By Pamela Newkirk

On the surface author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and Symptomatic) brings us by now  a highly familiar character in popular literature:  a brilliant, handsome but troubled black, alcoholic and violent husband and deadbeat dad who hails from a dysfunctional and haphazard past.

His mother, a product of the South who moves North has children of unknown paternity who are, for several years, placed in a Catholic orphanage as she chases her dream of a college education.

As an adult, Carl Senna, a child of trauma and charity who resides in a Roxbury housing project meets and marries Fanny Howe, a vibrant, idealistic fellow writer who was white, blond and blue-eyed and the product of Boston Brahmins. Her father was an esteemed pro-civil rights Harvard Law professor who hailed from a long line of blue-blood accomplishment – authors, poets, and scholars whose deeds are celebrated in books and etched on Boston plaques and placards.

On the surface this is an uncommon American tale-the remarkable collision of privilege, poverty, promise and race rendered compelling by seemingly striking contrasts. But underlying this apparent contradiction is an all too common and messy American story of power and powerless, and their overriding influence on myth-making and on whose history gets sanitized and recorded and whose becomes a murky oral account steeped in rumor and shame.

Senna’s characters are not the stuff of fiction, but are drawn from her real life. From shards of truths, half-truths, legend, and a searing search into her personal history, Senna reveals a larger truth of America’s character of racial mixing, undue pride and shame, and unreconciled identities. Senna herself, the offspring of a light brown father and a white mother, is often mistaken for white even as she traverses both sides of the fault line.

Her story is rooted in the hopeful marriage of her parents in 1968, at the height of the nation’s social revolution, and a volatile divorce eight years later. Their union seemed to embody the rebellion of the period and was chronicled in a 1969 feature in the Boston Globe written by Ellen Goodman who described  Fanny Howe as “the slight and feminine descendant-if not heir-of the Howe family, an impressive lineage of scholars, authors and thoroughly Eminent Bostonians.”

Howe’s grandfather had founded The Atlantic Monthly and was a friend of Herman Melville and Henry James. Emphasizing Howe’s break from tradition, and her decision to leave Stanford, she is also described, unlike her two sisters, as “the rebel, the drop-out and now, the author” who married Carl Senna, a “black writer” who “teaches English and African Literature at Tufts University and is an editor at Beacon Press.”

But Danzy Senna delves beneath the surface of starkly clashing histories – of a legendary Boston family and an anonymous  black one — to reveal the underbelly of America where eminent Bostonians  can carefully craft narratives that distance them from a slave-trading  ancestor and nameless, unheralded blacks quietly triumph over centuries of oppression.

There, beneath the patina of white respectability, lay bare the secret trysts between powerless black women like Senna’s paternal grandmother, and a powerful white man, in this case an Irish Catholic priest with whom she maintained a lengthy relationship. In this multilayered account, Senna tries to find a context for a father who held so much promise but dissolved into a violent, aimless, if still charming, free-loader who drowns his brilliance and demons in booze.

She returns to his dark past at Zimmer House, the Catholic orphanage in Jennings. Louisiana, to find generations of poor, black, and often father-less God-loving

people who were unable to escape, as her father had, their bleak existence.

This is not a story of redemption, nor is it one that challenges the common stereotype of worthless black fathers, but it does chip away at the myth of racial segregation and purity and exposes an ugly truth: that many of the nameless deadbeat fathers of black children were often white.

While Senna’s unsettling peek into the heart of America’s darkness was an attempt to reconcile her own personal histories, she offers a quintessentially American story that is more familiar than many on both sides of the racial fault line may care to acknowledge.

Pamela Newkirk is Professor of Journalism, New York University, and the author of Letters from Black America, and other books.