An Odyssey Through Family Roots Turned Upside Down

Denny’s Tapes by Carolyn Meyer (Margaret K. McElderry Books: $12.95 hardcover; 209 pages)

Most young-adult protagonists are white and comfortably middle-class, however alienated they may feel from their background. The much rarer black main characters are typically poorer and often more thoroughly rooted in their cultural milieu. Half-black and half-white, Denny Brown confounds and partially reverses the reader’s expectations as he tape-records his journey across America in search of his roots.

Denny is 17 and has never thought too much about his mixed racial heritage. He knows his white mother divorced his black father and a bit more, but he has never probed the background of either. Life in a small Pennsylvania college town is pleasant enough. He gets along reasonably well with the white doctor his mother has married, but his life changes dramatically when his stepsister, Stephanie, the doctor’s daughter by a previous marriage, comes to live with Dr. West and soon becomes Denny’s first love.

Though this tangled family situation nicely emblematizes the far-from-idyllic backgrounds many contemporary teen-agers contend with, the tensions at home aren’t the heart of the novel. Young love and Steffy’s presence hover atmospherically, but the story is about roots, rather than romance.

Interracial Affair

Furious at the interracial affair between his dancer daughter and the stepson he only tolerates, Dr. West angrily brands Denny with an ugly epithet. This sets in motion the boy’s odyssey to find out on which side of the racial divide he belongs.

His stepfather’s hateful remarks precipitate Denny’s expedition to find out more about both his father and his mother. Armed with a bit of money from a part-time job and tapes on which to record his story, Denny sets off in “Mary,” his aging car, first for Chicago, home of his black grandmother, then for Nebraska, where his white grandmother lives, and finally on to Berkeley, where he ends up awaiting the return of his musician father.

In the course of the drive, he has many adventures (some scary and some realistically and hilariously amorous) and eventually discovers where he really belongs and what he wants to do with his life.

In a rather pat reversal, Denny’s black relatives turn out to be very upper class indeed. Meeting the matriarch of the Brown clan, his grandmother Eugenia, is a crash course in black history at its most prestigious; Denny discovers he’s kin to Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. No wonder his father is a musician.

Education in Sex

His grandmother lectures him on music, poetry, class and manners--her side of his heritage is much superior to his white ancestors. But Denny learns something else in Chicago; he may love Steffy, but sex with Roxanne, another of the clan, is an education in itself.

So is finding Grace Sunderland, the poor old white grandmother, ailing and dependent on the meager sympathies of her son Tom and his horrible wife. Denny makes contact with his grandmother, who transcends her prejudices to bask in the warmth of their relationship.

“My life is full of women,” Denny thinks, heading for his father. But his contact with his female relatives has prepared him to find out who that father “is so I can start to find out who I am.”

He looks, sounds and plays like his father, says his dad’s friend. Thinking again of Paul Robeson, Denny knows he’ll wait for dad and for the flowering of the musical heritage within him. It is a tidy ending for an upbeat book.