Customer Reviews

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the descriptions and the cover, I expected "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" to be a book about finding a multi-racial identity and the problems resulting from being a mixed race family in the 1960's. This is not that book. Early in WDYSLN, the author asks her mother if her mother had loved her father and after some thought the answer comes that it wasn't love, it was something else. I am of an age with the author. I am (as far as I know) white. Yet this book could easily have been about my relationship with my father, it tracks so closely to my own life. The heart of this tale is not really racism. Like everything else in America racism colors and informs other aspects of this story, but the true heart is about being a child of a divorce where one parent is so obviously wrong. How do you reconcile the mistreatment of someone you love, yourself, your siblings, your mother, with the fact of your father?

In Danzy Senna's case, her father is well respected in some circles. Her mother is from a long line of socially prominent people but her father's origins are shrouded in conflicting oral histories and unanswered questions. Laying out her paternal history is as complicated as explaining her father. The author has a perfect understanding of white privilege. She applies this to her father, seeing how identity privilege (or the lack of identity) shaped his views. His choices are his own, but informed not only by racism, but also by the complicated vagabond nature of his early existence. The things he has done right, the obstacles he overcame, the heights he achieved, begin to stand as tall as the actions he is completely in the wrong about, the failures he repeatedly has.

How we view ourselves is the second center of WDYSLN. The author and her siblings, through their father's ernest beliefs, are not conflicted about who they are. There is no question of racial identity in their mind, no blind eye turned to the truth of racism in America. There is almost a slight distance in how she speaks about her maternal ancestors, as though they are hers but not as deeply hers as her identity from her father. Her mother provided her stability, her father provided her self. The mysteries are unraveled in a natural conversational style. Senna writes as though she is telling you a tale one night in her living room, with the occasional side, the natural break in topics, the pace increasing or slowing with the emotion of the detail. It was impossible, for me, not to make an emotional connection with her. I may not know her, our family dynamics be somewhat different, but at the center our stories are the same. I have thought about how to describe WDYSLN without spoiling the details for a few days. I believe I will be thinking about the book itself for many months, if not years. Well worth reading, excellent for a book club, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was unexpectedly more than I anticipated.

One hesitates to judge a memoir harshly. People pull together the shards of their lives the best way they can, and it is a mark of courage to go public with the struggle to make sense of a life. That said, I did not love this book, and I am a memoir fan. There are two reasons. The first was the way perhaps the first half of the book was written. It was written as if the author was not inhabiting the things that happened to her, but was standing at a distance describing someone else. There was a distanced quality, a lack of immediacy. To say "my father punched my mother" is a description. To bring us into the scene where father bursts up the stairs, howls, throws things etc. is to make the scene alive. I do not think Ms. Senna created this sense of immediacy; at least not for me. It got better in the second half of the book.

My second reason for a somewhat tepid review was that the author felt to me still primarily captured by the struggles she was describing. Disliking the WASP side of her family constantly talking about their Mayflower heritage and Boston Brahmin roots, she cannot help but display these roots too many times. Her search for her black father's roots was more compelling, but here, she became trapped in the very labels and racist perceptions she struggled with. Everyone is described by a label. The Ukranian Jew. The Pakistani Muslim. I did not feel Ms. Senna was far away enough from the judging everyone by their label that her father taught her. It felt like she was still continually struggling with it and captured by it without real self-perception. It felt that I was hearing from a person still struggling with and in trouble from her experiences, rather than someone who had primarily resolved them.

But then again, I read it in two sittings over2 days, so it couldn't have been all bad. I just wish Ms. Senna had a bit more perspective. So, sometimes too distanced, and others too overwhelmed... I'd be interested in hearing how she'd write this in 20 years.

Author Danzy Senna writes a compelling autobiography about what it means to be the grown child of an interracial couple, who were married in Boston in 1968.

This book was personally meaningful for me, as I have only half of my own family's history, and the other half remains shrouded in complex secrecy. I envy her ability to have found answers to some of the questions about her family's past.

Senna writes about the complicated place that our generation occupies. On the one hand, technology offers access to sources of information not available to earlier generations of adoptees and adult children searching for answers about murky family histories. The lives of the affluent are well-documented in newspapers. Births, deaths, criminal arrests, even their comings and goings in society pages provide a clear path that can be followed by a determined researcher.

Yet the paths of ethnic and impoverished sides of a family are far more difficult to track down, because their lives weren't considered valuable enough to be written about or even mentioned in books and newspapers. Discovering family secrets rests in large part on the willingness of these family members to talk about what they know, and Senna put in a great deal of work tracking people down, meeting them in person, contacting them through the mail. Even after all of this effort, she was still never fully able to find answers to all of her questions.

I highly recommend this book for anyone dealing with these kinds of family and personal issues, those in search of answers to family secrets and histories.

I enjoyed reading this book, but in the end, didn't feel it really answered the author's questions. Her writing style took a while to get used to, it seemed to me that it started out a little choppy - jumping from one subject to the next too abruptly. After getting used to it, it became much more enjoyable to read.

I was sometimes confused about what the author was really searching for. Obviously, one thing was her heritage, and even that was confusing. It seemed an answer would be found, and yet she kept on searching, only to leave the reader (or at least this reader) wondering exactly what she was looking for.

To me, it wasn't exactly a memoir, and I believe the author could write another book about her apparent love/hate relationship with her father. She did do an excellent job of taking the reader on a trip with her - the visits to old friends of her dad's, and the relatives who brought him up when he wasn't in a home or with his mother. Those parts were fascinating - the old memories, the things she learned about her dad, but it seemed like after her long search was through - she still did not have answers to her main questions. It also seemed to me that, with all the resources at our fingertips today (google, for example), she somehow could have discovered more.

At any rate, I don't see it as truly a "personal history". It was more of an ongoing quest, without a conclusion - a quest that took up just a short period of her life for this book.

Although she explains why she didn't write more about her mother, I wish she had. It might have helped me understand more about what she was truly searching for. I think it would have been much better if the author had written more about herself, and had the book be an actual memoir. She had an interesting life, and an interesting heritage, but instead we are taken on a sort of wild goose chase for her father's roots.

That being said, once I got into the book, it was compelling and easy to read - it's just that the author didn't seem quite sure whose story she was really writing. I enjoy memoirs - they normally have the story of a person's life, along with a conclusion. Those things seemed to be missing in this book. It was still interesting and worth reading, but in my opinion, it could have been much, much better.

When Danzy Senna's parents married in 1968, they asserted their racial freedoms at the height of the civil rights movement. Only a year before, a black man couldn't even marry a white woman. Danzy's mother was the product of generations of blue-blood Bostonians, a people "obsessed with pedigree," the WASPiest of them all. Her father was considered "a Negro of exceptional promise" and successful in his chosen profession as a writer by his mid-twenties. But for reasons unknown (or at least unrevealed), Carl Senna gave himself over to drink and that's when things got ugly. Every aspect of his life suffered and his family was only one casualty.

Danzy Senna takes us with her as she researches her parent's pasts to figure out who her father is. It is a fascinating story of the search for truth through history, but a story that uncovers what so many African Americans already know. White people know where they came from; they can often rattle off their ethnic origins to an 1/8th, but black people seldom know their geneaology; who knows what slave ship our ancestors arrived here on? But the common ailment that afflicts Senna's father respects no race, ethnicity, or background. Sadly, that affliction profoundly colors one's choices and behavior. Above all the muddled racial history, and beyond the question of whether his father was an Irish priest or a Mexican boxer, Carl Senna was an alcoholic. The lies, the drunkenness, the inability to be a productive member of society, the unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for choices and behavior--this is a classic picture of the alcoholic. Throughout the book, we see a picture of a man (and make no doubt about it: Where Did You Sleep Last Night is about Carl Senna) whose life is dominated by alcoholism and the wreckage it creates.

We also see Carl Senna's fractured childhood and the denial about his origins. The memoir raises several sociological questions; for example, why does Danzy Senna see herself as black when she's only 25% black? Is this the influence of the "one-drop rule"? How could she be "socialized black" when her parents divorced when Danzy was 5 and there was no primary influence who was black around? Her father was half-black and half-Mexican, and her mother was 100% WASP. Is blackness a choice? Why didn't she investigate her paternal grandfather with the same zeal she sought information about her paternal grandmother?

Carl Senna was a man shaped far more by alcoholism than a muddled upbringing, regardless of race. That said, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a thought-provoking and fascinating look at the backgrounds of two very different American families who crashed into each other and created Danzy Senna. I recommend this book and I'll pass it on to my interracial friends who'll find common ground in its pages.

Danzy Senna has written, not a book about her parents or her family, but her evolution in understanding where and how she fits in with these people. Her writing style is captivating and concise, getting to the heart of what matters.

Her parents met through a work situation and got married in the late 1960s. This wouldn't be entirely unusual except that it was America in the 1960s, and the couple was an interracial one with histories that were at opposite ends of the spectrum. The background of her mother was Boston Brahmin, the most privileged and oldest families that had come to America, whereas the background of her father was black, southern, possibly Mexican, and largely unknown beyond that.

Senna recalls with clarity the components of her childhood: anger, violence, broken promises, divorced - and disappointed - parents. The crisis of the divorced child is then to choose a parent because to be loyal and loving to both would seem like a betrayal to one or the other. In the same sense, to be a child of a bi-racial couple and to look more like one parent, feels like a disservice to the race of the other parent.

It sounds like Senna has struggled with her identity while her parents have struggled with theirs. This book is a testament to her sorting out who she is, who her parents are, and even where this all leads.

She listens to her mother's stories. She travels with her father down south. She researches documents that might hold clues, and she talks to relatives she's never met. The secrets she uncovers, the places she visits, and the experience she has goes a long way to healing these old wounds.

Senna's account of her personal history is written like it was easy to record, but writing like this only comes about when someone has worked so hard for so long. This is someone who has struggled to understand her personal heritage, the complexities of race in America, and where to fit in between these two.

Danzy Senna's parents marriage came at a time when American society was in the throes of change. Her black father from a poor, unstable family married her white mother who was from a privileged and positioned heritage. Senna recounts her mother's well-documented lineage, but focuses on discovering her father's murky family history. While there are several surprising turns in that journey, I was disappointed to not hear more about her mother and her actual life, which I'm sure must be more than who she was related to. What was it like to be in a mixed race marriage in 1968? Why did her mother marry her father? What was her father expecting from that relationship?

Senna spent a lot of time tracking down the relatives and people from her father's past, but I felt that the basic questions of what her parents actually felt, thought or wanted were unanswered. The story is intriguing, and Senna is a capable writer, but I felt as if I was reading an early draft that need more fleshing out.

I couldn't put this book down once I began it. It is well-written and straightforward in its prose style and has a slight air of a detective novel as the author tells of her tracking down the history of her father's family. In the end, though, I would have liked a more profound meditation on the implications of this family history. The happy I'm-now-a-married-mom-with-a-baby-and-living-in-California-and-aren't-we-a-multicultural-family ending seemed a bit too pat and a tad smug.

Danzy Senna's review is beautifully crafted and written with grace and even elegance. The story of a marriage between two writers--her mother was white, a Bostonian's Bostonian; her father black, born of an uncertain lineage and raised in poverty--it is also the story of Senna's lifelong efforts to come to terms with that marriage, and with her own conflicted and contradictory perceptions of who her parents are.

She intended, she said, to treat both parents equally in this memoir of a challenged family, but it is her father's mysterious past that draws her most strongly, and she spends most of the book attempting to find out who he is. For me, her search is compelling, following the trail from one relative to another, although what she learns and the way she presents that understanding feels anticlimactic. The detective-story conclusion is too easily guessed, and the payoff (what she takes away from the long, arduous search) not quite rich enough to justify the investment of time and energy. I could wish that the conclusions she draws from her explorations were a little heftier--having learned who he is, who she is, who they are, what does it mean?

That said, the read is worth it, for this is an author who knows how to turn life into story, and the lives she stories--including her own--are deeply interesting.

Author Danzy Senna wanted to tell both her parents' stories, to interpret their family histories in a way that made sense to her. She acknowledges that it didn't turn out that way, and that Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History is her father's history; and, of course, her own.

In 1968, Carl Senna and Fanny Howe got married. Carl was a poet, a black man, raised by his mother and with conflicting stories about his father's identity. Danzy didn't know much about his family, and at every turn she encountered another ambiguity. Fanny was the fair-haired daughter of an old, wealthy Boston family; Danzy says that in Boston "...my mother's history--and therefore mine too--was written everywhere...It was quite literally all around me: on street signs and statues, on subway maps and plaques." Herman Melville was related by marriage and used Fanny's great-uncle, slave trader James DeWolf, as a character in Moby Dick.

The marriage was flawed and violent, saddled with too many iconic contrasts: black and white, rich and poor, North and South. The greatest of these contrasts was the first, and Danzy reflects on what his "blackness" meant to Carl Senna. It defined him and by extension his children, who never saw themselves as other than black. When Danzy began to research her story, it was the murky, poorly documented past of her father that absorbed her.

Danzy threads together her own memories, her current relationship with her father, and her search for the Southern relatives she never knew. She finds people from her father's past, but the "truth" is harder to come by. His mother's long-standing relationship with an Irish Catholic priest brings up doubts--did he father her children, or was it an obscure Mexican boxer, Francisco Jose Senna?

The point of this story is not the answers to these and similar questions; surely a quest like Danzy's has more to do with a personal synthesis than with a tidy, certified family tree. She acknowledges that the two parts of her family are "interlocking pieces of the same incomplete puzzle": on one side the DeWolfe slave trader and the winners of the bloody battle against the Wampanoag Tribe, on the other side the descendants of slaves and possibly inheritors of Francisco Jose's Mayan Indian heritage.

I hope Danzy Senna found a sense of rest in the aftermath of writing this compelling story. Her subtitle ("A Personal History") is the key to the book. There is bitter clarity to her prose that puts her own story, her own responses, front and center. She says of her maternal ancestors, "This side of my family was above all else interested in their own narrative..." Danzy Senna carries on that tradition with great passion. Five stars for a sad but important epilogue.

Linda Bulger, 2009