Arts

Old WASP Money Meets New Black Poetry

A Q&A with writer Danzy Senna.

In 1968, Carl Senna married Fanny Howe. He was a black American poet and writer from the Deep South; she was the daughter of an old money, white American family with members who had founded the Atlantic Monthly and owned slaves. The marriage was doomed, but it produced author Danzy Senna, who came of age after the break-up. She soon realized that her parents’ story was both an emblem of a new, hybrid national history and a cautionary tale about the limits of love and the importance of origins.

Senna gamely excavates her own quintessentially American ancestry in her new memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? Her previous books, Caucasia and Symptomatic, are fictionalized treatments of race and identity in America, where self-consciousness, bloodlines, and cultural disjuncture reign. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is Senna’s true story—at once a portrait of her family and a detective story. Senna travels from the American South to 1960s Boston in order to discover the forgotten history of her black relatives.

Senna spoke to Double X from her home in Los Angeles about the difference between fact and fiction and “optical ineptitude” when it comes to race.

What prompted you to write a memoir?

In the differences between my family histories, there’s an implicit question about race and the way narratives are told or buried. I thought about how much documentation there was of my mother’s family history, and then the void on my father’s side. But it started from a more personal curiosity about my father and my grandmother and where they had come from.

I thought the book was going to be more of a genealogical mystery and excavation when I began it. And then my father took me down south and I realized then that I was going to have to put in this more personal narrative as well—because that was driving my interest in the story. And I didn’t really want to write a memoir, but it kind of snuck up on me.

Obviously there’s an outline that is “true” here—but often you only have a few documents and some photographs, so you fill in the blanks. How did you put together the stories of your grandmother, Anna, your shadowy grandfather, and others in your father’s past?

To fill in the blanks with my imagination felt like such a different beast to me than writing fiction. And yet at the same time I guess I drew on my fictional sensibilities in trying to create a sense of suspense and the pacing of a detective novel. Because I wanted it to have that feeling of what I had experienced while I was trying to find this story.

A memoir is so much about what you leave out of the story. I had hundreds and hundreds of pages that I never used in this book. I realized that part of what makes a memoir work is choosing to create a lot of white space around things and letting those things breathe.

In the book, you struggle with the question of who is biologically related to you, and to one another. You’re frequently looking for some tether, the “one drop” of shared blood that proves a common history. How did this complicate for you the very idea of family?

Part of the subtext of the book is that I was having babies while I wrote it. So I created my own family as I excavated and explored the past, and I was creating my own family in the future.

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