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During my twenties I went through a phase of giving away my father’s clothes to various boyfriends. One of these men, Jack, happened to share my dad’s shoe size. At the time, I was living in my mother’s house in Cambridge. One Saturday night when Jack was over, we went through the jumble of shoes that my mom had gotten as far as moving out of her bedroom and into the closet in my dad’s study.
My father liked fashion and high-quality brands. Among the pairs Jack chose were some Paul Stuart loafers, some low-top city boots from Barneys, and a pair of hardly worn Timberland hiking shoes. Jack was a writer and lived frugally. He was more than happy to put these shoes to use.
We packed them up in a duffel bag. Since Jack had to get up early the next morning for an extra job he’d taken overseeing the delivery of the Sunday papers, I placed the bag by the front door where he wouldn’t forget it. He left out some beat-up Buster Brown–type boots—good for work, he’d said—to wear the next day, and we went to bed.
At 4:30 a.m. Jack slipped out without waking me—until he opened the front door, tripping the burglar alarm. I bolted upright in bed, Shit! Shit! Shit!—I’d forgotten to tell my mother not to arm the alarm—and went racing downstairs to turn it off. But my mom was already at the panel, punching in the code, and then the phone rang with the call from the alarm company, and she beat me again. I stood in the kitchen, naked except for the towel I’d grabbed, and smiled sheepishly while my mother relayed the password to the caller that indicated everything was all right. She hung up, shot me an annoyed glance, and disappeared back up the stairs without a word. This wasn’t the first time I’d caused a false alarm.
On the phone that night, Jack described his version of the events—the earsplitting wail pulsing from the house and the flashing lights that illuminated the sidewalk as he scurried down the street to his truck, his feet clad in his girlfriend’s dead father’s shoes and a bag full of half a dozen more banging at his side. The incident became a funny story he’d tell to friends. Everyone would laugh and roll their eyes at the obviousness of the metaphors—trying to fill my father’s shoes; stealing away, a thief in the night, from his house. I would laugh too, but the story exposed the conflicted place my father occupied for me a little too baldly for comfort. That Jack was fifteen years older, a nurturing fatherly type, and also a writer didn’t help matters.
Yet I persisted in my strange practice. The next boyfriend, a musician named Al, got some of my dad’s colorful sweaters and a jacket or two. Al was good-looking and a little cocky. He’d put on these jazzy sweaters and strut around. But the boyfriend after that, Bill, who accompanied me to New Orleans, was taller and broader than my father. He also flatly refused to be dressed up in his clothes (although he did end up with my mother’s dead brother’s tuxedo), and the habit was finally broken.
The obvious explanation is that I was looking for a man like my father, but the more I learned about my dad, the more I became determined to avoid men like him. Rather, I didn’t know how to rid myself of him, nor did I exactly want to. I missed my father even as my vision of him became more and more obscured, perhaps particularly as it became obscured. It felt like missing a ghost. If I placed his clothes on some form, maybe he’d reappear, the way the invisible man does at the end of the movie—slowly materializing to fill the empty suit.
At graduate school, in the stories that I was trying to write, fathers were appearing: charming, slightly bullying, sexy, artistic types not unlike my own dad. My classmates generally applauded them for their swaggering ways. I didn’t think of them as my father exactly, but I would borrow aspects of his character and then exaggerate them to explore some dynamic between fathers and daughters that I’d become fixated on.
After I’d been in Charlottesville for a few months, I received a letter from an editor at a New York publishing house. She’d come across the one story I had published so far, which described a daughter attending her dying father, and she wondered if I had more stories to show her. I didn’t, but I wrote back suggesting that after I finished graduate school maybe we could get in touch again.
A few months earlier, I’d heard from an editor at another New York publishing house, who invited me to lunch. When we got together, I learned that this woman wasn’t particularly interested in my fiction. She’d heard about my father’s racial identity from a mutual friend. The story had never been told publicly, and she thought that I was the person to do it.
I’d always imagined that I would eventually write about my father’s secret. A book would give me the courage and impetus to forge ahead in the rocky terrain of race and family rifts. Also, since this information about my identity had not been made public to me as I was growing up, the act of my making it public always felt like my right. Yet although I was becoming more comfortable and familiar with questions of race, I wasn’t ready to embark on this project. I put the editor off by explaining that I wanted to first work on a book of fiction so that I could try to find an audience on my own merit.
When classes ended in June 1995, I headed to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer to wait tables and clean houses to earn money for the following school year. One day I got a phone call at home from Rick Grand-Jean, a neighbor of ours and a close family friend. My mother and I often had dinner with Rick and his wife, Christine, during which we would sometimes talk about my father’s racial identity and my plans to write about it.
Rick was calling to report that at a cocktail party the night before, he’d met Henry Louis Gates Jr. “He’s the head of the Afro-American department at Harvard,” he said.
“I know who he is,” I said, slightly annoyed. Even if I weren’t reading and thinking about race all the time, it would be hard not to be familiar with Gates’s name. He was everywhere: on political talk shows, in the table of contents of the New Yorker, listed in some capacity (author, editor, foreword by, writer of a blurb) on the cover of almost every book on the black history table in my local Barnes & Noble.
Rick explained that my family’s name had come up in conversation, and Skip, as most people called him, had expressed interest in my father’s story. He’d known about my dad’s black ancestry from Shirley Broyard’s husband, Frank Williams, whom he’d met while at Yale. When Rick mentioned that I intended to write a book about my dad, Skip passed along his number to give to me.
I wondered out loud why the top African American academic in the country would want to talk to a twenty-eight-year-old short-story writer with one publication to her name.
“Maybe he wants to help you,” Rick suggested. “He seems like a nice guy.”
Five minutes later I was talking to the man himself. I’d called from the phone in the kitchen, an old-fashioned wall model with a rotary dial and a stretched-out cord that was always getting tangled. I started out the conversation pacing back and forth in front of the counter—I was anxious about sounding stupid or ill-informed—but his easygoing manner and a conversational style peppered with words like “dig,” “brother,” and “crazy motherfucker” soon relaxed me, and before long I was perched on the kitchen stool, my elbows propped on the counter, relaying my story with my own saucy language: So then my mother says, Your father is part black, and I’m like, That’s the secret? Big fucking deal!
Skip asked me question after question: about my father’s family and whether we ever saw them when I was growing up, about the manner in which I’d learned the secret, about my dad’s attitudes toward African Americans.
“He was totally prejudiced,” I said bitterly, feeling a small prick of betrayal. “You should have heard the things he said.”
Skip didn’t sound surprised. “That was probably the blackest thing about him,” he said.
I confided my confusion about what to call myself, and Skip told me a story about a student of his who’d discovered her black ancestry over one summer and returned to college with her hair in dreadlocks. I waited for him to add a coda: As if being black were as simple as changing one’s hairstyle. But he di
dn’t, which prompted me to wonder if I was making my identity quest too complicated.
Skip explained that his interest in my father’s story began back in the midseventies, while he was teaching at Yale. In 1971 my dad had gotten the job as the new daily book critic for the New York Times. No major daily newspaper in the United States, aside from Negro newspapers (as they were then called), had ever had a black critic on staff, and African American intellectuals around the country had been buzzing with the news ever since. Skip was occasionally contributing book reviews to the Times himself. One day he took the train down from New Haven to have lunch with a senior editor there. As he and the editor were chatting, Skip made a comment—a mischievous one—about being pleased to see a black critic on staff. The editor looked confused and asked him who he was talking about. “Why, Anatole Broyard,” Skip said. The older man pushed back his chair from the table and said—Skip put on a scolding patrician voice here—That sort of scandalous talk will not be tolerated if you hope to keep writing for the New York Times. Because he did want to keep writing for the paper, Skip muttered something about how he must have been mistaken. The conversation resumed, but a few minutes later the editor circled back to the topic: Well, he might be one thirty-second black—a great-grandmother or something somewhere—but no more than that.
“No more than that,” I repeated sarcastically. “Thank God.”
After talking for almost an hour, Skip promised to put together a reading list for me and get back in touch. I stood in the kitchen for a minute after we hung up, staring out the big picture window onto the jungle of my mother’s garden. The head of Harvard’s Afro-American department had told me emphatically that I had to write about my father’s racial identity, that it would make a wonderful and important story. The notion of my life having a grand purpose swelled my chest, and for the next few days, as I cleaned the houses of the Vineyard elite, I imagined them saying, years from now, To think that the author of that book used to mop our floors!
The next time I heard from Skip, I was back in Charlottesville. He called to say that he was going to be in town for a memorial service for the director of the university’s black studies institute, and he wondered if I was available to have lunch.
“Uh, sure,” I said, a little hesitantly. I couldn’t imagine why he was being so generous with his time. “You can give me the titles of those books that you mentioned I should read.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I’ve got to put that together.”
I wondered briefly if his interest was romantic. I’d run across such men before: older intellectual types who fancied themselves Don Juans. They’d develop a fascination with my father, and in his absence, settle on having me as the next best thing.
A day or two before our lunch date, Skip called again to say that he had to cancel. “I was really looking forward to meeting you,” he said. “But I’ve got to go to Washington because they’re giving me this award.” He hoped that I understood.
“Well, of course,” I said, more confused than ever. “Wow, congratulations.”
“Yeah,” he answered modestly. “But listen, I’ve got some good news. You know that I’m under contract to write these profiles for the New Yorker. Well, I talked to the editor, Tina Brown, and she’s interested in a piece about Anatole.”
I hadn’t known about the contract. I swelled up again, this time with my own naïveté, which threatened to rise in my throat and choke me. Besides being an academic, Skip was a writer too. Of course his interest in my father’s story would involve telling it.
“Isn’t that great?” Skip asked.
No, I told him. It wasn’t great. Not at all. I was planning on writing about my father. “As you know,” I added pointedly.
“Well, why haven’t you, then?” he asked, a new sharp tone in his voice. “You’ve known for over five years now.”
I couldn’t believe this. “I’m not going to fight with you over my own father like he’s some sort of commodity,” I said.
“I’m not trying to scoop you, Bliss,” Skip said, sounding insulted.
My voice rose. I didn’t care who the hell he was. But I couldn’t make the Harvard professor understand how important it was to me to be the one to publicly identify my father as black for the first time.
“You’re worried about the stigma. That’s it. Isn’t it?” he said. “You’re afraid of being identified as black.”
Now it was my turn to sound insulted. I told Gates that I felt I’d been done an injustice by having my father’s ancestry kept from me, and that it was unfair for him to wrest away control over my identity once again. But of course my personal battle was not his concern. My dad was the most well known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century, and Gates was determined to tell his story.
We hung up at a crossroads. As he continued to call throughout the fall, trying to win my cooperation—and by extension, my family’s—my trash-talking buddy Skip rapidly disappeared. Messages from Henry Louis Gates, Professor Gates, Dr. Gates, and then finally Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. piled up on my answering machine.
We argued back and forth. He later told my mother that except for Louis Farrakhan, nobody had ever been as angry with him. He kept insisting that his article wouldn’t get in the way of my own writing project; in fact it might generate more interest. He even offered to ask Tina Brown if she’d run a thousand-word essay from me about my dad in an upcoming “black issue” of the magazine.
“I told you, I’m not ready yet,” I said petulantly.
Eventually Skip realized that he was barking up the wrong tree. Someone introduced him to my mother, whom he managed to persuade to participate with the argument that of all the black writers who were lining up to take on the subject of Anatole Broyard, he would be the most sympathetic.
The article appeared the following June; I flew up to Boston the day the issue was released. A row of New Yorkers lined the glass window of a Logan Airport newsstand. The white wrapper advertising highlights from the magazine read in big black letters: WHITE LIKE ME. THE PASSING OF ANATOLE BROYARD. I had a wild impulse to charge inside the store and rip all the magazines down. I wasn’t ready yet.
I headed to the house of my dad’s old pal Mike Miller, where family friends were gathering. The party had been planned the way politicians plan events for election night, allowing room for positive and negative contingencies, with lots of booze and food on hand. I’d managed to get an advance copy of the issue, and I’d spent the last twenty-four hours poring over the twenty pages recounting my father’s life, and my own, underlining passages and taking notes.
I read about my grandparents Nat and Edna, and my father’s childhood. I read about what people had thought and said about my dad—his racial identity and romantic career—behind his back. I read about my father’s desire to write fiction and the theory that he was unable to do so because he was living a lie. I read about that day at the hospital when I was told the secret, and how my aunt Shirley thought that I was handling the news rather well. I read about this man, my dad, who was a “virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation” and “a connoisseur of the liminal—of crossing over and...getting over.” And I read about my own need to now reformulate who it was that I understood my father—and myself—to be.
Years later I’d realize that my biggest fear was that Gates, a stranger who had never even met my father, would understand him better than I could, who had known and lived with him for most of twenty-four years; that I’d be shut out of the conversation by their shared language of blackness. And so, most of all, I read for the ways that Gates had gotten my father wrong.
“It’s not so bad,” people at the party said. “It could have been worse.”
And they were right: the piece was not unsympathetic, despite its summation of my father’s life as a kind of Faustian bargain. But my family and I stood stiff with anger, blinded under the glare of this sudden spotlight. The characterization of my father as an obsessive seducer of
women particularly upset my mother. My brother, who was sensitive to any slight of our dad, talked about wanting to punch the professor’s lights out. I took issue with Gates’s claim that my father wanted to be someone other than Anatole Broyard. “The exact opposite is true,” I said to anyone who would listen. “He just wanted to be himself, without all the restrictions and stereotypes of being black.”
For their part, my father’s friends disputed the extent to which my father’s racial identity was described as a secret—most everyone in his life knew. And they especially took objection to Gates’s portrayal of my dad as evasive or a trickster. My father’s charm, unlike that of some charismatic people, didn’t rest in his mysteriousness but in how genuinely he connected to others. My father’s friends were smart, observant, sensitive people; they couldn’t have been fooled so easily.
But, someone pointed out, there was no denying that earning a long profile in the favored magazine of the country’s intelligentsia represented a certain level of achievement in a person’s life. Then the conversation moved on. Anatole had been dead for nearly six years now, and these various friends from the different walks of his life welcomed the chance to catch up.
The next day I returned to Charlottesville, where I had decided to spend the summer. I’d just graduated from the writing program, and I busied myself trying to figure out how to assemble the life of a writer. One morning I received a thick envelope in the mailbox. It was from Gates’s research assistant, and it contained all the genealogy that had been collected to prove my father’s race. I could barely make out the various names on the census records, obituaries, and marriage licenses, which appeared to have been photocopied many times. But there was a copy of my father’s birth certificate, which I hadn’t looked at since my trip to New Orleans three years earlier. Someone had penned the word “colored” in the margin in case the “(col)” following my father’s name wasn’t clear. On my own birth certificate, my father’s race was listed as white.
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