Summary Of Danzy Senna's Novel Caucasia

5. Deck Lee, the absentee father in Danzy Senna’s Novel Caucasia is intent on disproving the concept of race. He believes that race is an illusion, similar to a mask that we wear in order to make sense of the world. He says the mixed children in the United States are used as indicators to alert when the population is becoming too blended. By alluding Birdie to the canary, he is suggesting that she is amongst the first wave of survivors in the battle against miscegenation. That she essentially survived the toxins of race. The metaphor of dirt in BreadGivers also correlates to the theme of the canary in the coal mine. Just like how the bird chokes on the carbon monoxide, the dirt is choking the Jewish immigrants on Hester Street. Sara comments

Both girls are being defined just by where they are spatially located. This politicization of people because of the neighborhood where they reside is also limiting the girls to grow to their true potential. There is semiotics attached to both Hester Street, and Roxbury in their relative novels. Hester Street was located in the capital of Jewish America in New York’s Lower East Side. By 1900 the district was packed with more than 700 people per square acre, making it the most crowded neighborhood on the planet ("Polish/Russian). Although disease was rampant in the city, many people still moved there for a sense of home in a new country which was profoundly different from the one they had fled from. Sara’s family was no exception, and this exiled her away from mainstream society in America. When she finally goes away to college, many of the other students won’t associate with her because she is different than the other students in her looks and mannerisms. After being denied conversation by one boy, Sara attempts to strike up a conversation with a girl in her class: “She nodded politely and smiled. But how quickly her eyes sized me up! It was not an unkind glace. And yet, it said more plainly than words, ‘From where do you come? How did you get here?’” (Yezierska 214). When she was living on Hester Street, she was considered no more than a working-class immigrant girl, to a white American middle-class woman once she has her teaching job. If she had listened to what others believed she was capable of when she was first starting out, she would have never seized the opportunity to go out and prove to them that she is more than her area