackness. However, this is not a thing that can be attained at a shop or through propinquity. In Senna’s fiction, attempts at acquisition end in sunken places: The protagonist in New People (2017), Maria, ends her search for a perfect Blackness lodged under her obsession, immobilized. Late in Colored Television, Jane, sitting in a retirement home, sees her life’s work flashing before her eyes like so much prestigious Black trash.
With the pace and narrative shape of tragicomedy, Senna’s Colored Television fulfills what essayist, critic, and novelist Albert Murray argued a half century ago: “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people in the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.” Blackness, a plurality in itself, is complex, ungraspable, and endless. Senna makes, unmakes, and remakes Blackness cyclically, using jokes and play to keep the blues of it all at bay.•
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here, and preorder the book, which will be published on September 3.
