Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

About this book

When Danzy Sennas parents got married in 1968 they seemed poised to defy history. They were two brilliant young American writers from wildly divergent backgroundsa white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. They married in a year that seemed to separate the past from the present; together these two would snub the histories that divided them and embrace a radical future. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later it was as one friend put it the ugliest divorce in Bostons historya violent traumatic war that felt all the more heartrending given the hopeful symbolism of their union. Decades later Senna looks back not only at her parents divorce but beyond it to the opposing American histories that her parents had tried so hard to overcome. On her mothers side of the family she findsin carefully preserved documentsthe chronicle of a white America both illustrious and shameful. On her fathers she discovers through fragments and shreds of evidence a no less remarkable history. As she digs deeper into this unwritten half of the story she reconstructs a longburied family mystery that illuminates her own childhood. In the process she begins to understand her difficult father the power and failure of her parents union and finally the forces of history. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is at once a potent statement of personal identity a challenging look at the murky waters of American ancestry and an exploration of narrativesthe narratives we create and those we forget. Senna has given us an unforgettable testimony to the paradoxesthe pain and the prideembedded in history family and race.