Other critics, including McKay Jenkins, have highlighted the importance of themes of racial and sexual identity. Frankie wishes people could "change back and forth from boys to girls." John Henry wants them to be "half boy and half girl." Berenice would like there to be "no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair." For them, Jenkins suggests, the ideal world would be "a place where identity . . . is fluid, changeable, amorphous."