In the process of writing my essay, I called Anatole’s daughter, Bliss Broyard. We talked a few times on the phone, as I was deciding whether or not to write about her father’s story. Finally, after talking to my editors at the New Yorker, Tina Brown and Henry Finder, I decided to plunge ahead. I tried to tell Bliss in person, when I thought I would be visiting the campus of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where she was a student. But that trip was canceled. So I told her on the phone. Anatole had a close circle of friends who knew his secret. His wife, Alexandra Nelson, a white woman of Norwegian ancestry, knew it as well. But it was entirely hidden from Bliss and her brother, Todd, almost up until the moment Anatole died. When I told her that I planned to write about her father, Bliss became quite angry with me. I was outing him in a way, and that upset her. But as the years have passed, Bliss’s feelings seemed to have softened somewhat. I was delighted this past summer when she left me a copy of her book about her father, One Drop, at the house we lease on Martha’s Vineyard. When I read her book, I discovered that she was still pretty angry at me! Nevertheless, when I began this project, I decided to ask her to participate, precisely because she was so angry and did not, I believe, fully understand how culturally black her father and his father truly had been. I wanted to see how Bliss had been affected, an entire decade after I published my essay, by her father’s secret and its revelation, and I wanted to learn what, if anything, DNA testing could add to the story. She was surprised, I believe, but she eagerly agreed.
“When I first met you,” Bliss said, “I thought this step of outing him myself would allow me to regain control over my identity. But what I have come to realize is that I am not in control of the way that people see me or my dad. It’s always going to be a compromise between how I see myself and how the world sees me. Between how the world sees my dad and how I do.”
Bliss took for the title of her book the redolent phrase “one drop”—it refers to one drop of blood, which is the way that blackness was defined legally throughout the United States (if you had one traceable black ancestor—one single drop of black blood—you had the legal standing of a Negro, which, of course, was not a good thing). Her book is fascinating and helped me to understand her father better, yet the essence of his life—his decision to pass as a white man—remains something of a mystery, at least to me. And that mystery, I think, is not his desire to break through the glass ceiling of race but the repudiation of his visibly black sister, Shirley, in the lives of his children.
Bliss and I began our discussion by talking about her memories of her father, whom she loved and admired profoundly. Flipping through Bliss’s photos—past pictures of Anatole walking on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard, standing stock-still as an army officer, holding his young daughter—he almost looks like a white man. It is only in his high-school yearbook photo that he looks, at least to my eyes, unmistakably black. This was, curiously, before he started identifying himself as a white man. According to Bliss, that happened when he filled out an application form for a Social Security card the following year, in 1938. He was seventeen years old. He needed a Social Security number to get a job. In that same year, that same summer, his sister Shirley, who was a couple of years younger, went to the same state office to see if there were any summer jobs. She was told there were no jobs for colored girls.
Looking at Anatole’s application, the eye is immediately drawn to question number twelve—the question about color. On Anatole’s form there is a check next to “Negro” that has been crossed out, and then there’s a check next to “White.” The letter C has been handwritten as well, which could stand for “Creole” or “colored.” There’s no way to know. The form is astonishing to behold because of the way that he erased his identity, agonizing over his decision to pass, right there on the form.
“He was confused,” Bliss said sadly.
I asked her how she learned her father’s secret. Her mother, Sandy, had told me the story, but I wanted to hear it from Bliss’s point of view. She told me that for the first twenty-five years of her life she was, for all intents and purposes, a white person. Though her father was “legally” black Bliss was raised white in the whitest of white towns—Southport, Connecticut—and she looked white and believed herself to be white. She did not learn that her father was black until just months before he died of prostate cancer. “My mom said that she and Dad wanted to have a family meeting, which was very out of character for us,” she recalled. “And Dad was quite ill at this point. I remember I had to bring a beach chair for him to sit in while we waited for my brother to come. The cancer had metastasized, and the doctors had let us know that there wasn’t really anything else they could do.”
“I think my mother had been kind of encouraging him to figure out how to finish up his life. And telling my brother and me this secret was one of those things that he needed to do. So we sat down in the living room, and my mom said, ‘Anatole, is there anything that you’d like to tell your children?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get into that today.’ My brother and I kind of caught eyes and were like, ‘Get into what?’ And then my mother explained over my father’s protesting that there was some secret from my father’s childhood that would explain a lot. And she said that the secret was even more painful than this pain of cancer. But he didn’t want to talk about it that day. He said that he would tell us eventually—that he needed to think about how to present things, that he wanted to order his vulnerabilities so they didn’t get magnified during the discussion. That’s a quote. He wanted to ‘order his vulnerabilities.’ And I remember this because it was so distinctly him.”
Ultimately it was her mother, not her father, who revealed the family secret. “What ended up happening,” said Bliss, “is my father went back in the hospital after that meeting, with another medical emergency. His bladder burst, and he had to go into emergency surgery, and my mother took it upon herself to tell us then—as my father was about to face the surgery. At that point we had just been watching my father screaming for help as if he were literally drowning, because he was in such terrible pain. So my mom simply said, ‘I think I better tell you what the secret is.’ And she said, ‘Your father is part black.’ That was her language. Then she sort of talked a little more, and she said that he was mixed and that his parents were Creoles from New Orleans, where there had been a lot of race mixing at one point, and that when he was growing up, his parents had had to pass in order to get work, and it had confused him about what the family was supposed to be. And she told us that his two sisters, Lorraine and Shirley, had stayed in the black community and they both lived as black and that’s why we never saw them.”
Bliss’s mother also said that when Anatole was growing up, he was a victim of frequent abuse due to his color—and Bliss believes that this in many ways shaped his decisions in later life. “My mother,” said Bliss, “told us that when he was child, my father used to come home with his jacket torn from getting into fights, that the black kids would pick on him because he looked white, and the white kids would pick on him because he looked black, and his parents would just ignore it. They wouldn’t ask what happened. And he didn’t want his own kids to go through the same thing he did.”
Bliss says that she had no inkling that her father had been concealing his race, but she also recalls feeling no shock upon learning this secret. Her father was dying—and would die in just a few days—and her thoughts were focused on his health. The fact that he was part black was immaterial. “We laughed,” said Bliss. “I thought the secret was going to be something. And it was just, like, he’s part black. You know? This is the terrible secret from his childhood that’s caused so much pain? We didn’t get it. In fact, it seemed kind of cool, like, I remember saying to my mother, ‘Oh, that means that we’re part black, too!’ Because I had always bought into this idea of the American melting pot, and here I was an example of it.”
While Bliss does not seem the least bit concerned about the content of her father’s
secret—and the realization that she is part black—she remains deeply concerned over why he felt the need to keep the secret from her, his daughter. Indeed, in talking with her it is palpably clear that she still struggles with this—and still wonders why her father concealed so much from one of the people in the world who was closest to him. In the end she believes that he did so for a variety of complex reasons, all deeply intertwined with our nation’s tortured past. “I think,” she said, “that a big part of it was just that he didn’t want us to have to struggle with our racial identity the way that he had. He just thought that he’d saved us from having that struggle. I think that, you know, he didn’t want us to be black, that for him, growing up in Bed-Stuy in the forties, being black wasn’t a good thing. And he always was sort of encouraging us to meet the kind of people who could help us later. I think that’s what we were supposed to do in Connecticut. He was always telling us that we should learn how to play squash, because, you know, those are the kinds of people who can give you jobs. For him there was a kind of social cachet.”
There are, of course, overwhelming advantages to being white in America. When Anatole surveyed the racial landscape and decided that his children would have an easier time of it if they were white, he knew what he was doing. And about this he was, without a doubt, correct. Being white, in general, in America, has had enormous historical and economic advantages. The cost, however, could be enormous as well. Anatole’s life and virtually all his personal relationships were contorted by his decision. Bliss has great sympathy for him but also clearly recognizes the consequences of his decision—the internal chaos that it may have spawned.
“I think he wanted to spare us from a lot of pain that he had as a child,” said Bliss. “But I don’t know that he wanted to be white, either. He just wanted to be a kind of outsider to both these racial labels and expectations and prejudices that went with them, ’cause, you know, he was kind of a cool cat. He didn’t want to be some white guy. He held black people up on a pedestal and was always making these comments about black athletes being better than white athletes, always the stereotypes, or black musicians being better than white musicians. At the same time, though, he also had some prejudicial feelings about blacks himself, and I think that my dad looked down on black people. I mean, I heard him saying prejudiced things when I was growing up sometimes. There was this time he was trying to sell our house in Cambridge. It was a very nice house, but down the block there was some low-income housing. And these buyers were coming back to look at the house for the third time, and even though he was sick, he walked up and down the street, picked up all the trash so it would look nicer. And then he came back fuming. I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘There are some black kids playing down the street. And these people are never going to want to buy this house if they see that.’ And I was shocked. I remember saying, ‘Dad, you sound like a goddamn racist.’ And then he got up and left the table.”
In this regard Anatole was acting like many black people, meaning that we make comments of this sort all the time. Nonetheless, the comment is startling—and as Bliss and I explored the implications of her father’s decision to keep his race secret, similarly ironic contradictions arose. When I think about Bliss’s father, I am reminded of how hard it is to be black and successful. His story is among the saddest I know, not because of its abstract implications but because of the costs to his mother and sisters. Anatole gained a world; they lost a son and brother. And how does one measure the comparative costs of that trade-off?
Bliss believes that her father liked to pretend that he had put his family in the past, but in reality she thinks he lived with the guilt or struggle of his decision on a daily basis.
“He was a family man,” said Bliss, shaking her head. “He loved our family, and I think that he loved his family, and I think he had terrible guilt about it. I remember in 1979, when I was twelve, it was Mother’s Day, and my father had decided to get my mom these really fancy earrings from Tiffany’s, a kind of much nicer present than he usually did. He told me all about it, and I picked them out in the catalog with him, and then when he came down to give her the present, she was making dinner, even though it was Mother’s Day, and she didn’t sort of turn around and sit down quickly enough to accept the present. He abruptly lost his temper and threw the Tiffany box across the room. And I couldn’t believe it. It was just so irrational. Then, later that night, I just went to bed, and my parents were kind of fighting, and then my mom woke me up in the middle of a deep sleep. She was looking for the bologna. She wanted to know where I had put the bologna when I had helped her unpack the groceries earlier that day. Because every night my dad had a bologna and cheese sandwich. Every night—with a single beer. So I told her, you know, ‘It’s in the meat drawer, I think.’ And she went running back downstairs. I followed her, because I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”
When Bliss arrived in her family’s kitchen, she was confronted by a scene of utter chaos. “My mother was kneeling in front of the refrigerator,” she said, “and there were all these broken mayonnaise jars and things all over the floor. Because my dad had ransacked the refrigerator. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘What has got into him? It’s Mother’s Day. He got you this nice gift.’ And my mother said, ‘Well, his mother died, and I think he’s feeling guilty.’ This was the first I had heard that she was dead—and she had died nine months earlier.”
Bliss can remember meeting her grandmother Edna Broyard only once in her life. “I had just turned seven,” she recalled, “and my grandmother came out for the day to Connecticut where we were living and sat in a lawn chair in the backyard for a while, and then we went to the local country club and all had dinner, and then she went back home with my Aunt Lorraine. Then later, when I was going through my father’s letters—he kept every letter he had ever received—I found a letter from my grandmother, who was living in a nursing home, dated a few weeks prior to this visit saying, ‘Dear Anatole, I am not that young anymore. I am just going to be seventy-six. I want to meet my grandchildren for once in my life.’ So she had requested this visit. And then she had her one visit.”
Bliss says that her requests to see her grandmother again were always met with excuses. To me this story encapsulates what would be the unimaginably painful consequences of Anatole Broyard’s decision to pass.
Turning to her family tree, Bliss told me that before she began writing her book, she had no knowledge of her family history as it related to her father’s line beyond the fact that they came from New Orleans. Her research on her book revealed much more. Bliss was able to trace her family back to the middle of the eighteenth century, to her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a white Frenchman named Étienne Broyard who was born in 1729 and arrived in New Orleans in 1753, when it was part of New France. I wondered how her father would have felt about that. No doubt he would have been pleased; it certainly wouldn’t have threatened his sense of the black identity that he had fled. It would have confirmed what was written right on his face: that he had a long, mixed racial heritage. Indeed, it probably would have impressed him, just as Bliss’s research skills impressed me.
Bliss and I then began to explore the part of her heritage that had so tormented her father: her African ancestry—which, as it turns out, is filled with remarkably fascinating and quite unusual stories. It can be traced back to the marriage of her great-great-grandparents, Henry Antoine Broyard, a white man born on July 18, 1829, and Marie Pauline Bonnet, a free woman of color. They married in 1855. Marie’s family came from the French colony of Saint-Dominque, now Haiti, as refugees of Toussaint Louverture’s revolution, the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere. The Bonnets were expelled from Haiti along with thousands of other free people of color, because the new government feared they might still be loyal to France. And like many of their fellow refugees, they came to New Orleans because of the French culture there and its relatively large mulatto, elite population.
Th
e fact that Henry and Marie formed a mixed-race couple is not surprising. Marie Pauline’s parents were educated. Her father was a carpenter, and in fact he may even have worked with her future husband, who was also a carpenter. They all lived in the New Orleans neighborhood known as Treme, which has been called the oldest black neighborhood in America, though in fact it was quite mixed, even back in the 1850s—as was all of New Orleans, much more so than anywhere else in the South at that time. So to some extent Henry and Marie were mimicking the behaviors and mores of their city when they joined together. There were other factors as well. Records show that Henry’s father had had children with a black woman—and so Henry had half siblings living as free people of color. Moreover, there is evidence that Henry himself had a child with another free woman of color before he married Marie. So Henry and Marie were surrounded by interracial couples.
Nonetheless, these two people did something very unusual: They got married. It was illegal for blacks and whites to get married in 1855 Louisiana. Even though Marie was free, she was visibly and officially black, and in the years leading up to the Civil War anti-black feelings in the South were rising and free people of color were being viewed with ever-mounting suspicion as possible instigators of slave revolts. Yet Marie and Henry were able to marry. How was this possible? Bliss’s novel theory is that it was facilitated by the same means that Anatole Broyard would use a century later—only in reverse: She believes that Henry Broyard passed as black! His race, on his marriage license, is listed as “Negro.” He even volunteered for the army in the Civil War as a colored man, serving in the famous Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first all-black regiments in the war.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 49