She shook her head no. I went on to explain that his family moved out in the 1920s.
“Is there anyone older on the block who has lived here for a long time?” Bill asked. The woman’s son came to the door and said that we should talk to Miss Barbara down the street. “She’s lived here forever.” He offered to take us to her house.
As we followed him, I mouthed to Bill, “Miss Barbara,” slightly buoyed by the stately sound of the name.
We entered the house, and the smell of urine hit me. Towels covered these windows, and it took me a moment before I spotted in the darkness an old woman in a plaid housedress propped up on a mattress on top of a box spring in a corner. Piles of clothes surrounded her, and a small child wearing a diaper and a T-shirt lay sleeping beside her.
“This girl is trying to find out about her daddy. He lived here seventy years ago,” the neighbor explained. Miss Barbara pushed the sleeping child closer to the wall and told me to sit beside her.
“She can’t see so well,” said the neighbor, prodding me forward. I perched on the edge of the mattress and discovered that Miss Barbara was the source of the urine smell. She laid a hand on my arm and asked again who my father was. We quickly established that she had only been two when my dad’s family left town, and she didn’t remember any Broyards on the block when she was growing up. The little girl woke and started to fuss. She stood and tottered out of the room, one hand on her hip to keep her diaper from slipping down, looking, it seemed, for an adult who might change her.
After Miss Barbara talked for a while about the people she did recall from her childhood, prompted by Bill, who asked question after question in hopes of uncovering someone who might remember my father, I interrupted, saying that we’d taken up enough of her time. The diapered girl circled back into the room and started to cry. I got up, said again that we should go, thanked Miss Barbara, and headed past Bill out the door.
The walk back to the French Quarter went much faster than the way there. It was starting to get dark, and Bill suggested that we take Canal Street, which, as a well-traveled business thoroughfare, seemed safer. I was quiet while he read from the notes he’d made during the conversation. He was walking fast as he talked, making plans for the next day, trying to figure out when we could return to St. Ann Street to look for some of the people Miss Barbara mentioned. “We should go to the library first and check out the phone books, because they might have moved,” he said. “Oh shoot. I wonder if it’s open on Sunday. I forgot to look.”
I grabbed his arm. I was crying. “Just stop, all right?” He looked confused and stopped walking, but that wasn’t what I meant.
“Stop with the reporter bit,” I said, my voice rising. “This isn’t some story you’re doing. Okay? This is my family. My fucking father. Enough. All right.” I started walking again, a few steps ahead of him, crying noisily. We didn’t speak the rest of the way back.
I couldn’t explain what was upsetting me, because I was embarrassed and ashamed—that my father’s family had been poor, that I hadn’t realized how poor, that I cared so much. Bill’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, or close to it. His grandfather had been the dean of a prestigious medical school in New York City. Another ancestor, a great-great-great-grandmother or somebody, had been the first white woman born in Bronx County in New York. Bill had shared these details of his family scornfully, eschewing the Waspiness of his upbringing. He had told me more than once that he would gladly trade his own illustrious ancestry for my more exotic past, placing me as it did closer to the salt-of-the-earth folks who figured so heroically in the left-wing newspapers that he liked to read.
His glorification of my past I also found shameful and embarrassing, and on another level, perhaps the more honest one that made me yell at him, I recognized it as a fiction, one that was as convenient as the romantic image I’d held of my father’s youthful poverty.
When we got back to Cambridge, I made a folder, labeled it GENEALOGY, tucked all the notes we’d taken inside, and filed it away. Over the next three years, I would pull the folder out occasionally, spend half an hour trying to connect the dots, and then put it back. I didn’t return to New Orleans, nor did I try to call any of the people there who shared my last name.
In the fall of 1994 I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, to attend graduate school. I got an apartment a mile outside of town in an old mansion that had once belonged to the owners of a woolen mill. From my front porch, I could see the mountain on which Monticello was located, home to Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress Sally Hemings.
My first morning in my new place, I didn’t have any food, nor had I unpacked my dishes, so I headed out to a little breakfast joint I’d noticed up the road. It was a small building, not much bigger than a shack, set in between a couple of houses. I sat down at the counter, and a few moments later, a cop walked in. He went to a back hallway and returned with an apron, which he put on over his uniform before sitting down. I asked the cook, a heavy-set red-faced man with the slightly bulbous nose of a drinker, if he had a whole wheat bagel and some herb tea. He and the cop grinned.
“You’ll be wanting the biscuits and sausage gravy, ma’am,” the cop said.
“Okay,” I said, feeling my face redden slightly.
The cook added: “And there’s no tea. Just coffee.”
“That’ll be fine, then.”
I dug into my breakfast, listening to the cop and the cook chat with their y’alls and heavy drawls, and I realized that while I was only two hours from Washington, DC (and six and a half from New York), I was in the South.
The cook asked me if I was new in town.
“I just arrived,” I told him. “I’m starting school up at the university to study creative writing.”
They seemed impressed. The cook asked what I wrote.
Stories, I told him.
“True ones?” the cop wondered.
“No, mostly made-up, but I hope that they’ll feel true to people.”
“We’ll have to keep an eye out for your name,” said the cook. “What’d you say it was?”
Bliss, I told him. Bliss Broyard.
“Bliss?” he repeated, making sure he got it right. “That sure is a funny name. Sounds like one of them names the colored girls give their babies. They come up with the strangest-sounding names—Keisha, Shawanna—just make ’em up.” He and the cop laughed.
I remember that I raised my eyebrows—Is that so?—and how my face felt frozen in that expression, as if by relaxing it, I would give something away about myself.
He extended his hand. “My name’s Frank, and this here’s Fred.” He gestured to the cop’s apron: “He comes every morning.”
I shook their hands and told them that I’d be seeing them, but as I left, letting the screen door slam behind me, I doubted that I would be going back to that place again.
Charlottesville was where I began to learn about race in earnest. For the first time in my life, my world was somewhat integrated. Unlike most people’s, my sheltered existence hadn’t been challenged much in college. The University of Vermont, where I’d done my undergraduate work, was overwhelmingly white. In 1988, the year I graduated, there were only forty African American students out of more than eight thousand undergraduates. The one black student with whom I was friendly was a wealthy Nigerian guy who everyone said was a prince back in his country. While some of my course work brought me into contact with the music and literature of Africa and African Americans, my interest in “black subjects” didn’t extend to political issues. When some of the “hippie crowd” set up a shantytown in the quad to try to force the university to divest its South African holdings, my friends and I joked that demonstrators would be driven out by their own pungency from lack of showers. And my years in Boston working at the blue-blood investment firm weren’t much better. Since learning about my dad’s ancestry I’d been reading extensively about race and African American history, but I’d barely had a conversation about the subjects with a
nyone who knew them firsthand.
Hank, a recent graduate of the writing program, was the first African American with whom I shared my father’s secret. Over beers late into the night at a local bar, the stories came tumbling out of me: about my father being ostracized by both the white and black kids in his neighborhood, about his father having to pass to be in the carpenter’s union, and my dad’s fear of being pigeonholed as a black writer. Hank offered stories about his own light-skinned relatives. He’d also known of people who’d crossed over. Every black person did, he said. He went on to explain how racism could drive a man to deny his identity. He described how helpless and angry it made him feel when he saw a white woman cross the street to avoid him, and how difficult it was not to turn that anger inward at himself.
Up until then, I had seen my father mostly as an anomaly, a lone dropout from the struggle for civil rights, but the conversation that night made me reconsider: apparently lots of people had opted out. Much later I’d recognize how magnanimous it was of Hank to respond to my father with compassion, given that he didn’t have the same choice to control how he was perceived by the world.
With other African American graduate students, these conversations continued—about the subtle racist attitudes that persisted into the late twentieth century, but also about matters particular to being raised African American. Erica, another short-story writer, told me about the times she had to prove that she was “black enough.” She’d grown up in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood, and her family’s insistence that she speak “proper” English had made her a target on the street. On the other hand, she’d recently decided to lock her hair because she liked the look and was tired of the hassle and expense of chemical relaxants, and suddenly she was seen differently—more politicized and militant—especially by black men. Walton, a first-generation American whose parents were from Zaire, taught me about poetry, American jazz, and African high-life music, and explained the special meaning that the hyphenated identity of African American had for him.
I talked the most with Anjana, a cultural anthropologist who was writing her dissertation on multiracial identity. In her late thirties, Anjana was older than many of the other graduate students, having returned to school after a child and a divorce. A curvy woman with dreadlocks and a wide, open face, she was forceful, funny, and intensely fair-minded. We talked usually on the phone and often about the question of what one calls onself. Anjana had European, African, Hispanic, and Native American ancestors all in the first and second generations preceding her. For political reasons she identified as African American in any official capacity, but otherwise she resisted labels. A professor in a class she was taking once had the students go around the room and describe how they thought of themselves. People answered Hispanic, African American, Jewish, et cetera. When it came to Anjana’s turn, she wryly offered, “Empress of the Universe.”
Time and again I asked her what she would call herself if she were me, and she always gave some variation of the same response: What’s wrong with Bliss? It’s a fine name.
Some things that changed during that time: I stopped pussyfooting around race. I didn’t lower my voice anymore when I said the word “black.” I didn’t shy away from asking a question because I worried that it might make me sound ignorant or unwittingly racist. I began to stare, looking closely into the faces of my black friends, trying to see them rather than, as Ralph Ellison described, their surroundings, myself, or some figment of my imagination. I avoided that exchange of glances among white people—in a store, on the street, in a bus—when a black person has done something they disapprove of: that quick network built from strangers rolling their eyes and raising their eyebrows to remind themselves of their united front. And I started to notice the dozens of thoughts that zoomed through my brain every day carrying racially coded messages. I didn’t make a conscious decision to do this, but as I learned and talked about race, these thoughts that had once been background noise suddenly captured my attention.
I remember the first time that it happened. I was driving through the parking lot of my local supermarket and I spotted an old sedan that was speeding too fast down a neighboring row. I crossed the car’s path, and I noted with satisfaction that the driver was a black man—It figures—and in that split second, the belief that black men were reckless and inconsiderate, one that I wasn’t even aware of holding, had been confirmed, and I was pleased about it because I’d been proven right!
I parked my own car and sat there, trembling slightly. The thought lay in my brain like a mess on the carpet. I wanted nothing to do with it, but there it was, as plain as could be. Was that really me who just thought that? Or had the cook from the restaurant up the street possessed me for a moment? Given all the conversations that I’d had, all the friendships that I’d developed, what I’d learned about my father, how could I possibly be growing even more racist?
This experience repeated itself in the creative writing class I was teaching. I became conscious of slightly lowering my expectations of a black student by pandering to her hackneyed treatment of her story’s theme of discrimination. In the drugstore I watched as my annoyance with a slow cashier, who was black, widened into a general condemnation of certain types of young African American women as lazy. In the past these thoughts had passed stealthily through my brain the way the fact that you are reading subtitles during a foreign film fades from your awareness, yet their message still dictates how you see what’s happening before you. Now I began to try to intercept them.
I developed a method by which I hoped to deprogram myself. First I would forgive myself, because the only other choice, self-censure, didn’t leave any room to correct the problem. I reasoned that given the pervasiveness of racism in America, it’s impossible for a person to escape its effect. Of course I was racist, meaning I made judgments, valuations, and assumptions about people based on what I perceived their ethnicity to be. After all, fitting information into categories is how we make sense of the world. Perhaps if people felt less apprehensive about acknowledging their racist thoughts, then they could move on to addressing them.
Next I would try to identify which particular stereotype of African Americans had fueled the belief in question: that black men are dangerous, or black students aren’t as smart as white ones, or black girls have no ambition. And then, in a logical fashion, I would attempt to debunk it: What proof did I have that black men were more dangerous? Well, they are incarcerated at a higher rate than white men—but isn’t that also due in part to the bias of the justice system, issues of class, and a historical deprivation of opportunity? If all other things were equal, was there any evidence that black men would be constitutionally more prone to reckless behavior than white men? Hadn’t I in fact known white men who were reckless and black men who were not? Couldn’t that encounter in the parking lot have been a singular incident? And why should the driver be made to stand in for all other black men and not, say, all other people who drive old sedans? Couldn’t I have just as easily judged him as yet another inconsiderate old-sedan driver? Once I was satisfied that my belief was unfounded, I would make a pledge to myself to try to do better the next time.
It was strange to take such a systematic approach to changing the way I thought and behaved, as if I were making myself the subject of a psychological experiment. And it was hard work. Trying to be constantly vigilant wasn’t fun or easy. Sometimes it was difficult to resist the desire to feel superior over another person. Sometimes I got a thrill from thinking something that was ugly and extreme, the way that smelling a terrible smell can be perversely exhilarating. But mostly I didn’t feel I had much choice in challenging these thoughts. Along the way my loyalties had shifted without my even realizing it.
When I arrived at Southern Culture, the restaurant where I worked as a waitress, on the day that the O. J. Simpson trial was decided, the television in the bar was tuned to CNN and my coworkers were gathered around. Many of them were also graduate students or alumni of the Univers
ity of Virginia, well educated and liberal in their politics. Everyone was white except for one dishwasher, a black man in his midfifties whom the owners had taken under their wing. He had once been in prison for failure to make payments on his child support and was constantly struggling to stay on the wagon. So long as he was sober, he’d be given work; when he wasn’t sober, he’d sometimes show up in the middle of service to ask for a drink or some money, and then the owners would turn him away.
The verdict had been announced a few hours earlier, but many people hadn’t yet seen the televised decision. The case had been the topic of discussion over beers at the end of many shifts. I stayed out of it for the most part. I’d missed seeing the live footage of the flight of the white Bronco, which was the initial hook for so many people. Also, the debates often unwittingly exposed peoples’ attitudes about race in a way that was uncomfortable to hear.
O.J. rose along with his lawyers, and we stood there too, silently, as the charges were read. Then came the verdict: not guilty. I watched the relief pass through O.J.’s body, as his mouth rose slowly into a smile. Johnnie Cochran thumped his back in congratulations. I smiled too and turned around to begin setting up for dinner. My coworkers remained staring at the television in disbelief. “It’s outrageous!” someone said, shaking his head. “He’s guilty as sin!” By the kitchen door stood the dishwasher, who wore a shit-eating, I-can’t-believe-it grin. I imagined what he was thinking: Finally, a brother catching a break, a black man buying himself some justice. He shook his head and went back into the kitchen.
I didn’t actually believe that O.J. was innocent, and I appreciated the seriousness of the crime he was accused of. I would also come to realize the complex emotions provoked by the decision for many of my African American friends. But in that lightning moment that exposed the country’s deep racial divide, there was something about O.J.’s going free that, to my surprise, made me inexplicably happy.
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