One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Robert and Marchele described the moment when they realized that some love interest might care about their black ancestry—a joke the person made, or even a look given to somebody of color on the street, and how it was sometimes easier and less painful to just end the relationship rather than confront that person’s belief. I wondered if this worry was part of the reason that neither of the siblings had married, although they were both in their midforties.

  Robert explained that when they were growing up, their father had counseled them to not tell people about their ancestry if they didn’t have to. Although their father came from an illustrious Creole family—an elementary school in New Orleans was named in honor of his father, who had been a civil rights activist and a community doctor—he couldn’t pass the “paper bag test.” When they were kids growing up in the South, Robert remembered, his father would send his mother into certain stores because he wasn’t allowed to go inside himself. And if they were with their dad, the family couldn’t sit in the nicer “whites only” section of the beach or the movie theater with their lighter-skinned relatives.

  “He doesn’t really talk about it,” Robert said. “But obviously it affected him. He wanted to protect us from all of that, and so he reasoned that if someone didn’t need to know, then why bring it up.”

  I wondered to myself whether their father’s tact had made things more or less confusing for them. I believe that my father had wanted to protect us too, but we were never given the choice about how to handle our ancestry.

  Steve and Marchele went home, and Robert and I moved to the bar. The bartender brought over another round of martinis. Robert and I both reached for our wallets, but he insisted on buying the drinks. “You’re my cousin,” he said. “I want to treat you.”

  Robert told me about the first time he realized that he was black. A few years after arriving in Los Angeles, his family moved to Altadena, up in the hills, where they were the second African American family in the neighborhood. Their new neighbors seemed to view them more as a curiosity than anything else—some in his family had light skin and blue eyes, and they all looked so different from one another. Even their dad didn’t appear typically black, with his straight hair and American Indian features.

  Before long, Robert became close friends with a white boy down the street who wanted Robert to join his Boy Scout troop. “A few days later, though, he came back and told me, ‘They won’t let you join because your father’s a Negro.’” Robert paused, recalling the moment. “I remember my ears roaring at that word. It was the first time anybody had ever said that to me, and I was just shocked. What was the big deal? Why would that matter? And then it hit me that instead of me just being me, I was a Negro now too.”

  Robert looked down at his drink and said, “I’ve never really felt accepted by either side. There’s a lot of prejudice on the black side too.” He glanced at me. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, maybe you’re a brother, but you’ve got the good skin, the good hair, you didn’t go through what we went through.’ I get that from my own family even,” he said, widening his eyes.

  He shrugged and continued, “But this life has its benefits, I guess. Since I’m not on one side or the other, I can see all sides. I can see things from both the black and the white perspective.” He raised his glass. “Not that many people can say that, can they?”

  I touched my glass against his. “They certainly can’t.”

  And then I was flying home. On the approach to LaGuardia Airport, the stewardess came over the intercom to remind us to set our watches ahead three hours to the local time. As I adjusted my watch, that device in old movies to show the passage of time leaped to mind: the hands of the clock spinning wildly forward or the pages of a calendar falling away like leaves. I half expected my own watch to start spinning out of control. I’d changed and learned much more than seemed possible over the course of five short days.

  Before I parted ways with the different sets of LA Broyards, they each offered a piece of advice about what they imagined my dad would have wanted me to do.

  Vivian said: “The way I look at it, your father gave you the gift of whiteness, and out of respect for his memory, you should follow his example.”

  Robert said: “I’m sure if your father had lived longer, he would have told you about his ancestry eventually. He probably just wanted you to have the choice to decide who you wanted to be.”

  And Erin said: “I feel like your dad left this subject of race for you to tackle. In his time he couldn’t address it and still do what he wanted in his life. But you can. And that’s what you need to keep doing.”

  I gazed out the airplane window, down onto the city, all lit up and twinkling, as bright and promising as a new star. I wondered about my ancestral city, New Orleans, and how one place and one family could give rise to three such different approaches to being black—or not—in the world. And I knew that before I could understand what my father’s blackness meant to him, and means to me, I would have to go back to the place where his secret history began.

  II.

  Infinity of Traces

  -10-

  In Washington, DC, across Louisiana, and especially in New Orleans, I searched for the story of my father’s history...In the windowless basements of courthouses that sit at the bottom of long metal stairs; in glass-partitioned special collection areas at state and university libraries; among row upon row of microfilm readers at the National Archives; in the brightly lit Notarial Archives, wearing cotton gloves to protect 250-year-old documents from the oils in my skin; in one-room country museums staffed by terse old lady volunteers; in the aisles of the cemetery; in the Conveyance Office up some metal stairs (Careful, now, watch your head on that pipe); in the office of the church in heavy fragile ledgers that record the births, deaths, and marriages in New Orleans dating back to 1718; in question after question asked from the backseat of an old man’s taxicab; in a rental car with a different old man driving slowly down a country lane; in telephone calls made nervously to people whose names I found in the phone book; in carefully composed letters written to people from whom I never received any reply; among the millions of names posted to the hundreds of genealogical websites that, after pornography, are the most frequently searched destinations on the Web; in the index of Old Families of Louisiana; in the index of The African American Experience in Louisiana; in the footnotes of history books; in the pages of dissertations written forty or sixty years ago that I ordered on the Internet and were delivered to my door; in the middle of the woods at a Civil War battleground site; and at the kitchen tables of people for whom the name Broyard held meaning.

  At the end of these travels, I had an assortment of facts: What my ancestors did for work, where they lived and with whom. I knew who could read and write and who could speak English. I learned where their parents were born and what property they passed along when they died. I found records of their military service—enlistment dates and pay stubs—that did little to illuminate their experience of fighting in a war. I came across their names in the local newspapers when they had done something particularly good or bad. In those same pages I found their obituaries, in which their lives were summed up by the names of the people they’d left behind.

  Besides these facts and a few stories told by the survivors, I had little else to go on. None of my ancestors made enough of an impression on the chroniclers of their time to earn mention. No diaries or packets of letters turned up in an attic somewhere that described their feelings about themselves and the world around them. A single correspondence carrying the signature of my great-grandfather Paul Broyard appears in an 1894 New Orleans newspaper, but it is coauthored by a gentleman who was a frequent contributor to the publication and likely composed the letter mostly on his own. I had even less insight into the personal lives of my father’s female ancestors, whose domestic roles left little imprint on the official records.

  Yet as my facts accumulated, distinct people started to take shape with personalities and opinions,
particularly when set against the backdrop of New Orleans, an image of which was also materializing in my mind.

  During the three years, from 2000 to 2002, that I regularly visited the city, I often ran in the mornings along the Mississippi River, the aspect of New Orleans’s landscape that perhaps best accounts for its unique personality. For hundreds of years, these waters delivered Americans from the rest of the country and foreigners from all over the world to the city’s shoreline, where they introduced their own customs and beliefs into the cultural mix. Shipping remains the most important commercial activity for this self-described “port at the center of the world’s busiest port complex.” New Orleans also owed its physical existence—the land on which it sits—to the river and its centuries-old habit of regularly overflowing its banks. More recently, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how the Mississippi and other waters surrounding New Orleans could also, catastrophically, snatch that land away.

  I usually ran along the mile-long brick promenade that sits on top of the French Quarter’s levee—the mound of earth built up along the riverbank that is supposed to protect the surrounding areas from flooding. In the early morning hours, the benches along the promenade were often filled with homeless people, sleeping or organizing their possessions for the daily shuffle. On the other side of the walkway, a rocky slope led down to the river, which, depending on the time of year and the amount of recent rainfall, could range from five feet to twenty-five feet below the top of the levee. The Mississippi’s surface was brown, rolling, impenetrable, but the caps of waves or some debris—a bright plastic jug spinning and jerking along, or a thick branch jutting oddly out of the water as if fighting to keep its head up—called my attention to its fast-moving current.

  New Orleans hugs a sharp bend in the Mississippi, earning it the nickname Crescent City, and from the promenade, the ends of the river curved out of my sight, making it difficult to recall its great length—the fourth longest in the world if you measure it from the beginning of its tributary the Missouri, and, according to Mark Twain, the most crooked. The Mississippi didn’t evoke any of my usual associations with water: the expansiveness dissolving to melancholy when standing on the edge of the ocean, or the clean deep breath of a clear flat lake. Yet as I got to know it better, I came to like it and even feel a particular kinship with it.

  Algonquin Indians named the river Father of Waters, which translates literally as misi, big, and sipi, water. T. S. Eliot called it “the strong brown God.” In Life on the Mississippi, Twain called it “a wonderful book...that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.”

  On a map the Mississippi River system looks like a tree with the trunk planted in New Orleans and the branches reaching up across the United States. Sometimes, when I was running, I would picture this river tree and all the traces of earth collected from all over the country that had floated down it to make up the land beneath my feet. And then I’d think of my family tree, and the traces of my ancestors’ lives that had floated down to me, and I’d try to fit together those bits and pieces into something solid, with substance and a form. And suddenly my great-great-grandfather Henry might appear in my mind’s eye, blurry and fleeting, as if he were floating by on the river beside me. I would try to imagine how he’d felt when marrying my great-great-grandmother or setting off to fight in the Civil War. I’d see him as romantic and courageous, someone who took stands at important moments in American history, someone who had a hand in making history himself. Yet how accidental my picture was, made up from this flotsam of the past that happened to dislodge and remain intact during the trip down through time. I was always waiting for some fact to appear—a criminal charge, say—that would spoil the image I had conjured.

  The first piece of advice that experienced genealogists offer to beginners is to rid themselves of the expectation that they will discover a famous forebear. Most everyone, whether they admit it or not, starts out with the hope of finding in their past an accomplished artist or a military hero or at least someone who was really rich. Such secondhand glory can soften the blow of one’s own failures: I may not have amounted to much, but at least my ancestors did. People are also looking for an affirmation of the person they feel in their hearts capable of becoming. To serve your country in a war is an honorable act, but to have come from a line of men who served in wars transforms this act into an identity that a person can live by.

  In the end the process of re-creating my family story was as constructed and provisional as the physical landscape of New Orleans. History, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci put it, “had deposited in me an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.” As I sifted those traces, looking for the shape of my past, I was always sifting them through a screen fashioned in my likeness, so that my origins came to resemble nothing so much as my own wishful thinking about myself.

  -11-

  When I arrived in New Orleans in the winter of 2000, I already knew from Internet research that the first Broyard to set foot on these shores was a white man from France named Etienne, and that he had arrived sometime in the early 1750s, thirty-odd years after the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, founded the city on behalf of the French crown.

  I’d also learned that a hundred years later, in the 1850s, when my great-grandfather Paul was born, the Broyards had begun to be identified in public records as mulatto or free people of color. What I didn’t know was which man, or men, in the intervening generations was responsible for the change in the family’s racial identity. Nor did I know what the moment of mixing was like: Was it a rape in a slave cabin or the conclusion of a business deal between a white “protector” and his quadroon mistress? Did the couple feel tenderness for each other? Or love?

  My father’s explanation of his origins, told to my mother and a few friends, played like a scene from a 1930s Hollywood romance, an inverted Tarzan and His Mate, one of his favorite movies: My father’s grandfather was walking along one day when he saw a pretty girl sitting in a coconut tree. He coaxed her down and made her his wife. The tree was my dad’s way—ironically, offensively—of acknowledging his great-grandmother’s Caribbean roots, her blackness. The story also paid homage to the long line of sweet-talking Broyard men and their helplessness before a lovely face. In his memoir about Greenwich Village, my dad described how he, when walking down the street, would ditch a friend in midsentence to chase after an attractive girl “whose smile held the very incandescence of meaning.” Ultimately, though, my father’s creation myth allowed him to dismiss his bit of blackness as just another accident of lust—as inconvenient as an unwanted pregnancy and as inconsequential too, if you could harden your heart enough to cut it out.

  How much my father knew about the actual truth of his family tree is anyone’s guess. The preposterousness of his story tended to discourage further inquiries, as I imagine was his intention. But even among the relatives who had always known about their African ancestry, mystery or mythology seemed to surround the origins of the Broyards’ mixed-race identity. The version passed down to Emile Broyard out in California had the six brothers of my great-grandfather’s generation as originally hailing from Morocco—an account that explained away their looks without the taint of sub-Saharan Africa, slavery, or rape.

  During my first full-scale research trip to New Orleans, I was lucky to team up with another newfound cousin from the black side, Sheila Prevost, a native of the city, who wondered the same thing I did: how mixed we were and how we got that way. Sheila and I had first bumped into each other a few months earlier on a genealogy Web site. She’d been corresponding on a “Broyard” message board, and I stumbled across a chat in progress about the New Yorker article on my father. After lurking for a while, I mustered up the courage to join in with the announcement that I was the daughter of the man under discussion.

  Sheila, like many Broyar
ds who stayed in the black community, viewed the outing of one of her “white” kin as both a hilarious comeuppance and a disturbing abrogation. When we finally met, she exclaimed, hooting with laughter: “Ooh, your father got caught,” and then turned serious. “But nobody can tell him who he has to be.”

  We soon figured out that Sheila’s grandmother Rose, who was still alive, was my father’s first cousin. Rose didn’t remember my dad—she was four when his family moved to Brooklyn—but she’d met his sisters, Shirley and Lorraine, during the visit in 1935 of which I’d seen photographs in Shirley’s album. And Rose had known her grandfather Paul Broyard, who lived with her family for the first eighteen years of her life, until he died in 1940, at the age of eighty-four.

  My father had also known his grandfather Paul, although he never saw him again after his family moved north, when my father was six. But his father would tell him stories, which my dad passed down to my brother and me and included in his writing. My father clearly identified with his grandfather: in his fiction, which was mostly autobiographical, he always chose the name Paul for his narrator.

  According to my dad, Paul Broyard had been famous in New Orleans for his skills as a builder and his talent with the ladies. His nickname was Belhomme, beautiful man, and he was supposed to have sired “half the bastards in New Orleans,” many of whom took the Broyard name. But Paul, I’d eventually discover, was also the reason that my father’s family left town.