Set in 1955 in Levittown, Pennsylvania, The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson explores a tumultuous period in our country’s history. During this time when school integration was new and Jim Crow Laws were still in effect, Levitt and Sons were mass-producing homes under the guise that they were helping to create affordable housing, especially for veterans. That housing, however, was for white families only, creating a deeply discriminatory practice.
After serving as a soldier in World War II, Williams Greene is determined to provide access to the American Dream for his family. He is tired of the race riots in the big city, so they move from their apartment in Chicago to a house with a yard in Pennsylvania where they will pass as white. So, gone are their Black friends and their sense of community. William teaches his seventeen-year-old son Calvin to blend in by giving race neutral answers to questions about tastes in music or favorite foods. However, Calvin struggles to hide the pieces of himself that give him joy. He’s not willing to pay this price for peace, to sell his soul and leave behind an untraceable past or the feeling of energy and warmth.
Suffocating from the lies he has to tell, Calvin fears he will be discovered. The hiding makes him want to disappear “until he can rebuild himself into something braver” (54). He wishes to join his brother, Robert, at Sojourner, “a place with young people filled with life stories that they would rather leave untold” (88). Here, he meets Eugene and Harry, and the trio improvise with their music. Calvin realizes that “the act of improvising had taught [him] how to operate within a box so [he’d] know how to match someone else’s playing” (95)—a metaphor for his playing at white passing. When he meets Lily Baker, his life grows even more complicated.
Other key components of history in Johnson’s book include references to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and to the Green Book for safe travel and dining options for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. Ample allusions to key personalities such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, and Thurgood Marshall also add historical authenticity to Johnson’s writing. Calvin takes inspiration from these individuals to add his own contributions to setting right a world gone rotten.
- Donna