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Danzy Senna's "Caucasia," which is fiction, has the ring of a more recognizable truth throughout. Senna, a biracial 26-year-old, has written what one can only guess is a partly autobiographical novel. It shows with devastating clarity what happens when the well-meaning but solipsistic white radicalism of the late '60s collides with the corrective but also solipsistic black nationalism of the early '70s. As always, it's not only the people driving those runaway ideologies who are injured; innocent bystanders are, too.

In "Caucasia," those bystanders are children, Cole and Birdie Lee. Their mother, Sandy, is the shy, overweight daughter of a Cambridge blue blood (Cotton Mather is a cherished ancestor) and a liberal Harvard academic. Their father, Deck, is a bright, upwardly mobile graduate student who grew up scant miles (and yet light years) away, in the Orchard Street Projects of Dorchester. Like a lot of interracial couples at the time, Sandy Lodge and Deck Lee marry in the assumption that the Gordian knot that is America's race problem would loosen, if not come undone, in the foreseeable future. It doesn't, of course. In Boston it grows even tighter, as the tension surrounding the great busing experiment of the early 1970s polarizes the city's black and white populations to an even greater degree.

As their parents' marriage disintegrates under the twin pressures of their mother's radical leftist activities and their father's deepening submersion into his newfound interest in black culture, Birdie and Cole are left to pick their way through a social minefield. After years of home schooling, they're plunked into the Nkrumah School in Roxbury, a private academy stressing black culture and politics with a nationalist world view -- another one of the grand social experiments of the time. (There were real-life counterparts, like the Nairobi School in East Palo Alto, Calif., but they have mostly died out now.) Cole, who is brown-skinned with her father's kinky hair and her mother's green-gray eyes, fits in immediately. Birdie, ivory-skinned with straight brown hair, finds every day a torture. Like Toi Derricotte in later life, she's made to declare her blackness over and over to disbelieving students who wonder how someone who looks as she does can be trusted to think as they do.

Eventually, things fall apart. In a disastrous, ad hoc agreement between the estranged parents, Deck splits in the middle of the night for Brazil, taking Cole with him. Hours afterward, Birdie and her mother depart too. It seems her mother's radical activity (unspecified throughout the book, but inferred as hiding stockpiled weapons for use in some future revolutionary insurrection) has caught the eye of the dreaded feds. Or at least her mother suspects that's the case. To escape surveillance, Sandy has an "ingenious solution": She and Birdie will simply disappear into America. "The FBI would be looking for a white woman on the lam with her black child. But the fact that I could pass, she explained, with my straight hair, pale skin, my general phenotypic resemblance to the Caucasoid race, would throw them off our trail. The two bodies that had made her stand out in a crowd -- made her more than just another white woman -- were gone; now it was just the two of us. My body was the key to our going incognito ... We'd be scot-free, she told me, a couple of new people overnight."

And so they do just that, plunging Birdie into a world of carefully crafted subterfuge. She's rechristened Jesse Goldman, daughter of a distinguished, recently deceased Jewish classics professor and a goy mother. Their lack of contacts with relatives is explained with oblique references to joint parental disapproval of this fabricated, mixed-religion marriage. Birdie passes reluctantly, not to gain entry to a racially exclusive venue or to avoid painful or embarrassing disclosure but to save her mother from apprehension and jail.

Jesse's journey back to being Birdie takes the reader through a host of '70s scenes that have, by now, become clichés, fodder for the rightist rants of people like David Horowitz and Bill Bennett. The escapees sojourn at a feminist commune in upstate New York. They rent a small cottage in rural New Hampshire, the tenants of limousine liberals who sneer at the locals for their prejudices, yet get caught with their own racial panties showing a few times. She gets an earful of what her white, prole peers, less worldly and far less educated, think of black folks: They're stupid. They're dirty. They're perpetually horny. The men have huge dicks, the mere contemplation of which gives the girls, with their Farrah Fawcett feather cuts and glittery nails, a delicious frisson. "My grandmother in Boston used to say that 'the Negroes should stop obsessing about race. Then maybe everyone else would,'" Jesse observes. "But I was finding that in New Hampshire, the white folks needed no prompting. It came up all the time, like a fixation, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it."

In the end, that "twoness" that DuBois talked about so famously becomes too much to bear, both for the fictional Birdie and the real Derricotte. No longer willing to live in peace as a white girl, Birdie flees New Hampshire and her racial camouflage, determined to return to Boston to find, somehow, the lost, overtly black half of her family. Derricotte, after decades of serving as an unwilling spy in the war between the races, decides to declare herself and be damned. "I think that most people protect themselves, their relationships, their friends, by not quite facing the worst. On the contrary, I go searching for it. Especially in myself. I keep telling the truth even when it is abhorrent."

Much of what is written in The "Black Notebooks" is abhorrent, especially in the current light of PC thinking. It's obvious that this was a painful book for Derricotte to write -- and it was quite painful to read. But like Senna's "Caucasia," it should be read. Both books raise issues about race and how we continue to perceive it, and show that in our evolution on things racial, we are not nearly as developed as we'd like to think.
SALON | April 15, 1998

Karen Grigsby Bates is an Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where she writes on issues of race and popular culture.

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B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N:

"CAUCASIA"
BY DANZY SENNA | RIVERHEAD PRESS | 368 PAGES