Tellingly, after black-and-white marriages were legalized again in 1870, Henry Broyard indicated that he was white on the census, and his family indicated the same on his death certificate. If Bliss is indeed right about her ancestor’s origins, it would seem that following the Civil War he stopped passing, although his wife and all their children continued to list themselves as mulattoes.
Bliss is struck by the irony of this. “I thought, how could it be that my great-great-grandfather passed from white to black?” Passing, it would seem, has a long history in her family.
I have consulted with many scholars about Bliss’s ancestor, and I am convinced that Henry Broyard could possibly have decided to pass for black, although for obvious reasons this was extraordinarily rare. On the other hand, he could have been a mulatto himself. Race is such a tenuous thing, especially in New Orleans.
“I come from a very illustrious line,” said Bliss, laughing. “I like to think of it as a little bit of a love story. It was important for me to find that moment of mixing, and I thought it was rape in a slave cabin. I mean, that was the sort of image you always have, right? But I think this was a love relationship. It’s quite unusual.”
Henry and Marie Pauline’s oldest son was Nat Broyard. He is Bliss’s paternal great-grandfather, and according to her research, he was a carpenter who built some of the biggest buildings in New Orleans in the 1890s. He was also, according to Bliss, very active in Republican politics at that time and may have been friends with Homer Plessy and the group of Creoles in Louisiana who pressed one of the most important civil-rights lawsuits in American history—an early and unsuccessful challenge to segregation that ended up in the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. The failure of Plessy’s case cemented the “separate but equal” doctrine and helped institutionalize Jim Crow racism in this country for another six decades. If Nat Broyard knew and helped Homer Plessy, he has my deepest admiration. Plessy and his friends stood up for racial justice in the worst of times.
In this life of passing, Anatole Broyard was a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation. People who learned about his secret generally heard rumors about “distant” black ancestry—perhaps a great-grandfather. Anatole wanted things vague. He rarely spoke directly to anyone about his racial background.
“My father,” recalled Bliss, “never said anything about it to me, but he said it to, I guess, my mother and some other friends who had asked. He’d say, ‘Oh, you know, my great-grandfather found his wife under a coconut tree.’ That was his way of saying that she was from the islands. Or he would say that there were some ‘Caribbean influences’ in his past. But he’d never come out and say ‘black.’”
The truth, of course, was very different. Nat Broyard, Anatole’s paternal grandfather, was half black, and he married a half-black woman named Rosa Cousin. Her father was a white man named Anatole Cousin (the source of Anatole Broyard’s name), and her mother was Marie Evalina Xavier, whose family was also part of this Haitian refugee community in early-nineteenth-century New Orleans.
Nat and Rosa Broyard’s son was Paul Broyard, Anatole’s father. Paul followed in his father’s footsteps, working as a carpenter and builder in New Orleans. His wife was Edna Miller. She was from a colored Creole family in New Orleans, and in her photographs she looks like an elegant African American woman of her day. There is simply no doubt, based on Bliss’s book and my own research, that Anatole Broyard was at best confused if he did in fact believe that he had only one black ancestor. He had many black ancestors, just as he had white ancestors, and in the United States when he was born—and in the United States today—he would be defined as an African American. And so would Bliss.
Our DNA testing further confirmed this. Bliss’s admixture test revealed that she is 17.2 percent sub-Saharan African, 78 percent European, and 4.7 percent East Asian. Her African results indicate that 37 percent of her African ancestry came from Upper Guinea and 63 percent comes from Congo Angola, which is where more than a quarter of all the slaves brought to America came from.
“I’m an octoroon,” she said. “My daughter is a steeth—she’s a sixteenth black. My dad was a quadroon. A quarter black.”
I asked Bliss if she saw race as a matter of choice. “I’m in a very unusual situation,” she said. “I can decide how much I want this to be a part of who I am. In a lot of people, their race is so apparent that they don’t have any control over how they are seen. I think race is the sum of experience and a state of mind. When I went to New Orleans and did my genealogy and learned about my family history, that made me feel like a different person. When I look in the mirror, I see a different person now. But without having grown up as black and without looking black, it’s hard for me to feel that I am black, you know? I don’t feel that I have earned the right to call myself black, since I wasn’t raised that way and I don’t look black. But, you know, at the same time, my father was black. I’m black. There’s just a lot of explaining to do.”
I told Bliss that based on her DNA she most certainly has a significant amount of African ancestry. And she was fascinated to hear that her results indicate that her first enslaved maternal ancestor on her father’s side (we tested her father’s sister) was most likely shipped from what is now Angola to the New World sometime between 1750 and 1808. The slaves shipped from Angola were generally handled by Portuguese slave traders—which triggered an interesting memory in Bliss.
“Edna Miller,” she said, “my father’s mother. When they moved to New York in 1930, the census taker came around, and she said that her family was Portuguese. And Portuguese keeps cropping up in her family line, and I always suspected that somebody in her family had been a slave in the United States, and maybe they came over with a Portuguese slave trader or something.”
Before we said good-bye, I told Bliss once again how powerfully her father’s story had affected me. I still remember when I learned that Anatole was black. I was stunned. And I remember thinking, “He’s reviewer for the New York Times, but he’s passing.” And I had very mixed emotions about that. I was proud of him, but I wanted him to have fought the battle as a black man and not as a black man passing as a white man. I wanted him to have made it as a daily reviewer at the New York Times with everyone knowing his race. And I have often wondered whether he ever felt this, too—could he have achieved so much if he had identified himself as a black man? And would it have made him happier?
Bliss does not know any better than I do. “He believed in that kind of modernist notion of self-invention,” she said. “He thought that he could create himself and be who he wanted to be and that the only authority on his identity was himself. And he was ahead of his time in that way.”
The irony, of course, is that he should have been able to define himself. I deeply believe that. But Anatole was trapped in a system of racist class values—deeply American racist class values. And he couldn’t recreate his conscience. He couldn’t obliterate this sense of rejecting actual people with whom he had grown up. But what kind of person could? And that was naïve on his part.
“It’s also naïve,” Bliss said, nodding her head, “that he believed that people who looked like himself, who didn’t look visibly black, could make race not matter. I think that he wildly underestimated the level of racism and prejudice that people experience every day. It was very easy for him to say, ‘Forget your race.’ But some people don’t want to forget their race.”
This is very true. And it is also true that there is probably no way in the world her father could have achieved what he did had he identified himself as black rather than white. “He never could have gotten that job at the Times,” Bliss said. “If he had been openly black at that time? There was no other black critic on staff of a daily major paper in the United States. And one of the reasons he couldn’t have gotten the job is that if he had been openly black, he would have been expected to write only about, to know only about black subjects.”
Nonetheless, I believe that Anatole Broyard
made a terrible mistake. And I’ve had people pass in my own family. My cousin Pat Carpenter was black, divorced his first wife, and married a white woman, and he didn’t want anybody in the family to contact him. My father’s Uncle Roscoe married a white woman and passed. When my great-grandmother died, my grandpa, my father’s father, wouldn’t tell his own brother that their mother had died, because he was so angry at him for having passed. I was raised with these stories. I know firsthand that the black experience has always been multicolored. But Anatole’s decision will always, on some level, be a puzzle to me—especially the fact that he couldn’t talk to his children about it.
In parting, I told Bliss that I wish I could have met her father just to console him, just to encourage him to talk to the people who loved him. Hearing this, Bliss smiled knowingly. “If I could say something to him now, it would be something simple,” she told me. “I’d just say, ‘I can understand why you were trying to protect yourself and protect your family, but you don’t have to anymore. Times have changed, and being black can be a wonderful thing. There are so many great aspects of the culture and your own family history that should not be buried, and we’d like to know. I’d like to know.’”
I am very sorry she never got the chance to say this. I think it would have unburdened him in some way to hear it.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (New York: Crown, 2009).
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
DR. ELIZABETH ALEXANDER is a poet, professor, and chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University. She is the author of five books of poems (including American Sublime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and two collections of essays. Among her many honors, she has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the inaugural Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society.” In 2008, Barack Obama selected her to compose and read a poem at his inauguration as president of the United States.
Elizabeth was my student at Yale and since then has become a dear friend, someone whom I have relied on for advice and inspiration time and time again. I asked her to be in the series Faces of America for the same reason that I asked Malcolm Gladwell: because both can trace their ancestry, in part, to the West Indies. I also invited her because over the years I thought I had come to know part of her family story, and I was fascinated by the way in which it embodies the complex nature of racial identity in America. She and her parents, like countless other African Americans, forged strong identities for themselves despite knowing very little about their deep ancestors. Her mother has written two excellent books on her family’s past, but there are profound questions that she has been unable to answer. I wanted to take a try at these questions myself. And I must say, the results truly surprised her and me. Elizabeth, as we shall see, has one of the largest documented family trees of any African American on record—with ancestors whose lives, it turns out, stretch from Jamaica to Wales, from the heart of Africa to the heart of Europe.
Her story begins in one of my favorite places on earth: New York City. Elizabeth Alexander was born on May 30, 1962, in Harlem. Her parents were Clifford Leopold Alexander, Jr., and Adele Logan, both also born in New York, he on September 21, 1933, and she on January 26, 1938. Theirs was an exceptionally close family with a clear sense of what it meant to be black and what it took to succeed in 1960s America. Elizabeth’s father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement and a very significant person in African American history. A trailblazer in the truest sense, Clifford attended Harvard University in the 1950s, where he was elected the first African American student-body president. He graduated with an A.B. in government and then went on to study law at Yale, one of the first black people to earn degrees from both those universities. Among his many accomplishments, he was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisers on civil rights, and he played a major role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was also, under President Carter, the first African American secretary of the army. In this capacity, he promoted Colin Powell to the rank of brigadier general.
Elizabeth says that even as a very young child she was aware that her father was engaged in something important—and that it was deeply related to race. “We had a sense of being in the midst of a historical time,” she told me. “We were race people—that was always plain and clear. That was part of the language. It was the primary lens. I wouldn’t say that my parents were race obsessed in any way, but they saw the world in large part along the lines of those struggles.”
The Alexanders moved from Harlem to Washington, DC, when Elizabeth was two years old, because her father was offered a job in the Johnson administration. So Elizabeth grew up in the nation’s capital, during one of the most tumultuous times in our history, immersed in the civil rights movement. “One of my most powerful memories,” she said, “was when Martin Luther King was killed, and Washington erupted in riots and fires. I remember my father couldn’t come home. I’m not sure what President Johnson sent him to do to help, but as the city was burning maybe ten blocks away from our house, I knew that Daddy was doing something helpful—but also that he wasn’t there, and we were waiting for him to come back. And then when he came back, he told us about flying over the city and watching it burning. We knew at that point already who Dr. King was and what he was trying to do. We knew about Medgar Evers. Somehow it all seemed tied together.”
As we began to explore her genealogy, Elizabeth told me that she knew much more about the great sociopolitical events of her youth than she did about her ancestry. Politics, culture, and race, she said, were constant subjects in the Alexander home. The past was not. “I had my whole childhood with my maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather,” Elizabeth said. “Both of my grandparents were only children. We spent a great deal of time with these grandparents. But they didn’t tell us much of anything about where they came from.”
Her paternal grandfather, Clifford Alexander, Sr., was particularly reticent. He had immigrated to America from Jamaica as a young man, leaving behind a mother whom he never saw again and rumors that he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish merchant. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he rarely discussed these matters. “He gave a few tantalizing details,” said Elizabeth. “He told me that his father died in the great earthquake in Jamaica in 1907, but that was about it. When he was a few days away from passing, in the middle of the night I realized we don’t know his parents’ names. And so I asked him and received no last names, just Emma and James, and that was pretty much all that we knew.”
This is a rather sad story, and the telling of it clearly gripped Elizabeth. She said to me that she was especially eager to learn more about her grandfather and that, indeed, she had peppered him with questions as a child. Everything about his life was interesting to her. “I remember,” she said, “I asked my grandfather once, ‘Did you know anybody in America when you came?’ And he said no. I couldn’t imagine going somewhere and not being met, so I asked, ‘What happened when you got off the boat?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there were always people there. There were chaps.’ That was the way he talked: he was from Jamaica, his English was different. His vocabulary was not the same as ours. So he said, ‘There were chaps who would show you where you could live and where you could work.’ And you needed these chaps, because this was a segregated country that he was coming into. He said these chaps took him to Harlem and showed him a boarding house and where you could get a job.”
Harlem, at the time, was a melting pot of comparatively well-educated West Indian immigrants and many more poor, less-educated African American migrants from the South who transformed Harlem from a community that was 67 percent white in 1920 to a community that was 70 percent black just ten years later. Class tension, racial tension, and cultural tension between the groups abounded. But Elizabeth does not recall that her grandfather suffered from these t
hings. They certainly did not limit his career. Clifford ended up overseeing a YMCA and managing the branch of a bank. He was a community leader in every sense of the term and an enduring inspiration to his activist son.
“The sense that I got from my grandfather was of an incredibly vibrant Harlem,” Elizabeth said, “with a whole lot of different kinds of black people in it. That was always my sense of that world. And he became someone who was a very helpful figure in Harlem. When he passed away, I can’t tell you how many people at his funeral came up and said, ‘Your grandfather gave me advice about starting a patty stand,’ ‘Your grandfather gave me help with this.’ He really was a community person in the present, and he just didn’t talk about the past. Maybe there are sadnesses, too. You leave your mother, and you never see her again. So who knows if that was part of it? Maybe he just didn’t want to discuss that.”
I asked Elizabeth if she thought her grandfather was embarrassed about his immigrant status. I kept thinking of him getting off that boat and looking around for a “chap” to show him where to stay. I can imagine African Americans making fun of a Jamaican like that.
Elizabeth told me that she didn’t think so. Her grandfather, she believed, was simply someone who had reinvented himself and did not want to look backward. As evidence, she told me that she had once asked him to tell her the story of his journey from Jamaica to New York. He turned the whole thing into a kind of shaggy-dog story for his grandchildren.
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