But even if the novel has lost something of its sanctity in Colored Television, it still captures more of the complexities and contradictions of identity. From within Senna’s novel, Jane recalls a scene from her dead-end epic, one focused on the isolated Melungeon community whose light-skinned inhabitants venture into town only to buy necessities, living under the cover story that they are of Portuguese descent in order to escape scrutiny. One night, one of the children calls to his mother, homesick and crying that he wants to go home. “The boy cried in great heaving wails and began to call out for Portugal, a country where he’d never been. The mother stroked the boy’s back and told him to hush, but the boy only cried harder until finally she told him that she missed Portugal too, and that someday, someday, they’d go back.” It is here in this made-up moment, a fiction nestled inside a fiction nestled inside the larger fiction of race as essence rather than the shifty, market-driven thing that it is, that we find the book’s most urgent argument for the necessity of storytelling. A fiction can provide a home that can be cried for, satisfying a need to mourn that is more concrete than the loss itself. It may be a false home—but that doesn’t mean the tears can’t be real. {read}