One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Yet conspicuous among my childhood memories were encounters with African Americans, which stood out perhaps because they were so rare and because the pervasiveness of racism—in my sheltered life and in me—had lent them a special charge. I grew up believing, without exactly realizing I believed it or knowing where this belief had come from, that blacks were different from whites, probably inferior, and possibly had even brought on some of their own ill treatment. If you asked me if I thought this way, I would have objected vigorously. As a well-off white kid with artsy parents growing up in the 1970s and 1980s just outside New York City, I gave lip service to principles like justice and equal rights and considered myself immune to racial prejudice. Nevertheless, when I encountered African Americans, the racist belief arose, like a word on the tip of my tongue, at once concentrating my mind and distracting me with its relentless agitation.

  The first black person that I remember meeting was Leroy—yes, that really was his name—the head of a cleaning crew that visited our house once every few weeks when I was about seven years old. He was a small, energetic, medium-brown man with a surprisingly deep voice for his size and an aura of intense masculinity that belied my notion that cleaning was woman’s work. He performed the job double-time, with lots of sweat and heavy lifting.

  I liked it when Leroy and his crew of black men were at our house, the whirlwind way they would turn everything upside down—moving furniture and rolling up rugs to wax the floors—and then set it right again, a faint lemon scent lingering in their wake. I liked the way our house would become alive with the noise of their vacuum cleaner and floor buffer and conversation that to my ears was more waves of sound than words—notes that dipped and sprang, repeating and overlapping, interrupted by round soft laughter and high-pitched exclamations.

  My father would talk to Leroy in a familiar way, saying Hey man! and What’s happening?, which made it seem as if they knew each other from somewhere. I was impressed that my dad seemed to know how to talk to our cleaning man in what I construed to be Leroy’s particular way of speaking. I imagined that he’d learned to do this when he lived in Manhattan, a loud, fast place where my mother occasionally took my brother and me.

  Manhattan lay at the end of a long car ride that led us over iron bridges and elevated highways from which, with my nose pressed against the window, I peered down onto vacant lots strewn with rusted appliances and old mattresses, apartment buildings with sheets tacked over their windows and the occasional Jesus on the Cross dangling against a pane, and scruffily dressed children, black and Puerto Rican kids, whose parents let them play in the street; after which we barreled down a stretch of tunneled roadway and then popped up into the city, our arrival punctuated with my mother’s instruction to lock our doors.

  After parking the car, we took public transportation to get around. On the subways and buses, over my mother’s arm that pulled me tight against her, I stared at the other riders, many of whom, with their strange clothes and thick accents, their dark skin, the unusual caps and hairstyles they wore, I took to be visitors from other countries.

  Both my parents had lived in the city, but while my mother gave off the impression that she’d lived beside these foreign inhabitants, my father seemed to have lived among them and, as a result, had learned their ways and means.

  Leroy and his crew stopped cleaning our house after one of his men broke a decorative plate and hid the remains rather than confessing the accident. When I asked why he didn’t come anymore, my father, sounding regretful, explained that this dishonesty had left no choice but to fire him.

  When I remember this conversation now, I can picture my seven-year-old self nodding to indicate that I understood what my father was saying, and with that nod, plucking from the atmosphere the vague notion that black people lived by a different—lesser—code of behavior and embedding it more firmly in my brain. At the same time, I can imagine my child self feeling sorry for Leroy and his men, because I would view this moral shortcoming as an affliction rather than a choice, rather like a character in a fairy tale who’s been turned—through no fault of his own—into a frog.

  A few years ago, my mother ran into Leroy at the home of the woman who had originally recommended him. My mother reintroduced herself, explaining that Leroy’s crew had cleaned her house some twenty years earlier. I remember you, he told her. And then my mom asked something that she had always wondered: Had Leroy known about her husband’s background?

  “Sure. I knew,” he said.

  I asked my mother to describe his response. Had he seemed tickled, resentful, enraged, admiring, about the fact that the guy in the big house on the hill in the Waspiest part of Fairfield with the white wife and the white kids was really a brother? But her memory refused to supply any inflection. “They used to do this thing together.” She waved her hands back and forth, like she was describing dance moves or a boxing match. What she meant was, they used to be black together. I knew that behavior of my father’s. I’d seen it at the bar on Martha’s Vineyard where we’d go listen to a funk band. I knew it from parties at home when my dad told a story about his army days as the (white) captain of a black unit or about the time he took his Greenwich Village buddies up to Spanish Harlem to hear Afro-Cuban music. He grew animated, his voice stretched and preened, his body was looser and lighter on his feet. But it never occurred to me to think of this behavior as “black”; it was just my dad telling stories about his life.

  The first black person that I remember touching and being touched by was Uncle Pete. He drove the afternoon school bus when I was in the sixth grade. All of the kids loved him, in no small part because he seemed to love all of us so much, starting with his insistence that we call him Uncle. Pete made an immense effort to keep us entertained, filling the forty-five-minute route with more frivolity and celebration than the best birthday party. As Christmas approached he strung the cards that we gave him the length of the bus and draped the windows with garland and Christmas balls, and then one afternoon he showed up wearing a red felt cap with a black pompom hanging from some tassel and a fake white beard and mustache.

  This was around the time of the TV series Roots, and Pete began referring to himself as Kunta Claus, encouraging us to do the same. He was in his midtwenties, with a plump-cheeked, boyish face, dark brown skin, and a short Afro. It was the first time I had heard someone call attention to his own racial identity—I was used to other people pointing out this fact—and to joke about himself in this way struck me at first as embarrassing and then hilarious.

  I was the last kid that Uncle Pete dropped off. When we were alone, he would invite me to sit on the seat next to him. He would tell me to put my hand on the wheel, and then, on the straightaways, he would take his own hand away so that I was the only one steering. Barreling down those country roads, feeling the great length of the bus swaying heavily behind me in response to the slightest movement of my hand on the oversized wheel, I was more exhilarated and scared than I had ever been. If Pete spotted an approaching car, he would reclaim the wheel and tell me to duck out of sight. I would lean forward with his hand resting on my back until he tapped my shoulder, signaling that the coast was clear.

  I remember my surprise at the roominess of the bus driver’s seat—almost as wide as the bench seats we students filled two by two behind him—but not so roomy that as I settled my narrow eleven-year-old frame next to him our legs didn’t touch. I was acutely conscious of the left side of my body where I rested against him—the pressure and warmth. I felt that we were doing something that we shouldn’t, a feeling that was connected in my mind with our close proximity, and the fact that he was black and male and older than me but not so old that, despite his nickname, he actually seemed avuncular.

  Sometimes I resisted the invitation to join him on his seat. I wasn’t specifically worried that our game was a prelude to his touching me in an inappropriate way, and even now in these more puritanical times, I’m not sure that’s where he was headed. But I was afraid of gett
ing into trouble, and I thought it was reckless to even pretend that I was driving the bus.

  I was nervous, too, because I wondered if the difference between us, his blackness and my whiteness, rendered him unknowable to me on an essential level, and out of politeness or ignorance, I might overlook any hidden motives on his part. I was not unaware that black people could resent white people. The guy on Leroy’s cleaning crew might have broken the plate on purpose. Maybe Pete wanted to hurt me. These worries didn’t present themselves in such concrete terms, but as a vague fear, as if I were trying to navigate across a room in the dark.

  “That’s okay,” I would say. “I don’t really feel like driving today.”

  “Then come sit next to me to keep me company.”

  “That’s okay,” I would say again as cordially as I could, because I also didn’t want to hurt his feelings, since I knew that black people had had their feelings hurt plenty already.

  After we came back from Christmas break, we learned that Uncle Pete had been fired. The teachers at my school were concerned about how to explain his dismissal to a white girl named Kathy who had been especially close to him. I knew, in the way that children know things about what people are capable of, that he had done something wrong to someone—something not terribly wrong, probably nothing worse than inviting someone to share his seat—but the someone, likely a girl, had told her parents. This was 1977 in Fairfield, Connecticut, on a bus route that serviced Greenfield Hill, which next to Southport was the most exclusive area in town. The fact that Pete was black mattered.

  For high school I attended Greens Farms Academy, a local prep school housed in a converted estate overlooking Long Island Sound. Some descendants of the Vanderbilt family had built the Tudor-style stone mansion in the early twentieth century. The property featured formal gardens, ivy-covered stone gates, an apple orchard, and a great lawn. It was said that the train station a quarter of a mile up the road had been added specifically for the Vanderbilts’ convenience. The station was now used by students from neighboring towns whose families could afford the $6,000 tuition. (As of 2006, it has topped $26,000 a year.) In the mornings girls in plaid skirts and knee socks and boys in navy blue blazers could be seen trudging up the long driveway, beside the mothers driving car pool in their Volvo station wagons or Mercedes sedans and the harried-looking teachers—many of whom had long commutes since they couldn’t afford to live nearby—vying for a parking spot for their secondhand Subarus.

  During my first year at Greens Farms, I joined the drama club, where I met a girl named Dawn in the grade above me who was black. So far in my schooling, I’d never gotten to know a black schoolmate; there had been one African American student apiece in my elementary and junior high schools, both boys and in different classes from me. I was curious about Dawn, in part because she was black, but also because of her spunky nature and a poise that made her stand out among her fellow tenth graders.

  One day when we were talking, I asked her if she liked it at Greens Farms. She looked at me for a long moment, perhaps trying to decide how interested I really was in her experience at the school. Finally she said, “Well, you know, there aren’t many chips in this cookie.” I nodded solemnly. “But it’s all right, I guess.” And that was it, the closest I ever came to having a conversation about race. Race, however, did sometimes come up in conversation. One day during my junior year, my friends and I were exchanging jokes over lunch, while another of the black students, I’ll call him Bob, sat unnoticed at the far end of the table.

  Here are two that I remember telling:

  What do you call a black kid with a bicycle?

  A thief.

  If a black person, a spic, and a Chink fell out of an airplane, who would hit the ground first?

  Who cares?

  I remember the giddiness that came with daring to be offensive and my laughter—nervy and full of theatrical mortification. (I don’t remember using the word “nigger,” although the symmetry of the second joke calls for it. For a long time, I maintained that I had never used that word, and then one night someone took a sip from my beer bottle and handed it back with the rim all wet, and the term “nigger-lip” sprang to my mind, and I recalled my days of teenage smoking and realized that, in fact, I had used it, often.)

  Whispers traveled down the table to my end, saying that Bob had gotten up and left the lunchroom. Oh shit. Bob heard us. I didn’t see him. Why didn’t someone say he was there? He was well liked: smart, handsome, fun, a good athlete, and a nice guy. Nobody wanted to intentionally hurt his feelings. I vaguely recall a friend named Chris, who at age seventeen had a more developed sense of decency than the rest of us, going after him.

  After an embarrassed silence, more whispers: It’s cool. Bob’s cool. He knows that we didn’t mean anything by it. The implication was that Bob would understand that we knew he was different from the butts of our racist jokes. He was one of us, at private school, with wealthy parents and a nice house. He was cut from the same cloth, just a darker color. We trusted that Bob would realize that these jokes were the continuation of a groove that started with amputees and blondes and ratcheted up in offensiveness from there, and that we didn’t mean him. We weren’t thinking about him.

  I wanted to apologize many times, but I never did. I couldn’t face Bob, or rather, I couldn’t face what he must have thought of me. That was my only real concern—how I now looked in his eyes.

  Fifteen years later, as part of an effort to attract more “students of color” to the school, a friend who currently teaches at Greens Farms spoke to some of the handful of minority alumni about what it had been like for them. Bob didn’t particularly want to talk about it, but he told my friend that he’d had a difficult time.

  The subject of race started coming up at home too toward the end of my father’s life. African American culture had always been a part of our household: it was the music that we listened to, the athletes and entertainers that we admired on TV, but I don’t remember my parents ever discussing race, or making overtly racist comments for that matter. Neither did they instill in Todd and me a belief that all people were created equal. Whatever I came to believe about the difference between blacks and whites grew up in that void, fed by the racism in the world at large.

  After my father got sick, he became more outspoken. One night over dinner, he praised David Dinkins, the mayor of New York at the time, the first (and to date only) African American to hold the job. My dad approved of the fact that Dinkins, in his opinion, didn’t make excuses for black people. “Finally, someone who doesn’t just want to give them handouts and encourage their laziness and dependence,” he said.

  Armed with my youthful well-meaningness, I suggested to my father that what he called laziness was really a lack of opportunity, and any dependence could be blamed on the legacy of slavery. My response was mostly of the knee-jerk liberal variety, as I’d never given these issues a lot of thought. But my dad wasn’t particularly interested in arguing with me.

  “Dinkins can say it,” he continued, “because he’s black, and people will have to listen.”

  About six months later, shortly before my father died, he made a more pointed outburst. He had got it into his head that he and my mother needed to sell their “perfect doll’s house” and move to a better neighborhood. The house itself was elegant enough: a Victorian with four fireplaces and a front and back stair (which, according to my mother, used to be the definition of a mansion), but the block had an apartment building for low-income housing on one end, and some of our neighbors looked too down-at-the-heels for my father’s taste. He would regularly walk up and down the block, dragging a trash barrel behind him and picking up any garbage from the street. (He had done this in Connecticut too.) My dad believed, superstitiously, that a tonier address might protect him from getting any sicker. At least he would be less depressed, and as he regularly said, depression was bad medicine.

  One morning when some prospective buyers were due to make a second visit,
my dad returned from one of his street cleaning missions, tight-lipped and angry. He sat down at the dining room table, where I was having my breakfast.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “What’s wrong?” he repeated. “There’s some black kids playing outside down the street. That’s what’s wrong. These people aren’t going to want to buy this house when they see that!”

  Shocked, I answered with an outburst of my own. “Jesus Christ, Dad,” I said. “You sound like a goddamned racist.” Part of what surprised me was that my father loved children indiscriminately: fat, thin, funny, serious, and in all colors, or so I thought. I couldn’t believe that he would speak so harshly against them.

  I can still remember his expression as he sat across from me, his hands laid flat against the tabletop as if he were about to dart up and run away. He looked angry, hurt, confused, defenseless. Mostly I viewed his behavior through the lens of his cancer. I knew he felt trapped by it, and by extension, the narrowing circumstances of his life.

  I was also suddenly, painfully, aware of his age—almost seventy by this time—and his obsolete attitudes that were shaped during a distant era. He was forty-three, after all, when Dr. King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in the March on Washington in the summer of 1963.

  In the years to come, I would revisit the expression on my father’s face in light of what I had learned about his racial identity. I would wonder anew about the circumstances that my father felt trapped by; whether he worried that he’d ended up back in the sort of place that he’d spent so many years trying to escape.

  -5-

  When I was about twelve years old, I received a letter inviting me to apply to the Daughters of the American Revolution, the organization for female descendants of the colonial settlers. At that age, it was rare for me to receive a piece of mail, and I was thrilled to open the letter and read Dear Bliss Broyard, You may be eligible for membership... My mother, who seemed amused by the letter, said that since I wasn’t actually descended from any colonial settlers (my ancestors came later, from Norway and France, or so I was told), I needn’t bother replying. In retrospect I realize that the offering was probably from a genealogy company trying to entice customers with the suggestion of illustrious backgrounds, but I interpreted it as recognition that I came from good stock, someone who could be mistaken for a member of an old prominent family. In other words, a Wasp. I liked the idea that an anonymous person out there might be keeping track of who was who and that I hadn’t escaped his or her notice.