I asked Shirley about her upbringing and whether she thought there was any way that my father could have been confused about what race he was, as my mother had suggested.
“There was no question when we were growing up that we were black,” she said firmly. “My parents passed sometimes for work. A lot of black people did if it could bring some advantage. My father couldn’t be in the carpenter’s union if he wasn’t white! But at home we knew what we were. All our friends were black.”
Shirley talked about her trip with Lorraine back to New Orleans in the 1930s during Jim Crow—how they would go to the white movie theater with one set of cousins and go to the colored one with another. “I hated it,” she said. “It was so backward and provincial.”
We had eaten our entrées, ordered coffee and dessert, and finished those too, and now the waiter was hovering with the check. Still we kept talking.
“How did my dad’s decision make you feel?” I asked.
“As I said, we were far away, in California in the early sixties, and then Frank got the post in Ghana. By the time we got back to New York, my kids were grown. We had a busy, full life.”
Besides, Shirley did see her brother occasionally after she moved back—particularly around the time their mother died. “Once he took all of us out to dinner to talk about our mother’s care. It was a little French place, very nice, in Midtown, way over on the West Side”—she smiled a little bitterly and shook her head—“where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew.” She went on to say that her husband and my dad had always enjoyed each other whenever they’d gotten together. “Frank used to give these radio addresses in the eighties,” she explained. “And sometimes he would call up my brother to get his help, and Anatole would go over to Frank’s office and work on it with him. He was very friendly and accommodating.”
I was surprised to learn that my father did see Shirley and her family on occasion. Unlike his lunches with Lorraine or his trips to his mother’s nursing home, these visits were never mentioned by my dad, not even to my mother.
The waiter finally deposited our check on the corner of the table. The restaurant was still crowded. A new rotation of couples had appeared on either side of us. I was afraid that the dinner might end before I got a chance to ask a question I’d been wondering about since I learned of my father’s secret. I could feel myself grow nervous, and I learned forward so I wouldn’t be overheard by our neighbors. It felt like such a weird thing to want to know, for a person not to know. “Do you think it’s possible that some of our ancestors were slaves?” I asked.
Shirley sat back in her chair and eyed me with a mix of pity and condescension. “Well,” she said, “not too many black people emigrated to America in the nineteenth century, so, yes, I expect they were.” I let this news soak in. If some of my ancestors had been slaves, then the history of blacks in this country was my history too. Here was the conclusive evidence that could make my father’s identity as a black man real to me. I felt perversely pleased, the way that someone does upon receiving a bad diagnosis—I knew it! It’s true!—and then abruptly sad. There were still so many unanswered questions, and my sense of my father felt more distant than ever. The immense sadness and tragedy of slavery itself, however, I couldn’t yet feel.
Shirley began to gather her things to go.
“But I don’t know how to think of myself anymore,” I persisted. “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”
“You’re Bliss, that’s who you are,” she said, tugging on her jacket impatiently. “And the best thing you can do is to figure out what that means.” She tapped her finger on the tabletop. “The minute you let other people label you, you let them take away your power.”
Yes, yes, I agreed, I told her, but I felt as if my identity had been staked on false information.
She pushed her chair away from the table and offered her final word: “You’re not going to be able to understand what it means to you until you understand what it meant to your father. That’s the question you should be trying to answer.”
-7-
In December of 1993, six months after my dinner with Shirley, I went looking for my father’s birthplace in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Although he was only six when his family left for Brooklyn, in his stories and writings my dad was always offering the French Quarter as a way to explain his upbringing and the kind of man his father had been—a bel homme (beautiful man) and raconteur. It was there that my father’s secret history began.
My boyfriend at the time, a television reporter named Bill, came with me, offering up his skills to help me get the story on my dad. I don’t remember specifically discussing it, but it was understood that Bill and I were trying to find an answer to that first question I’d had on learning my father’s secret: How black was he?
Before we left town, I discovered a copy of my dad’s birth certificate that I’d somehow missed during my childhood snooping. It stated that before the recorder of births, deaths, and marriages for the city of New Orleans had personally appeared
Paul Broyard, native of this city, residing at No. 2444 Lapeyrouse Street who hereby declares that on the sixteenth of this month, (July 16th 1920) at no. 2524 St. Ann Street was born a male child, named Anatole Paul Broyard, Jr. (col), lawful issue of Anatole P. Broyard a native of this city aged 33 years, occupation carpenter and Edna Miller a native of this city aged 25 years.*
I knew from Shirley that Paul Broyard was her and my father’s grandfather. This fact and the addresses on the document were all the information I had to go on.
On a Friday evening, Bill and I checked into a guesthouse on one of the Quarter’s side streets and then headed out to walk around. Tall stucco townhouses painted in pale shades of pink, green, and blue sat flush along the narrow sidewalk. Ornate iron balustrades outlined second-floor balconies and heavy black slatted shutters folded back from windows. We wandered down the roughly laid brick sidewalks and peered behind gates and doors at tucked-away courtyards with small fountains at their centers and bare trellises set against their walls. The scene fit the image of my father’s childhood home that I’d developed from his stories and from what he’d written about the place. Explaining his father’s habit of walking down Broadway every Saturday after the family moved to New York, my father wrote that “every man in the French Quarter was a boulevardier, and life was a musical comedy.” I could imagine his father, who “had a blues song in his blood, a wistful jauntiness he brought with him from New Orleans,” strolling here.
Bill and I made the compulsory trip down Bourbon Street. We passed a jazz band—with a few horns and a drum kit—set up on a street corner and a mime with his face covered in white greasepaint posed motionless on a stepladder under a streetlamp. The shops, still open, displayed rows and rows of Mardi Gras beads, beer mugs with crawfish etched into their glass, and T-shirts that said things like “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” and “New Orleans/Home of the Big Party.” All the bars had their doors propped open despite the cool December evening, and music bled onto the street: drunken college boys singing off-key karaoke versions of Van Morrison and the steady throb of a disco beat. Every once in a while, we passed standing in a doorway a buxom woman clad in a sequined halter top or a metallic-colored minidress, wrapped in a fake fur stole, and perched on stiletto lace-up boots. She’d be leaning against the doorframe, chatting with the bouncer, his jacket zipped up against the cold, and when we walked by, they’d both pause, and she’d straighten up, switch her weight from foot to foot, throwing a hip out and her chest forward, wondering if the young, adventuresome-looking couple cared to come on inside.
As we walked up to Decatur Street, near the Mississippi River, passing more T-shirt shops and rowdy bars, my mood turned dark. Outside of that one charming street, the musical comedy of my father’s French Quarter with its jaunty walkers and raconteurs had been usurped by this tacky burlesque. I knew that it was unreasonable to expect a neighborhood to remain unchanged after almost seventy year
s—and of course the city would change more drastically still after Hurricane Katrina—but I’d hoped to feel more kinship to the place, that it would call up the hidden blues song in my own blood rather than a feeling of slight disgust. We paused at Jackson Square, a small, pristine gated park with a statue of Andrew Jackson rearing up on his horse at its center. The park gate was locked, but a few homeless people had spread out their bedding and tucked in for the night. Behind the park loomed St. Louis Cathedral, built in colonial days, a tall and regal remnant of more refined times.
We headed back to our room, walking along one side of the cathedral. When we reached the next cross street, Bill paused and pointed up to the sign. We were on St. Ann, the street where my father was born. We strolled along it for a few blocks, and I noticed some of the same aspects of the town houses that had charmed me earlier. Neither Bill nor I could recall the street number from my dad’s birth certificate, so we decided we’d come back the next afternoon after visiting the library. I could have already passed the house, I thought, imagining my infant father in the arms of his grandfather as he stood in the courtyard and admired his newest descendant, before setting off for the Board of Health to declare the birth.
I was also relieved to note that there was a street named St. Ann in the French Quarter, that at least this detail shared by father about his origins was true.
The most frequent visitors to the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library are amateur genealogists. You can spot them hunched in front of microfilm readers, searching through reels and reels of census data, city directories, old newspapers, wills, and successions; or lugging armfuls of volumes of church records or reference books back to large wooden tables; or crouched in front of filing cabinets housing index cards listing obituary notices or marriage licenses. Many of them are older retirees, but they speak about their genealogical searches as though they were work: I’m so busy lately—too many meetings, and I still haven’t gotten up to the state archives.
Many plan on publishing the results of their research when it is complete, which is often defined as having traced their family name or group of names back to their countries of origin, with the birth date and place of the first emigrants to America. The stacks of many regional libraries are full of such volumes. The authors sometimes sell them to the general public through genealogical Web sites and newsletters, but most are content to produce a book for their relatives and colleagues, perhaps especially their colleagues.
The researchers lean over the documents for hours, occasionally taking a break to stretch their backs and rest their eyes, and then they are at it again. It is exhausting, tedious work. The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall spent fifteen years studying microfilmed records throughout Louisiana and in Spain, France, and Texas to create a database containing the largest collection of individual slave records ever assembled. An article about her achievement that appeared on the front page of the New York Times noted that Hall nearly lost her sight in the process.
Now and then you can overhear someone talking to herself: There you are! or Well, lookie here.
Always they are searching for a name—their surname, or their mother’s, or their grandmother’s, or the maiden name of the mother of their great-grandfather. When they find these names, they can begin to lay claim to history. They tell themselves a story: My family has been in this city for over two hundred years. We lived in this neighborhood and on those streets. We were farmers or lawyers. We fixed shoes. We fought in wars. We had money. We knew people who were important. We were important. You’ll find our name in history books. We took part in shaping this time, this place, this world. We mattered. We will not be forgotten.
I envied these people. Whereas they were unraveling a ball of thread that started with family stories and yellowing photos displayed in the hall, my lead was a dusty, tangled thing that had been kicked under the bed years before. Unknotting it wasn’t going to be easy.
After Bill and I spent a few hours before the microfilm readers ourselves, all we had was a handful of seemingly unrelated facts. I’d tackled the obituaries while he looked up census records. In the 1830 New Orleans census appeared a Gilbert Broyard, between the ages of thirty and forty, listed as white, living with two free colored girls and two free colored boys, all under ten years old, and one free colored female between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five. Until 1860 only the heads of households were named in the census, so there is no way of knowing who these other people were. Did this family represent the beginning of the race-mixing in my father’s tree? That would make his—and my—ancestors black for more than 160 years, more than three times as long as the 50 or so years that my dad had lived as white, and six times as long as the 24 years that I had.
Bill brought over the current New Orleans phone book to show me the dozens of Broyards listed. My family had always been the only ones I knew of, and it was strange to see the name over which I’d felt so proprietary repeated again and again.
“I’ll get a copy of this page so we can start calling people,” he said.
I told him not to bother, that we wouldn’t have time this trip to see anyone. I didn’t tell Bill that I had already run across some Broyards myself in an index of articles appearing in New Orleans newspapers between the eighteenth century and the mid-1960s. I had been thrilled to find numerous entries, until I looked them up and saw that two were references to Broyards who had been arrested—one for immoral behavior with a fourteen-year-old and the other for being caught with $20,000 worth of narcotics—and a third was a guy who’d witnessed a murder. Their names had appeared in the police logs of the paper, which made me hesitant about getting in touch with the rest of my relatives.
Anyway, we had to get going if we wanted to hunt down the house where my father was born. We left the library and, after a quick sandwich, made our way to St. Ann Street and looked for 2524. The block that ran along St. Louis Cathedral was numbered in the 600s; we started walking away from the river, figuring that it couldn’t be too far. The route led us through Louis Armstrong Park, which runs along the edge of the French Quarter proper, and when we got to other side, the street numbered only in the 1500s—and the neighborhood had suddenly, dramatically, declined.
Here and there a few brightly painted wooden cottages remained with their lacy Victorian ornamentations, but most were in need of a paint job and had fallen into disrepair. Tall onion grass grew up around the foundations. Rooflines were pocked with gaps in the slate shingles. A surprising number of lots were empty, with just a square of scorched earth marking where houses had once stood.
Everyone we saw was black and looked poor. A young woman stood in an open doorway and watched us as we walked by. With loose jeans that snagged on her hip bones, she was rail thin. A little girl with holes in the knees of her pants was by her side. When she saw us, she reached for her mother’s hand. On the next block, some teenaged boys stood around a car with the doors opened and the radio blaring. They also turned to stare. We hit the 2000 block; another five to go. I felt as though we had been walking for hours.
For his job Bill sometimes had to travel to Boston’s inner city, knock on strangers’ doors, and ask if they had a photo of the son or daughter who had just been killed or arrested, and if a parent, uncle, or sister would be willing to talk to him for a minute. As we walked down St. Ann Street, he seemed perfectly at ease. He kept commenting on our surroundings, noting an interstate that we had passed under and wondering when it had been erected and about the effect on the neighborhood. He pointed out nice details on houses and speculated about urban renewal programs.
I remember wanting to ask Bill to lower his voice, to stop gesturing at people’s homes, to stop calling so much attention to us, but I was grateful for his company and his interest in my search, and I didn’t want to do anything that might discourage him. I was also hesitant to show my own discomfort, lest I appear cowardly, or worse, racist or elitist in his eyes. But the truth was, I was shocked by the poverty around us.<
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I’d known that my father’s parents weren’t well-off or educated—neither had gone to high school—but if I’d thought of them as poor, my vision of that was more rural and innocent: closely set houses with sparse furnishings in well-swept rooms, a small yard with some chickens perhaps, a tight square of a vegetable garden, some washing on the line. I’d expected to see in the windows simple white curtains, slightly frayed from constant laundering, rather than the old sheets tacked over the windows that were not already boarded up.
This was gritty ghetto poor, like the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Manhattan that, as a child, I’d peered down at from my family’s car. Again I wasn’t allowing for the fact that seventy years had passed. Bill was right about the construction of I-10 in the 1960s, bisecting the French Quarter and the Tremé neighborhood where my father was raised: the impact was devastating. Also, in 1993, the year of this visit, New Orleans was in the midst of a crack epidemic that continues today, and the area where we walked was among the hardest hit. But all I kept thinking was that no neighborhood that I had ever lived in would have declined so much.
Bill asked me for the house number as we crossed onto another block. Suddenly we were standing in front of a faded blue one-story cottage that appeared abandoned: the paint was peeling and there was no evidence of anyone living inside. We knocked for a while with no response.
“It’s small,” I said.
“It’s deep,” Bill said, peering down the alley alongside the house. “Look how far back it goes. And it looks like there used to be a nice yard.”
He suggested that we knock on the door of the neighboring house. I told the middle-aged woman who answered that my father had lived next door. “Anatole Broyard? People called him Buddy?”
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