One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Gates had advised my mother when they were discussing my objections to his article that the best thing she could do was to help me accept my blackness. He suggested that I could even petition the court in Connecticut to change my father’s race to “black” on the record of my own birth. As I filed away these papers with the rest of my genealogical data, I wondered how a man whose lifework was dedicated to the notion that a person’s race was the most signifying element about him could propose that switching sides was as easy as changing a word on a piece of paper, as simple as restyling one’s hair.

  In September a friend from high school called to let me know that another friend of ours, Eric, had died. He’d been sick with a brain tumor for a few months, and I’d missed my chance to visit him in the hospital when his wife, Amy, who also went to our high school and had been a good friend of mine, was still allowing people to come. Everyone from our class and the class above us was flying in from around the country for the memorial service, and I promised that I’d be there too.

  I’d lost touch with many of these people since my parents had left Connecticut seven years earlier, but I was reminded over the course of the visit how intimately these friends had known me and my family and how they were among the shrinking population in my life who had known my dad. Yet the specter of the New Yorker profile, which described my father’s acceptance by the Connecticut gentry as the ultimate test of his reinvented self, made me feel awkward and self-conscious. Over the years I’d told a few of my closer friends about my dad’s secret, and since I’d arrived, one or two people had mentioned quietly that they’d seen the article, but for the most part the subject wasn’t openly addressed.

  On Sunday morning before the service, we were hanging out at the home of two other high school friends who’d ended up marrying each other. They lived in the kind of eighteenth-century farmhouse that my own parents would have coveted: low-beamed ceilings, oversized fireplace, and wide pine floorboards. A group of people were gathered on the couch, leafing through old photo albums, when my friend Nick, on seeing a picture of one of the two black guys in our upper school, made a joke about never being able to tell the men apart. A few people laughed, and I noticed Chris, the same guy who’d gone after Bob that day in the lunchroom, glance at me. Now I was the one unseen at the far end of the table. I got up and left the room.

  Compared to the jokes that I’d made in the lunchroom, Nick’s was pretty benign. Part of what made everyone laugh was the fact that Nick had been particularly close with Ed, the other black guy at our school. Of course he would recognize him. But as I walked down the hallway toward the bathroom, I was shaking. A little while later, I pulled Nick aside and told him about my father’s ancestry. He grinned and said, “So you’re telling me you’re a sister?” And then I told him how his comment had made me feel.

  “But you know me, Bliss,” he said. “You know I’m not a racist. That’s just my obnoxious sense of humor.”

  The problem was, I had lost my sense of humor, at least on this score. I could no longer locate myself in the world I was raised in. I didn’t have a perspective on the landscape anymore; I couldn’t gauge how big anything was, or how small. It was as if my own life in Connecticut had existed only in my father’s fantasies, and now that they’d been laid bare, I’d ceased to exist there at all. One night over the weekend, I kept my friend Holly awake for hours, questioning her about who I’d been back then and what role I’d played among our gang. I honestly couldn’t remember.

  I knew that these old friends looked to me to set the tone about my father’s blackness. If I didn’t make a big deal out of it, then neither would they. They’d look past it, just as we had looked past that time when we’d seen another friend’s mother run screaming across their front lawn as her husband chased her and the friend’s little brother hopped up on his father’s back, crying and yelling for him to stop. It was clear that we’d seen something we shouldn’t have, and so we gathered our things together and stood to go.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to pretend that everything was still the same, even if I could. The world and manner in which we’d been brought up were implicated by the revelation about my father. I was coming to realize that, like the old Groucho Marx joke, one of the attractions this particular club held for my dad was the fact that it wouldn’t have accepted him as a member.

  My friends had liked, or even loved, my father, especially the boys, whom my dad had talked to like men, over beers and cheese and crackers (which I was dispatched to the kitchen to fetch for them) after games of touch football or swims in our pool. He showed these young men that literature and the emotions it invoked could be sexy and cool. He told them stories about women and war and running a bookstore in Greenwich Village. But mostly he asked them about themselves, and as they formulated their answers, he taught them that they actually had something to say.

  Nevertheless, over the weekend, I’d heard that in Eric’s hospital room, back in June when the New Yorker article came out, the word “nigger” had been tossed around in conversation. I wasn’t told whether the term was used in connection with my dad or not, and I didn’t ask. But I decided then and there that I would no longer put myself in the position of finding out what these people thought about my father—and me. I would never give them the opportunity to shut me out.

  I left town shortly after the memorial service and didn’t return for years. When people asked me where I was from, I started to answer that although I’d been raised in Connecticut, that fact didn’t say anything about me. I began to joke that I didn’t even like driving through the state.

  Before I left, though, at the church that Sunday afternoon, as I was waiting for Eric’s service to start, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I turned around and saw Dawn, the girl who’d made the comment about being one of the few chips in the cookie.

  “Is that Bliss Broyard?” she said. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years.

  I nodded and said hello.

  “Well, bless you,” she said, smiling broadly.

  Perhaps Dawn was just happy to see me, but I imagined as I watched her walk away down the aisle that actually she’d seen the article about my dad, and her blessing was a welcoming home of a different sort.

  I took advantage of being up north to visit my mother on Martha’s Vineyard, where she was in the process of taking up residence full-time. I’d been there for a few days when I answered a phone call from someone asking for Sandy Broyard.

  “Anatole’s wife,” the woman said in an accent that I couldn’t place.

  “Can I tell her who’s calling?” I asked.

  “Bliss?” the woman said. “Is that her daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hello,” the woman said, her voice suddenly excited. “This is Vivian Carter, your cousin from California.” She went on to explain that she and my father were second cousins, which made Vivian and me second cousins once removed. She said something about six brothers and started rattling off a list of names: Emile, Octave, Anthony, Henry, Gilbert, and Paul, my great-grandfather, whom she had known when she was a child in New Orleans.

  “I read about your dad in that magazine,” she said. “And I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you ever since. The article was full of lies. Your father was white.”

  I sat down on my mother’s bed. “What do you mean?”

  “There was this woman at the Board of Health in New Orleans who used to change people’s birth certificates,” Vivian said. “It was written up in all the newspapers.” She told me that the Broyards were French, that they’d always been French, that she’d been researching the family for years.

  I fantasized briefly about proving Gates wrong, forcing the New Yorker to print a retraction explaining that all of this had turned out to be a colossal mistake.

  “Why would this woman want to change someone’s birth certificate?” I asked.

  “Because she was trying to pin something on them.”

  “But I’ve also seen
Broyards listed as mulatto in the census.”

  “They could have had Indian blood. The Indians were listed as mulattoes too.”

  “Is it a problem,” I asked, “if we are part black?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re not,” Vivian said breezily. “We’re all white. And there are other Broyards out here in LA, and they’re white too.”

  She urged me to come out to California and see for myself. I said that I would try. In the meantime I offered to send her the genealogy I’d collected so far. I hung up the phone, unsure what to make of this news.

  That night I called up Todd, and we joked that next we’d learn that we were really Jewish or that we were descended from English royalty. For my mother’s part, she felt vindicated by the phone call. After living with my father for thirty years, she didn’t think of him as black, insofar as she thought of him as any race at all. I understood her reasoning: My father had never played by the rules; why should we have expected him to follow the one-drop definition of blackness? Such arbitrary boundaries were no match for his outsized personality, and it was incomprehensible to imagine anyone but him arbitrating over his identity. But it had never occurred to me that other branches of the family had followed the same course.

  A few weeks later, I received a card from Vivian saying how glad she was that we had connected. She wrote that the article had really done a number on her. She included a picture of herself and her husband, Anthony, posed on a balcony outside of what looked to be a condominium complex. The month and year, September 1996, were recorded on the back. Vivian had told me on the phone that her husband was a photographer, and I imagined her waking up one morning to the bright blue sky in the photo’s background and asking him to set up his tripod outside to take a picture for her newfound cousin back east. I imagined Vivian thinking to herself, and perhaps even saying to her husband too, I want to show her how white we are.

  The couple looked much younger than their age of midsixties. Her husband was tall with thick gray hair, brown eyes, and square, handsome features. She wore her straight dark hair in a side part and had black eyes and thin lips, which were accented with bright pink lipstick. They looked happy, and they looked almost entirely white except for their skin, which glowed with a warm yellow undertone, as if it had absorbed some of the sun’s light and was now reflecting it back.

  I believed that most white people accepted the couple as white. Black people, on the other hand, would recognize their roots in an instant.

  I began to look for other Broyards in Los Angeles to see on what side of the color line they fell. I came across a review in an LA paper of a play called Inside the Creole Mafia, coauthored by someone named Mark Broyard. The review, titled “Skin Test,” described the play’s spoofing of the Creole community’s obsession with color: the intrigue of who was passing and who was not and the tests once used to gain entry to dances—was the person lighter than a paper bag? could he pass a fine-tooth comb through his hair? I thought to myself that this guy and I had to be related.

  I telephoned Mark and told him who I was.

  “I think we might be cousins,” I said.

  “I’m sure we are,” Mark said. “I’m in the middle of reading your father’s memoir right now.”

  My dad’s account of life in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, Kafka Was the Rage, which my mother published after his death, had just come out in paperback. Mark told me that as a musician and an artist, he related to my father’s story about art and music (and women) beyond the family connection.

  “Man, your dad could write!” he said.

  I was so excited to find a relative who spoke the language of books and making art that I forgot for a moment about the purpose of my call.

  “Oh yeah. So Mark. What’s the deal? Are the LA Broyards white or black?”

  “Well, I’m a Broyard,” he said, sounding annoyed by the question. “And I live in Los Angeles, and I’m black. I know other Broyards out here, and they’re black too.”

  I told him about my conversation with Vivian Carter.

  Now Mark sounded sad. “Yeah, I’ve heard about her. I think my father talks to her once in a while. Well,” he said. “I guess you’re just going to have to come out here and check us out for yourself.”

  -9-

  In September of 1997, a few months after I spoke to Mark Broyard, I flew out to Los Angeles. On the second morning of my trip, I headed in my rental car to a local Creole restaurant called Harold and Belle’s to meet the white and black clans of the LA Broyards. Mark had picked the place and was contacting his relatives to invite them along, and I’d relayed the plans to Vivian Carter, whom I told to bring the family members that she knew.

  I was staying with the older brother of a friend from college. Earlier that morning I asked his wife to help me with directions to the restaurant, and after looking up the address on the map, she said with alarm in her voice that it was located in South-Central. I had already told this couple my father’s story, but I could see that this detail—I was heading to the land of the LA riots—made my black ancestry true to her in a way that it wasn’t before. Although she was the metro editor of a local paper, which I imagined would make her familiar, if not comfortable, with the different parts of the city, she talked about South-Central as if it were behind enemy lines. She made me promise to ask one of my relatives to lead me out of the neighborhood when we were done.

  I started to feel apprehensive when I turned onto Jefferson Boulevard, where Harold and Belle’s was located, but as I passed some automart stores and a hair salon and then a gas station and a bank—all the usual features of an urban landscape—and noticed the people on the street—mostly women pushing strollers—I couldn’t see what was supposed to be so threatening about the neighborhood.

  I pulled up to the restaurant a few minutes early. I was sitting in my car, putting on some lipstick, when suddenly a man’s face appeared outside my window. When I turned toward him, the man smiled and held up a bouquet of yellow tulips. I opened the car door and Mark Broyard leaned inside to hug me. “Welcome, cousin,” he said.

  We sat in the car for a moment, looking through the genealogy that I’d brought, trying to figure out how we were connected. But I didn’t need old census records to tell me that this man and I shared the same blood. His compact, narrow frame reminded me of my father’s or my brother’s build, and he shared my dad’s smoky good looks—with soft brown eyes, a cleft chin, and a mustache.

  Everyone else arrived at once. Thirteen of us in all gathered in the lobby of the restaurant; from the black side, ten members of Mark’s extended family, and from the white side, only Vivian and Anthony. Vivian explained that the other relatives she invited couldn’t make it on such short notice. I was trying to pick no side, as the intermediary of sorts.

  If I hadn’t been told already who was living as white and who was living as black, I wouldn’t have known. In the pictures that were taken outside under the midday sun after the meal, we all appear roughly the same shade of golden brown. We also looked as if we’d been raised in the same types of neighborhoods and shopped at the same types of stores, with everyone dressed in comfortable stylish clothing, wearing tasteful jewelry and chic sunglasses. My relatives did not look like the kind of black people my host’s wife might have pictured that morning on discovering that I was meeting them in South-Central LA.

  I pulled out my genealogy again, in hopes of establishing some common ground. Nobody could make much sense of the jumble of census records and obituaries, but Vivian, who seemed most familiar with the family tree, managed to explain how everyone was related.

  After we were seated, the waitress came to take our orders. She looked to be a Creole, and as I watched her move around the table, chatting easily with my relatives about the specials of the day and answering their inquiries after the owner, I wondered whether she would see me as one of them. Suddenly it was my turn. I hadn’t had a chance to look at the menu and blurted out that I would have a club s
andwich. Mark’s father, Emile, who was seated across from me, looked down and shook his head. He told the waitress to bring me some gumbo too.

  “She just found out she’s Creole,” he explained. “She’s still learning.” He turned to me and said, “Gumbo, that’s what we are.”

  Heads nodded around the table. “That’s right,” a voice chimed in.

  “A little bit of everything,” Emile continued. “Black, white, French, Indian. A delicious stew.” With his big belly and knowing smile, Emile was the elder statesman at the table. A lifelong smoker, he’d been afflicted with emphysema in recent years, which turned his voice husky and thin. Everyone quieted to better hear him. “I’m curious,” he said, nodding at me. “What did you and your brother think when you heard that your father was black?”

  “It must have been quite a shock,” one of the younger cousins offered.

  “It wasn’t, actually,” I said. “Suddenly a lot of things made sense—like why we never saw my father’s family when we were growing up.” I explained that we’d learned about the presence of a secret a few weeks earlier, and we were relieved that it wasn’t something more troubling. I told them Todd’s joke about always knowing that he wasn’t built like the average white guy, which made everyone laugh.

  Emile took an envelope out of his jacket and handed it to me across the table. Inside were photos of my dad, fifty years earlier, on a street corner wearing his army uniform; his sisters as young women; and my grandparents Nat and Edna.

  “You knew my father’s family?” I asked, looking up at Emile.

  He shook his head. “These were taken by some mutual friends,” he said. “But we always knew about your dad, and your family too, out in Connecticut. You just didn’t know about us.”

  I imagined my family as a subject over dinner—someone mentioning that she’d spotted my father’s name in the newspaper or a magazine, a debate ensuing about the choices he’d made, difficult questions from children about why a person wouldn’t want to be black. I pictured myself at dinner with my own family, asking my father why we never saw his mother or his sisters, scolding him for his old-fashioned ideas and bigoted ways.