How can one tell the story of a difficult upbringing without lapsing into anger or self-pity? In her memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, two-time novelist Danzy Senna provides a moving example of how not to place blame but to use the past to illuminate the complexities of the present. An uncompromising examination of her parent's interracial marriage and the murky familial origins of her father, Senna's third work is less a moody j'accuse than a gripping detective story, one in which the author travels from New England to New York to the Deep South, following the trail of her father's upbringing in a quixotic effort to understand her own.
In 1968, black Beacon Press editor Carl Senna married Boston Brahmin poet Fanny Quincy Howe, their union not only an expression of love but a self-conscious political act "steeped," Senna writes, "from the start in symbolism." Carl, a rising intellectual, was the son of a black jazz piano player and Mexican boxer. Howe, a talented writer, counted among her many illustrious relations the founder of the Atlantic Monthly and a notorious slave trader. Raising their three children in "hardscrabble bohemian chaos" amid multiethnic literati, Carl and Fanny would remake the world simply by existing.
But these parents were "an interracial couple out of a dream," Senna explains. In solemn meditative sketches, she details her parents' brief marriage, a welter of raging fights and physical abuse. (Howe sought an order of protection before their divorce.) Howe raised the children on welfare, sometimes sending them as emissaries to ask their mostly drunk, late or AWOL father for money. When Danzy publishes her first novel, Caucasia, her father calls not to congratulate but to demand a loan.
Setting this abject failure up against her current happily married life in L.A., where she is raising her son in a building that is "multicultural to the point of absurdity," Senna returns to her parents' history to see where things went wrong. But while the written history of the Howes is available at any library, Carl's past is a dead end. In uncovering a clearer picture of this one man, his daughter finds a larger metaphor for how slavery erased the history of half a nation. "The different parts of my family, when I really look at them," Senna writes, "seem not segregated at all, but rather interlocking pieces of the same incomplete puzzle."
The story of her unhappy family, she realizes, is also the story of a nation, one equally fractured but full of possibility.
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