Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

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

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.

As one who does genealogy research, I happen to believe, as most genealogists do, that family history is a vital part of one's life. Knowing where you come from and the journey of one's ancestors can be self-affirming. But what if your history is convoluted, filled with pain, distortions, lies and gaping holes? Author Danzy Senna finds out that family memories can open a Pandora's box of angst that can pose even more questions in her memoir/ family history, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History. Senna, author of the novels, Caucasia and Symptomatic, is the product of a biracial marriage between a white woman and black man, a marriage that went bad and resulted in bitterness for all parties involved. As Senna was about to give birth to her son, she reflected on the journey she took to solve the mysteries her family history held. Her mother's family history is straightforward. Fanny Howe, a writer and poet, came from a Brahmin Boston family with roots back to the country's forefathers. Her ancestors included the slave traffickers De Wolf family, literary giants, and Irish aristocracy. The libraries are full of books on her family's illustrious past. And then there was Senna's father. What she and her siblings had been told about Carl Senna was that he was born in the segregated southern state of Louisiana to Anna, his black mother. On the other hand, his paternity was questionable. He had been told he was the son of Francisco Senna, a boxer from Mexico, who abandoned the family when Carl was very young. His childhood was disrupted by his mother's repeatedly leaving her three children with various "relatives" and at one point an orphanage in Alabama for three years while she either pursued an education, or played piano in nightclubs during the 1940s and 50s. At least that was the story told. With meticulous research, Danzy was able to reveal her father's story but for every answer there was another question. Just who were her father's people and what was the real truth? Who and what was she to believe? Senna had a tenuous relationship with her father. Between her brother and sister, she was the one who carried the bitterest feelings of their parents' divorce. She describes her siblings and her as a product of a mistake of idealistic parents of the rebellious 60s. Her mother felt that mixed marriages could not work in the U.S. but it would seem that her father's alcoholism and abusive behavior was the main cause for the failed marriage. However, it was not as simple as black and white--no pun intended. Carl Senna was a brilliant writer, editor, and professor of English and African-American literature. He was able to escape the poverty of his southern past, becoming highly educated and marrying up. His descent from a respectable husband and father to a drunk who could not hold a job and uphold his responsibility to pay child support is a tragedy; he would say an American tragedy caused by the social aspects of racism and poverty in

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.

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.