We’d start up, syncing into each other’s movements, and my partner would grin a little and say something to encourage me. I’d show off my fanciest steps, and he’d make them his own and hand them back. Sometimes the crowd would part a little to give us room.
He’d take me in his arms, stick a knee between my legs, and pull me forward and back, pantomiming a grind. I didn’t worry, because I believed that black men understood, as I did, that dancing is all about sex; therefore it was fine to bring it onto the floor, since that’s where it would stay. (If I ever danced with a white guy like that, he’d be following me around for the rest of the night, sure that he’d get lucky.)
When the song finished and I was panting a little, my partner would nod appreciatively. More than once I was told that I danced like a black girl. And once one of my partners asked me if I was black.
The next morning over breakfast, I would tell my dad about my night. “All the black guys ask me to dance,” I’d say, shrugging modestly. “They think I dance like a black girl.” This was a brag in our household. I once had a boyfriend named Peter who my father declared was the best white dancer he’d ever seen. Whenever Peter came over, my dad would take him into the living room, where the record player was kept, put on some funk, and entreat him to demonstrate his moves. But always Peter’s skill was noted with the disclaimer “for a white guy.”
I told my father, laughing, incredulous: “One guy even asked me if I was black.” He raised his eyebrows. You don’t say.
What could he have been thinking in those moments? Did he ever contemplate telling me? Was he looking at me and considering just how black I seemed? Was he thanking his lucky stars once again that my hair was curly, not kinky, that my skin was olive, not dusky, that my lips were thin, my nose only slightly wide, and that my ass was small? Did he worry that someday one of us might be found out?
Later that spring I invited my friend Chinita and her boyfriend, Mike, to come visit my family on Martha’s Vineyard for Memorial Day weekend. Chinita was renting an apartment next door to my parents, and she’d been dating Mike for a few months by this time. Through conversations in the shared driveway and over dinners, the couple had become family friends.
Before the weekend arrived, Mike was chatting on the telephone with his grandmother who lived in Greenwich, also in Fairfield County, near where I’d grown up. He mentioned that he was going to Anatole Broyard’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. He trusted that his grandmother would know the name—she was literary and she socialized with the handful of Times higher-ups who had also made Greenwich their home.
“Oh,” she said. “The black Haitian who writes for the New York Times.”
“He’s not black,” Mike said, amused. “I’ve met him. He’s as white as you or me.”
Mike relayed this story to me after he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard and then again at my insistence one evening during a dinner party thrown by my parents. I remember now how everyone, including my father, laughed and shook their heads. What a strange thing for his grandmother to think. If there was any pregnant pause, a holding of breath or darting of eyes, it escaped my attention. The moment was of so little consequence to my mother—who had known about my father’s ancestry since before they were married and had been beseeching him to tell Todd and me for years—that she barely recalled it when I reminded her. Most startled perhaps were any guests who knew the truth and realized that my brother and I were completely unaware.
I didn’t spend one minute wondering why someone would confuse my father with a black Haitian. Even the next day on a stroll down the beach, when I was walking behind my dad and noticed his long, rhythmic, loping stride, and blurted out, “Look, he even walks like a black guy,” and Mike and Chinita agreed, and my dad kicked out his legs and swiveled his hips a little more to make us laugh—even then, I still didn’t pause and wonder.
If you asked me why not, I might have told you that people never knew what to make of my father’s name—who ever heard of someone called Anatole?—or that growing up in the city, he’d developed an urban, hipster style of writing and being in the world that might mislead the unsophisticated. Probably, though, I would simply shrug. I was aware that my father had his secrets, mostly—I suspected—about women and his long career of seducing them, but I thought that essentially I knew him. In fact I knew much more about him than most daughters know about their fathers, such as all the girls he’d impregnated during his bachelor years and the difficulties back then in obtaining abortions (which he told me about as a kind of cautionary tale). But he was my dad, and we loved each other. I couldn’t imagine him deceiving me.
After he died I recalled a conversation we had when I was in my early teens. “What are you again?” I asked him out of the blue one day.
“French,” he said. “You know that.”
“Isn’t there something else too?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“I just thought there was something else. Are you sure there isn’t something else?”
After a moment he said: “Maybe a little Portuguese.”
I have no idea what made me press my father this way. To my knowledge this is the only time my father ever specifically lied to someone about his background. He would mark his race as white on official forms, as many light-skinned black people did, but when the subject came up in conversation, he would either reveal his ancestry, avoid answering the question, or, if cornered, occasionally grow angry and walk away. I haven’t found anyone else, though, to whom he unequivocally, directly lied.
In the years right after my father’s death, however, I clung to a theory that he was not deceptive but confused. I imagined him growing up ignorant of his own ethnicity—that his parents had managed to keep it from him somehow; that he’d lived among others like himself, all caught in a racial limbo; that when checking white on those forms, he was actually making his best guess.
I know from journal entries I made around the time of my father’s death that my mother had said that both of his parents were black, but somehow I began to misremember it as being only his mother. And she was so light-skinned! There she was in our family photo album at my parents’ wedding. Wasn’t it slightly absurd to expect my father to identify as black? Hadn’t I discovered myself how inscrutable the logic to racial identity could be? Couldn’t my father’s rejection of the racist, antiquated one-drop rule be considered courageous even?
If these things were true, then also true was the sense my father gave me of my rightness in the world. If he was authentic, then so was I. If he was honest, then I could believe that he really loved me. The only problem was his family.
The winter after the memorial service, I made a trip to New York to see my aunts and cousin. Shirley had me over for dinner, along with her son Frank and his wife and their two kids. My other aunt, Lorraine, was there too.
Shirley was petite, lively, expressive. When she told a story, she splayed large hands that reminded me of my own and widened round hooded eyes that looked like my father’s. Shirley lived in the large parlor-floor duplex of a five-story brownstone that she owned on the Upper West Side. The living room was elegant, with brick walls, a fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling windows edged in wrought iron that looked down on a back garden. I sat on the sofa and looked around at the African art collected by Shirley and her late husband when they lived abroad—masks, shields, and an array of antique metal crosses displayed under the glass-topped coffee table. I noticed the elegant traditional furniture and the attractive oriental rugs on the floor, and felt quietly relieved to see that my father’s family, like my own, had good taste and appreciated nice things (as if it would be easier to feel comfortable with my newfound family amid such comfortable surroundings!).
We talked about living in New York, movies, current events. Although it was my dad who connected us, I felt shy about bringing him up. Frank surprised me by referring to my father as Uncle Bud, which was the first I heard of his childhood nickname.
Fr
ank had lost his own father a few months before I’d lost mine. His dad, as an ambassador and civil rights activist, had also been well known in his field. I was curious to know more about their relationship—Frank mentioned the many demands on his father’s time and then quickly asserted that he was proud of his dad’s accomplishments—but I didn’t feel I had the right to ask such intimate questions. I wondered if Frank and I, had we grown up together, would have become friends. He struck me as a soft-spoken, thoughtful, gentle man. Perhaps, despite his being almost twenty years my senior, we’d have found some common ground. We might have turned to each other during this time, each looking for some solace.
Frank’s wife, Denise, who was originally from Belize, was pretty with closely cropped hair and large alert eyes. She reminded me slightly of her mother-in-law: capable, confident, and strong-willed. And their kids, then about six and eight, were cutely nonflummoxed on meeting their long-lost cousin, the white girl. Throughout the evening, though, I noticed an edge to Denise’s voice. It was softened slightly by her rather dutiful inquiries (where did I go to school? what did I do for work?), but I wondered if a few hours earlier her voice had been raised in argument with her husband: Why should we have to make nice and have dinner with her when her family would never share a meal with us?
Unmistakably, I was the outsider at this gathering. I sat among my relatives and noticed the easy rhythm they fell into, the apparent closeness between Frank’s kids and their great-aunt Lorraine. I sensed the shared history they had—the many other dinners, trips, and holidays spent in each other’s company. Also the culture they shared, black culture, was subtly evident throughout the evening—in the Caribbean meal of chicken cider stew Shirley prepared; in the art from Africa, Haiti, and by African Americans on the walls; in the woodcut print of James Baldwin propped up next to the fireplace; and in the conversation, which included a different set of references than those I was used to: Jesse Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Harlem, and apartheid.
Yet, although we were strangers to one another, I realized that my father had been a character in these peoples’ lives, albeit an infrequent and disconcerting one. From the few stories they shared about him, I recognized the man I knew as my dad.
That evening the same progression of thoughts that I’d had at the memorial service kept repeating in my head: This is my father’s family, and they are black. The thoughts lingered with the persistence of a riddle that you can’t solve: This is my father’s family, and they are black.
Therefore I’m black too?
Had I announced this over dinner, I don’t doubt that I would have been met with some confused and affronted faces. What did I know about being black? About Jackie Robinson or Nelson Mandela? Had I ever had trouble getting a cab or service in a store or the respect of my colleagues because of the color of my skin? Was I ever judged not as an individual but as a credit or an embarrassment to my race? Had anyone ever assumed I was stupid, lazy, or dishonest because of the way I looked? No to all of it, yet I remained caught in that loop of logic: This is my father’s family, and they’re black, therefore I must be black too.
After dinner, I noticed a photo album on the coffee table, and I asked if I could look through it. The album contained pictures of my father and his sisters in Brooklyn in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after the family had left New Orleans. There were also group shots of kids, sometimes including Lorraine and Shirley, taken during a trip the two sisters made back to Louisiana in 1935. I paused, intrigued by the range of phenotypes pictured—from light eyes and loose curls to brown skin and kinky hair.
“And all these people are Broyards?” I asked Shirley, who was looking at the album over my shoulder.
“Yes,” she said.
“But how could they all be related to each other?”
“Why shouldn’t they be? They’re cousins.”
My question seemed to irritate Shirley: Did I expect her to explain the vagaries of genetics? And why was I asking anyway?
Some of those cousins looked no more black than I did.
Lorraine is the most shadowy figure in my memory of that evening. Whereas Shirley, who is quite cosmopolitan in her conversation, was hard to keep up with at times, Lorraine was a more relaxing presence. I remember her as seeming very auntlike, touching my shoulders, taking my coat, making sure I had enough food. She’d maintained a relationship with my father over the years, and so, by extension, we had a measure of comfort with each other.
Before I got a chance to see her again, she died from breast cancer. I’d known that she was sick: during that visit she’d worn a head scarf to hide her hair loss from chemotherapy. But my mother, who spoke to Lorraine on the telephone sometimes, told me that the cancer was in remission. I expected to have plenty of time to get to know her, to hear her recollections about her brother as a young man, to enjoy the relationship of aunt and niece that we’d been robbed of, and to talk about my father’s choice to live as white so perhaps I could begin to understand it. Then suddenly her cancer returned, sending her back into the hospital for what quickly appeared to be the final trip. I considered going to New York to see her, but I didn’t feel right about encroaching upon her remaining time with her sister and nephew, who, after all, had been her family in both name and deed. And then Lorraine was dead, and we’d never gotten past the niceties.
A few impressions—her melodious voice; her round, smiling face; the kindness and gentleness that seemed to emanate from her—were all I had to remember her by. A couple of months later, I came home from work to a fat envelope in my mailbox from somebody Esquire: it was a copy of her will. I opened the package and read that since Lorraine had never married nor had children of her own, she left her weekend house in Long Island and all of her possessions to her sister, Shirley, and her nephew Frank. The will stated explicitly that her brother, Anatole, was to inherit nothing “for reasons known to both of them,” but that she left to his children, Todd and Bliss, one piece of jewelry each, to be chosen by them as a remembrance of their aunt and grandparents.
In soap operas the reading of the will is always a suspenseful moment. It gives the departed one the power to reach back from beyond the grave to bestow or retract her favor, and there’s no opportunity to plead your case. In a sense it’s the dead person’s true last words. I hadn’t anticipated, though, that in real life the moment could pack the same potential for surprise. Yet I was surprised. Lorraine’s will, more than anything I had felt in her presence or heard from my mother, made me realize that her brother’s rejection hurt her. My father had cut off his family, and here she was, doing the same thing back to him. Even through the document’s legalese, her anger was palpable, and any notion I held that the siblings’ estrangement might have been inadvertent or benign was dispelled. I leafed through the rest of the will and tried to piece together a portrait of my aunt from the belongings she’d bequeathed to others. A heavy exhausting sadness descended: my father had left behind so much unfinished business.
The next visit I made to Shirley’s was to choose the piece of Lorraine’s jewelry. My brother had deputized me to make his selection, and Shirley urged me to pick through the assortment spread across the dining room table and to try on some things. She pointed out a long strand of pearls and some particularly nice earrings. I was hesitant to rummage through everything, but Shirley, as Lorraine’s executor, insisted on following her instructions. “She wanted you to choose,” she said.
As I carried out this awkward duty, it occured to me that Lorraine must have realized when she drew up her will that to satisfy its conditions, Todd and I would have to meet our aunt Shirley at last, and my father’s secret, if we didn’t know it already, would finally be revealed. Perhaps she hoped to bring about some reconciliation, that the rift could stop here.
I settled on a ring of my grandmother’s for Todd to give to the next Mrs. Broyard: a mother ring with three small stones—two diamonds and an emerald—one for each of her children. For myself I picked a diamond pendant on
a gold chain that Lorraine had made from a divorced friend’s engagement ring. It didn’t have any sentimental value, but my aunt had liked it, and it looked good on me. I was quietly thrilled to have a piece of jewelry that was much nicer than anything I’d ever owned, and the irony that it had come from the secret black family my father had left behind, presumably in order to better himself, was not lost on me.
Afterward Shirley and I headed to dinner at a café a few blocks from her house. We sat at a small table squeezed in between other small tables in a glassed-in porch that fronted the street. Our conversation ranged from Broadway musicals to women’s rights in the 1990s. Finally I said something about family secrets, and by the time our entrées arrived, we had dived into the subject at last.
I asked Shirley how she understood the fact that my family never saw hers when I was growing up. My mother had intimated that my father’s estrangement from his younger sister was more complicated than just race.
“I never understood it,” she said. “Sometimes Frank would threaten to put the kids in the car and drive up to Connecticut and present ourselves on your doorstep.” She laughed heartily. “Can you imagine if you had opened the door and found all of us standing there? That would have been some surprise! But Lorraine always insisted that we had to respect Anatole’s decision.”
Shirley explained that since neither Lorraine nor Frank’s two siblings had had children, my brother and I were her kids’ only cousins. “They would ask me why it was that we never saw you.” She paused for a moment, and the painful response to the question hung between us. “But we were in California and then out of the country. We had our own lives that we were happy with.”
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