64 pages • 2 hours read
Kim JohnsonThe Color of a Lie
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
Music shows up often in the novel, from Calvin’s history as a jazz musician, to music’s relationship to passing, to Sojourner being a music school. Throughout the novel, music symbolizes identity.
As a jazz musician, Calvin feels connected to music by Black artists. His father makes him quell this interest, saying that “[e]ven Black artists who [a]re played on mainstream white radio stations [a]ren’t allowed” (28). He thinks this would make it more likely for their true identities to fall under suspicion. With his history of playing in Chicago jazz clubs, music is a huge part of Calvin’s identity that he must suppress at Levittown. When he makes friends with Eugene and Harry, even before they form an informal jazz trio, Calvin narrates that their friendship feels “like music,” using a metaphorical relationship between friendship and music to explain how they make him feel able to express his true identity.
At the Heritage dance, Calvin notes that they only play songs by white musical artists. Rather than playing recent originals by Black artists, they play songs that were “already copied by white artists like Bill Haley and His Comets and Elvis Presley” (187). Musicians like Presley famously copied the sound, style, and songs of Black musicians. Though Presley was a controversial figure in his time, his white privilege allowed him to find great success that the Black artists who originated his songs and sound were not allowed to. Listening to this appropriated music makes Calvin meditate on his own passing identity in his heavily segregated world. Music thus relates to Racial and Social Inequality in Midcentury America.
This contrasts sharply with the music at Sojourner’s dance. The moment Calvin approaches, he finds himself “moving with the rat-tat-tat of the music” (194), with which he identifies more. The song that most clearly symbolizes identity and relates to the theme of The Psychological Impact of Passing is “The Great Pretender” by The Platters. When Calvin hears it at the Sojourner dance, he feels like the lyrics “I’m the great pretender […] seem to be what I’m not, you see” are spoken directly about him and the way he passes in Levittown (197).
The Green Book
The Green Book is a motif that relates to the themes of Racial and Social Inequality in Midcentury America and The Psychological Impact of Passing. It is a “guidebook for Black travellers to find safe routes along which they could drive, eat, and stay overnight” (61). Started in the 1930s, long before desegregation, the book kept Black travelers safe in a country dominated by racial prejudice and inequality.
After returning home from World War II, Calvin’s father used his passing privilege to work for the Green Book. He and Calvin would arrive at a location, and if they were accepted, he would bring out Robert, who “couldn’t pass as easily” (62). This two-tiered test was necessary to see whether the staff would react badly to someone who had darker skin. If Robert was also safe, they’d pass along the location to the Green Book staff. They’d use their passing to help keep people safe.
Before moving to Levittown, these were the circumstances in which Calvin and his father purposely tried to pass as white. Calvin did a similar thing with his friends, passing in “white communities without a care” to benefit his darker-skinned friends or as “a game” (61). His friends called Calvin “their very own Green Book” (61), playing off Calvin’s surname, Greene, to evoke how his light skin can keep them safe in places with extreme inequality and prejudice.
Calvin uses the Green Book and his passing privilege again while taking Eugene and Harry to Virginia and later saving Thurgood Marshall. In a diner marked safe, the waitress makes Eugene and Harry, both dark-skinned, show their money to her before ordering. Eugene asks, “This kind of place gets the okay to be in the Green Book, where they make you show your wallets?” (204). Calvin responds, “They let us sit down, didn’t they?” (204). This exchange demonstrates the depth of racial and social inequality that Black travelers experience, where being allowed to sit down is the benchmark for “safety.”
The Capewoods
The Capewoods is a motif that relates to the theme of Racial and Social Inequality in Midcentury America. While many of the locations in the novel are real, the Capewoods and the nearby Sojourner Music School are fictional. They lie in between the real communities of the all-white Levittown and the integrated Concord Park.
People from different communities have different associations with the Capewoods, though they all agree it’s haunted. Darren says, “[P]eople go in and they don’t come out. That’s why they don’t develop that land over there. They leave it to the colored” (25). Darren is talking about white people who are nervous about the land for some reason. Only much later, when talking to Barbara, does Calvin find out why.
Physically, the Capewoods are home to “[p]eople caught in between [the Levittown and Concord Park developments] who can’t own but grew up near that land” (175). Barbara’s words, when combined with Darren’s, imply that there is a community of long-term, poor Black residents in the area who have been displaced due to the construction of Levittown, showing the interrelation between racial and economic inequality.
Historically, Barbara tells Calvin how the Capewoods are “part of the Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape people” (174), who were the first people displaced in the area. Then, the woods housed a stop on the Underground Railroad and were the site of a “massacre” by “slave catchers” (174). This makes Calvin realize that anyone who haunts the Capewoods is his “ancestor[]. They wouldn’t harm [them]” (277). This is supported when Eugene tells Calvin that he and Harry were led to Sojourner by the sound of music coming through the Capewoods, leading them to the music school, which was quiet when they got there. This also shows the relationship between the Capewoods and music, which symbolizes identity.
Related Titles
By Kim Johnson
