The following is from Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. Senna is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
Brett had once been, like Jane, a writer of that most doomed of genres, literary fiction. He had written and published just one book, a pithy short story collection called Lemon Rock. He had also, like Jane, been the product of an unsuccessful interracial marriage that had ended in divorce. In the graduate workshop where they met, they had been the only two people of color. The white kids in their cohort used to say that he and Jane looked like siblings. It wasn’t true—their hair textures and features were quite different—but to the untrained Caucasoid eye, light brown equaled beige, 3B hair texture was identical to 2B curls. Potato, potahto, mulatto, mulatta. But it was true that in that room of white faces they had developed a fierce, almost sibling bond, and the connection had held even as their lives had gone in such different directions.
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When Brett shifted to television, his career leapt ahead. He specialized in supernatural phenomena, mostly zombies. It was as if the same blankness that had made his fiction writing fall flat became a superpower in television. He worked his way up in the bright, glittering industry that had hovered behind Jane for years while she stubbornly hunched over her novel, pretending not to notice it. By the time he was thirty-nine, he was a showrunner. Now he was beginning to direct.
Was Brett happy with his success? Did the money make up for what seemed to Jane rather mind-numbing work? She wasn’t sure. Brett sometimes spoke about wanting to make a different sort of show, something more personal, a show, he said, about people like him and Jane—a show with two halfie leads. He’d said he wanted the fact of them being biracial to be not the subject of the show, exactly, but just something they happened to be—when race came up at all, it would be more an impetus for humor than something tortured and heavy. In other words, it would be a comedy, not a tragedy, something so punchy and funny that people wouldn’t remember all those old-timey tragedies of yore—the Douglas Sirk of it all—and would only see the future of mulattos, the whole sunshiny vista that lay ahead. He called it his vanity project and usually ended his musings by saying he’d never get the time to do it, he had too much else on his plate. Jane always encouraged him to find the time if he really wanted to make it, but secretly she hoped he would never attempt his race comedy. For one thing, he’d make a mess of the subject. He lacked the invisible thing that she possessed, that thing nobody talked about anymore: Black consciousness. If you did not get it as a child, as she had, it would not come to you later, not really. You couldn’t pick it up in a college AfAm seminar after the fact. She thought it best, given Brett’s childhood, that he stick to zombies and Thor and giant arachnids.
Once, at a bar, Brett had told Jane, drunkenly, that the older he got the more he valued friends who had been his friends through all his life changes. People who were witnesses to the whole arc of it. He told her that night that he loved her. Not in a creepy way but in an intense way that surprised her, his eyes burning. She got the sense that she was a thread he was trying to hold on to, a tenuous tie to both the starving artist he’d never become and the Blackness that was always just out of his reach.
She’d been pleased to discover that Brett still had a copy of her first novel on his office bookshelves. She could not remember having written the inscription though. Fuck these pale-faced motherfuckers, it read. Let’s burn this house down. Love, Jane.
For the past six months, Jane had been following the advice she gave her students. She woke each morning before dawn, when Lenny and the kids were still asleep, and walked barefoot across the yard to the studio, not pausing to make coffee or check email or brush her teeth. She wasn’t even fully awake when she sat down at the desk in the semidarkness and began to write.
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From Colored Television by Danzy Senna. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2024 by Danzy Senna.
