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Genna Meade is 18 in the fall of 1974, a freshman at Schuyler College, a liberal arts school near Philadelphia established by her Quaker ancestors. She was born into wealth, but her childhood was lonely, and she was neglected by the adults in her life. "I was invisible to them, as I was invisible to myself."
Minette Swift is also 18, a minister's daughter and scholarship student. She is Genna's roommate, a black girl unlike any other at the predominantly white liberal arts college. There are other dark-skinned women, "but few of them dressed and behaved like Minette Swift, who looked like she'd come by bus from South Philly."
In Black Girl/White Girl, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy alliance between these very different girls in the turbulent years after Vietnam, employing once again her grace as a writer and her eye for the signature details of human lives.
Oates runs two stories along parallel lines, the titular one being the relationship between self-effacing, eager-to-please Genna and angry, arrogant Minette. It is a union created by circumstance and destined to end tragically.
The book opens 15 years after Minette perished in mysterious circumstances on the eve of her 19th birthday. Thirtysomething Genna introduces the story, told largely in flashback, as her inquiry into a death she believes she might have prevented.
Malleable Genna is captivated by her strong-willed roommate. And there is something like idolatry in her persistent, ill-received efforts to win Minette over.
Minette refuses to take root in this place of privilege, stomping angrily about, greeting the most innocuous overtures with an irate "'Scuseme!"
The tandem tale is Genna's alone -- her past and present roles in the dysfunctional family of "Mad Max" Meade, the radical attorney famous for defending draft dodgers. Just as Genna's Quaker ancestors operated an Underground Railroad to lead slaves to freedom in the 19th century, Maximilian Meade appears to have his own underground network, a web of secrecy that frightens and confuses his young daughter.
Minette's and Max's slow, downward spirals overlap and entrap Genna as her eyes slowly open to the dangers that pursue them both.
Black Girl/White Girl is ultimately an indictment of white, liberal hypocrisy in those troubled years that shaped the generation of Americans now running the country.
Oates' language has an understated beauty in telling a story that is heartbreaking not just because of what unfolds in the fictional landscape but also because of what is so eloquently resurrected from our very real, very compromised past.
Black Girl/White Girl
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco, $25.95, 272 pp.
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