Colored Television

“Make this brotherman see the truth, that he needs to marry a non-Hispanic quadroon like you if he values his life and longevity. This is bigger than you and your silly heteronormative daydreams, Jane. This is about the universe. And trust me, you don’t want to fuck with the universe because that bitch has no mercy.”

This dialogue from the psychic Wesley Brown points to how Jane must use decisions within the framework the universe has given here. Wesley uses vernacular, charged language to drive his point home. He calls Lenny a “brotherman,” a term for a Black man used by other Black men. He refers to Jane as a “non-Hispanic quadroon.” The “non-Hispanic” label is a nod to the way race is categorized in the United States on official documents currently, whereas “quadroon” is an offensive, antiquated, and racist term for someone who has one Black grandparent. Jane and Lenny cannot escape these labels, but she can decide how to operate within them.

“Now she wondered if maybe writing—language itself—was like the eggs she carried. Maybe the novel she was writing in the middle of her life was running the same risk. Maybe it too was a high-risk pregnancy.”

This quote makes an analogy between The Demands of Motherhood and the demands of being a literary writer. Many writers compare writing a novel to giving birth. The topic Jane is writing about, the history of “mulatto” people in the United States, is “high-risk,” just as her “geriatric” pregnancy was considered high-risk.

“She was attempting the impossible—to write a history for a people without a race. Without a race, one could not have a history—and without a history, one could not have a race.”

In the United States, The Commodification of Racial Identity and its narrativization are predicated on having an easily legible identity. The “mulatto” characters in Jane’s novel resist this kind of neat label because they are a mix of different racial identities. The novel suggests that the reason her novel is rejected by the publisher because it is not commercially viable due to this.

“Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.”

In addition to struggling with her biracial identity and how people perceive her, Jane feels her class categorization is ambiguous. She describes this situation as undignified because when Balancing Artistic Integrity and Financial Security, her parents opted for the former. This reflection is an early indication that Jane will jettison her artistic goals to differentiate her choices from those her parents made. The line, “They had picked poetry over profit,” is a pithy and alliterative way of articulating their choices.

“Jane’s father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn’t want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had.”

This quote provides insight into Jane’s upbringing and how it orients her understanding of her racial identity. It clarifies that while Jane envies the wealth and security of her white peers, like her childhood friend Emma, Jane has never desired to be white. This points to how confident Jane is as a biracial woman.

“They both think I should put it in a drawer and never look at it again and move on with my life. Become a woman who dabbles in short stories, occasionally publishes in Ploughshares. They want me to drift away into the purgatory of the midlist author. They’re firing me.”

Jane comments derisively on the feedback her literary agent and publisher give her to abandon her novel. Ploughshares is a well-respected but small literary magazine and publishing house based at Emerson College in Boston. By mentioning “dabbling in short stories” and “occasionally publish[ing] in Ploughshares,” Jane is implying that they think she is only fit for “minor literature” rather than the major, genre-bending literary novel of which she thinks she is capable.

“She felt superior to Brett and all his industry friends. She felt superior to anyone who was not doing the work of high art, of elevating the culture. She’d felt sorry for Brett that he had given up on literary fiction after just the one slender story collection—sorry for him that he had allowed himself to be dragged down into the lower depths. He’d given up this promise of glory and immortality to spout drivel in that land where original ideas go to die.”

The “industry” is shorthand for the Hollywood writing and television industry. At the outset, Jane feels that Brett has chosen financial security over his artistic integrity and that she is morally superior to him for having done so. This quote likewise raises the idea of “minor literature” and “major literature.” Jane condemns Brett for only having the talent to do “minor literature,” “one slender story collection,” whereas she has dreams of “glory and immortality” as a novel writer.

“If every story needed an inciting incident, when the character’s flawed but stable reality was destabilized and they were forced on the journey that would teach them who they really needed to be, maybe the call from Honor was that inciting incident. Maybe it marked the end of her flawed, delusional life as a novelist. And here was the day her story could finally include those six words Dennis said every narrative needed: ‘And then one day everything changed.’”

Although eschewing and criticizing the write-by-numbers literary advice her former program director Dennis gave her, Jane cannot resist applying a literary structure to her life. She thinks of herself as if she was the protagonist in a novel and describes her rejection by her editor as an “inciting incident.” This tendency to interpret her life through the lens of storytelling makes her similar to Flaubert’s protagonist, Madame Bovary.

“A lie well told, often enough told, began to eat one’s memory. And over time, it became harder to say where the fiction ended and the truth began. And maybe if you lied long enough, you became a lie.”

In this quote, Jane is describing the ancestry and heritage of the Melungeons of Appalachia. However, it could just as easily describe Jane herself. Her spiral begins with a single lie, which then compounds. As a result, over time, she begins to conflate fiction with reality and sees herself as a television writer despite not having a contract.

“They would be a family just like Jane’s, only this family would be the stuff not of struggle and strife—and want, so much want—but of jubilant, knee-slapping comedy.”

Jane’s idea for a television show is an idealized version of her actual family. She feels burdened by the financial insecurity and tension that characterizes her real family life. To escape these burdens, she transforms them into “jubilant, knee-slapping comedy.” The use of this expression here is sardonic, suggesting that Jane recognizes the shallowness of this endeavor even as she also desires her life to be more reflective of this idealized, televised version.

“She felt like a different person in so many ways now. Like an improved Jane. The differences between Jane the TV writer and Jane the novelist were subtle but profound: Jane the TV writer was already a better mother than Jane the novelist.”

Jane begins to live a double life. Senna represents this bifurcation of her personality in the use of the expressions “Jane the TV writer” and “Jane the novelist.” Whereas “Jane the novelist” struggles with The Demands of Motherhood, she feels “Jane the TV writer” is better equipped. This language is also suggestive of a doll, like the American Girl dolls she buys her daughter. Jane feels as if she can change her identity in the same way that a doll can change with a new outfit.

“As Jane listened to the episode, keeping an ear out for lines she and Hampton could steal, the perkie still pulsing through her veins, she imagined herself a part of the city in an exciting new way, industrious and practical, essential in a way she’d never felt as a novelist. She was a person with a job to do, a boss to please, a demand to fulfill.”

Jane began her stint as a television writer by stealing a concept from her friend Brett. She is attempting to further it by “steal[ing]” “lines” from a radio program. This highlights how television writing, as Senna portrays it in the novel, relies on theft. Jane feels “essential,” suggesting that she is excited about the possibility of financial security in a way that artistic integrity never excited her.

“The big turn-on in this TV world, the thing that gets them hard, is success. Seasons. Deals. There’s something very antipleasure about this town. They drink water and green tea and see their trainers. And they work, Lenny. Really fucking hard. All night long. It’s all going into my novel, Lenny.”

In this excerpt of dialogue, Jane, high on drugs and seemingly unbeknownst to herself, describes her view of the Hollywood television industry. She is using short, staccato sentences and repeating her husband’s name in a way that resembles the way a television detective or businessperson might speak. It shows how Jane is coming to embody a television character, as she does not speak in this way in her typical daily life before this.

“[P]eople don’t realize that the thing that separates real artists from wannabes is real ones finish what they started. Persistence. Commitment to a work nobody seems to want or need until you show them what it was they were missing.”

In this quote, Lenny articulates the importance of holding onto artistic integrity rather than focusing on financial security. He represents a true artistic vision. This is a moment of irony, as Lenny is congratulating Jane for holding onto her artistic integrity because he is unaware that she has given up on her novel.

“I’ve got Bruce Borland breathing down my neck, waiting for me to hand him some Black and brown and yellow comedy. He’s like this hungry monster. Diversity, diversity, diversity. And the thing is—if I don’t do this really fucking soon, as in this minute, he’s going to lose interest. The default is whiteness. They get this flurry of interest in us every few years, but if you don’t strike fast and hard, they return to the tundra.”

In this quote, Hampton Ford articulates the pressures a Black Hollywood executive is under as relates to diversifying television programming. He explains how the pressures connected to The Commodification of Racial Identity ultimately come from white television executives at the top of the hierarchy like Bruce Borland. “The tundra,” or the white television landscape, is the default.

“While the traditional mulatto becomes a lighter version of the American Negro, the Melungeon, with all that blending and blurring over too many generations, looks strange and indefinable, neither Black nor white and perhaps not American at all. Whereas the standard mulatto is a proud and striving emblem of Negro pride, the triracial figure remains on the edges of society, unclaimed and unaffiliated, and all too often trapped in a life of petty crime.”

This quote comes from an excerpt of the fictional article by Hiram Cavendish that Senna cites throughout Colored Television. It uses faux-anthropological language that pathologizes racial typologies in a way that is typical of 19th-century writing on race and crime. Ironically, the way that Cavendish writes about the Melungeons of Appalachia is not dissimilar from the othering view that Jane has of them in her writing, as when she describes them “cavorting, playing their banjos” (49). This parallel suggests that Jane has internalized more racial stereotyping from a white perspective than she realizes.

“He was still talking. Telling her that it was going to make him look bad if the first show he brought before the network in his new role, under his new deal, was a pitiful weird little show that wasn’t even really very biracial. He said it was fine, creatively—they could make the show about a fucking Smurf if they wanted to—but it would only die in the pitch room, and did she want that? ‘Every show lives or dies on its premise,’ he kept repeating.”

Hampton Ford’s abusive and manipulative character comes through in this quote. He takes the pressure white network executives put on him to commodify racial identity and pressures Jane in turn. Most cuttingly, he criticizes her ideas as not “even really very biracial” because she does not put the Bunch family’s racial identity front and center.

“Had Hampton gotten far enough into her novel to finally realize she was an imposter? And which part was she faking? That she was a television writer or that she was a novelist? That she was Black or that she was white?”

Jane lives in constant fear of “disappearing” due to her class, race, and artistic position, which she views as a constant in-betweenness. She counts on Hampton’s response to her novel’s manuscript to validate who she is. Her lies have become so all-encompassing that she frets that it extends to her literary work, about which she previously felt confident.

“‘Why are we still even talking about the novel?’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about something more salient. Like your friend Lincoln Perry. And the show. The one you were just pretending to pretend to write.’”

In this quote, Lenny confronts Jane about her lies. He derisively refers to Hampton Ford as “Lincoln Perry,” a Black actor who made his money playing on stereotypes about Black people.

“It jangled some deeper part of her psyche—a sense she held, and had maybe always held, that her life out here with Lenny wasn’t solid or even real, and that it could all, in one instant, evaporate. She found herself checking her face in the mirror sixteen times a day wherever she could, not because she enjoyed seeing her frizzy hair and eyes ringed by dark circles but because she wanted to make sure her face was still there.”

Jane is partially defined by her sense of transience and the possibility that she could disappear. This leads her to constantly check for her image in the mirror, a recurring motif throughout the book. Her marriage to Lenny defines part of her sense of security in her reality.

“Will you stop with this poor Black child shit? You grew up a mulatto child of bohemian parents. Bread and Roses shit. All that cultural capital to go with your government cheese.”

In this quote, Lenny criticizes Jane for “this poor Black child shit.” This is a reference to the opening scene of The Jerk, which opens on a shot of Steve Martin saying, “I was born a poor Black child.” Senna references this earlier in the text when Jane teases Lenny on one of their first dates that “he was born a rich black child” (3). Its use here highlights the class divide between Jane and Lenny. He further notes the “Bread and Roses shit,” a reference to the idea that the working class should have both food and beauty or art, an idea with which Jane’s parents would have raised her.

“The mulatto, he said, would always be only halfway to becoming something else, and as such, they would either be swallowed into the great maw of the white world or transformed, by the peculiar alchemy of the one-drop rule, into real Negroes. Like Pinocchio, who existed for a time in the liminal state between toy and human, between imitation and real, the mulatto, Cavendish wrote, was perched on a threshold—a magical in-between state, a center that could not hold. Eventually one side or the other would get you—and then you would cease to exist.”

This excerpt comes from the final quotation of the fictional Hiram Cavendish’s anthropological article. In it, Cavendish articulates the idea that the “mulatto” would eventually disappear after being either absorbed into Black or white society. This echoes Jane’s perennial fear of disappearing, as shown in her constant checking in mirrors to see if she can see her reflection.

“Jane had wanted to be that woman, the chosen mulatto for Hampton’s ‘Project Rebrand a Race.’ Pick me, pick me, let me be your guide through the land of half-breeds.”

In this quote, Jane reckons with her complicity in Hampton Ford’s desire for her to embody The Commodification of Racial Identity. She uses the phrase “pick me,” which alludes to the slang term “pick-me girl.” Typically, a pick-me girl seeks male validation, often at the expense of other girls. In this case, Jane is seeking male validation of her racial identity.