Caucasia

“One day I was playing schoolgirl games with my sister and our friends in a Roxbury playground. The next I was a nobody, just a body without a name or a history, sitting beside my mother in the front seat of our car, moving forward on the highway, not stopping.” 

This passage shows how abruptly Birdie’s life changed and how she loses herself in the process of changing identities. It also introduces the theme of watching the world go by through the window of a speeding car, which literalizes Birdie’s disconnection from the world and herself. 

“Before I ever saw myself, I saw my sister. When I was still too small for mirrors, I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence.” 

The beginning of Chapter 1 sets up one of the novel’s main premises, which is how Birdie identifies with her older sister Cole. Only when they attend school for the first time does Birdie realize that people perceive them as racially different. Their difference is crucial to their parents’ decision to split them up—Cole with their black father and Birdie with their white mother—and to Birdie’s identity conflict. 

“The Elemenos, she said, could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again. She said they were a shifting people, constantly changing their form, color, pattern, in a quest for invisibility.” 

The girls’ secret language includes a mythos of color-shifting people—a metaphor for Birdie’s ability to blend in with her surroundings. Like chameleons, the Elemenos use their color-shifting ability as a survival mechanism. This implies that remaining visible is dangerous. Birdie questions what kind of life she will lead if survival means having to disappear (7). The novel seeks to answer this philosophical question.