64 pages • 2 hours read
The Color of a Lie
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Prologue-Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, death, and anti-gay bias.
From an undisclosed time in the future, Calvin Greene addresses the reader, telling them that he’ll reveal his “truth” about an escalating series of lies that affected his identity in his youth.
Chapter 1 Summary
Calvin and his parents flee from Chicago to Levittown, Pennsylvania. His parents try to comfort him, but Calvin misses his best friend, Ray, and his sister, Charlotte, who is dead. His brother, Robert, Charlotte’s twin, was disowned and lives in a nearby township. Calvin’s parents put on a “charade” for the real estate agent, Mr. Vernon, altering their clothes and names to purchase an “American dream” home in a neighborhood for white veterans.
Calvin thinks that their new life is a “delusion.” When Mr. Vernon leaves, Calvin and his mother express hesitation about their decision to pass as white in a “sundown” town. His father tells him that they will be fine if Calvin alters the way he speaks, his interests, and who he befriends.
Chapter 2 Summary
In the morning, the family prepares for church. Calvin resents having to pretend like Charlotte never existed and his father’s dangerous decision to try “passing” in Levittown after the tragedy at their old house in Trumbull Park. At this point, it is not yet revealed that they left Trumbull Park because Charlotte was killed when white residents firebombed their house in retaliation for Robert’s organizing. In church, Calvin is filled with “paranoia” that someone will know they are Black.
After church, Calvin’s mother locks herself in the bathroom and cries, overwhelmed by the stress of passing. A neighbor who is the same age as Calvin, Mary Freeman, offers to show him around. He asks about the destroyed grass between their properties, and she is cagey. He is overwhelmed by the questions she asks about their family, not knowing what to lie about.
Calvin meets Ben Smith and admires his Schwinn Phantom bicycle, which Ben says he built with parts of brass instruments. Calvin, who plays the trumpet, hopes that he’s found another teen who likes rock and roll and jazz by Black artists. At this point, Calvin does not know that Darren and Ben stole the bike from Harry.
Chapter 3 Summary
Calvin tries to call Ray but can’t reach him. Mary invites Calvin to a football rally with other juniors. Calvin can tell that his father doesn’t want him to go, so he says yes. When they get to Mary’s car, she tells Calvin that there’s no rally and that they’re going to “blow off” some stream. They drive through town with Ben. Calvin asks them to pull over at Vernon Realty so that he can fill out a job application.
They take Calvin to the woods for a gathering of white teens from Heritage High. Calvin tries to mingle and make friends. People say that the nearby Capewoods are haunted.
Chapter 4 Summary
The morning before school, Calvin’s father goes over how to pass. At school, Calvin can’t get used to physically moving through the world as a white person. In English, Calvin notices the high quality of their books, but none are by Black authors.
After class, Ben introduces Calvin to his best friend, Alex Washington. Calvin is interested in Alex’s “olive skin.” Calvin notices that Ben is bad at shop class, which surprises him when he remembers Ben’s bike. In homeroom, the teacher plays a film about the social rules that one should abide by to live the American dream. The messages are all about conformity, and Calvin notices the hypocrisy between messages aimed at boys and girls. Calvin is astounded by the propaganda and how his peers don’t question it.
Chapter 5 Summary
Calvin notices Mary pays a lot of attention to him, asking him about the upcoming sock hop and football game. Ben mentions that the game is past “Concord Park,” an integrated development. Calvin recognizes the name, which is close to where Robert lives. They start talking about a geography quiz. When Mary disparages Africa and calls it a “country,” Calvin corrects her, saying that it’s a continent with hundreds of languages and developed cities.
Another peer, Darren, begins to mime ape-like behavior, asking if people have “[a]ny guesses who [he is]” (41). Alex leaves, horrified, and Calvin follows. After school, Calvin’s parents ask about his day. He asks why they couldn’t have moved to Concord Park. His father says that development is built on swamps, unwanted land, and “unmarked graves of former slaves” (44). Calvin thinks that is preferable. He tells his parents he’s going to the football game with Ben and Alex.
Chapter 6 Summary
Instead, Calvin bicycles to see Robert, who runs Sojourner Music School near the Capewoods. Robert does not pass as easily as the rest of his family. The brothers catch up.
Calvin thinks of why they left Chicago. When Ray, who has dark skin, visited their mostly white neighborhood, the neighbors began to harass them. Robert solicited the help of the NAACP. Unrest grew until a white mob firebombed their house when only Charlotte was home. Their mother doesn’t blame Robert, but their father does.
They’re joined by James, who Calvin knows is “[m]ore than friends” with Robert (52), though no one acknowledges that Robert is gay. Calvin wasn’t immediately accepting of their relationship, but he likes James and is apologetic. They feed Calvin and tell him about the school, which is for Black kids accused of “truancy.” A girl his age named Lily draws Calvin’s attention.
They introduce Calvin to two brothers, Eugene and Harry. Calvin can talk to them about the stress and nuance of passing. Though Lily takes night lessons at Sojourner, Eugene and Harry tell Calvin that she’s about to attend an all-white school. They say that they play music but can’t accept distant gigs because Harry’s bike was stolen. They describe a bike that looks like the one Ben rides.
Prologue-Chapter 6 Analysis
These opening chapters establish Calvin’s character and the two worlds he moves between throughout the remainder of the novel. This expository information helps establish the novel’s main themes, like Calvin’s relationship to passing and how Racial and Social Inequality in Midcentury America operates in the Levittown development.
One of Calvin’s worlds is Levittown and Heritage, east of downtown. These locations are all-white. Levittown emphasizes conformity. Historically, developments built by Levitt & Sons consisted of tens of thousands of houses in only a few models, and residents had an extensive list of social rules to follow. Calvin is unnerved by the way the neighborhood looks exactly like the magazine ad, with “assembly-line-made homes that, from above, look[] like perfectly carved-out squares for blocks” and “identical-sized backyards” for “as far as [Calvin] c[an] see” (5). This picture-perfect, cookie-cutter-style neighborhood disorients Calvin: He often gets lost on his way home from school, riding his bike through the indistinguishable homes until he sees his father’s car. The neighborhood is “sickly quiet,” but there are always neighbors observing their behavior. When Calvin is assigned 1984, he thinks about how “the Big Brother society this very book [i]s talking about probably started in places like Levittown” (32), invoking the dystopian themes of conformity and surveillance and paralleling them to his real life. This contributes to the tension inherent in the book’s genre, psychological thriller. Psychological thrillers build suspense slowly and often contain a looming threat: Here, the threat is the disorienting nature of the development and the panoptic gaze of its residents.
Calvin sees conformity echoed in the school content that he is taught at Heritage. In homeroom, they watch a film about how “Black people” are making cities “overrun,” a fate that they can escape in Levittown if they follow “rules this generation must abide by” (35). This film invokes the themes of racial and social inequality in midcentury America and the Expectations and Reality of the American Dream in the Post-War Period. Calvin thinks the film is propaganda about an expectation of a certain kind of American dream. In reality, he understands that the ideological system that this “dream” perpetuates is restrictive, boxed in, and only available to certain people—namely, white Americans.
Another world is Sojourner and the Capewoods, west of downtown. Physically, Sojourner looks different from the buildings in Levittown. It is “freshly painted yellow” with white shutters (47), surrounded by “lush woods.” Before he meets anyone, just by observing the building, Calvin feels freer. He notes that though he is only “eleven miles away” from Levittown, he feels like he exists in a “slowed down” timeline “where [he] wo[]n’t have to lie” (48). While the literary term “foils” usually applies to two characters with opposite characteristics, here, the author establishes the geographical locations of Levittown and Sojourner as foils.
Calvin’s primary frustration with his father is how he went from someone who worked on the Green Book—a guidebook for Black travelers to find safe routes along which they could drive, eat, and stay overnight—after fighting in the war to asking his family to pass in a sundown town. Calvin’s father thinks that passing in Levittown will keep them safe from the type of violence that killed Charlotte. He tells Calvin and his mother that it is “about starting a new life” (9), but Calvin knows it’s really about “playing white.” His father thinks that presenting as a Black family doesn’t allow them access to the same opportunities that white families would have and that passing is a way around that. Calvin, on the other hand, feels shame about passing. This establishes the theme of The Psychological Impact of Passing, which increasingly weighs on Calvin as the narrative develops.
Calvin finds that he has to reorient everything about the way he moves through the world to pass. Not only does he have to gel his hair, change his voice, and lie about his interests, but he also has to interact with people differently. When he meets Mary and Ben, he thinks about how when he spoke to white people in Chicago, he “avoided eye contact for fear of an altercation” (15). He is uncomfortable by the way white teens look each other in the eye and has to remind himself to do the same. At school, he notices how students “jostle[] and bump[] into each other with no worry” (29). At home, if he bumped into a white person and was perceived as Black, it would invite violence. Calvin can forget all of this when he enters Sojourner. His conversation with Eugene and Harry comes “naturally, like with [his] friends from Chicago” (62). The relief of existing at Sojourner only makes the psychological impact of passing in Levittown harder for him to bear.
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