During the 1830s, thinking among whites about the origin of racial differences began to shift as well. For centuries the subject had been a favorite for theologians, philosophers, and scientists. During antiquity, the variation in people’s looks was generally ascribed to some force outside themselves. The ancient Greeks referred to blacks as Aethiops, or Ethiopians, which translates literally into “burnt face.” To explain the population’s darker skin, the philosophers pointed to the myth of Phaëthon, in which the god of the sun, Helios, lends his sun chariot to his son, Phaëthon. The boy crashes it, burning the earth and drying up all the rivers, “and that was when...the people of Africa turned black, since the blood was driven by that fierce heat to the surface of their bodies.” Aristotle, considered the father of biology, credited the range in people’s appearances to the varying climates where they lived (which is much like the way contemporary evolutionary anthropologists explain what we perceive as racial differences today).
Between the second and sixth centuries, a biblical explanation for the origin of blackness emerged in theological interpretations of a story in Genesis that came to be known as the Curse of Ham. In the text Noah is angry at his son Ham for looking at him while he is lying naked in his tent, sleeping off his drunkenness. It’s actually one of Ham’s sons, Canaan, though, whom Noah punishes. The passage reads: “And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” Future readings of the passage began to associate Noah’s curse on Ham’s son Canaan with blackness.
Proslavery forces seized on the phrase “servant of servants” to justify the enslavement of Africans. A sticking point, however, was the story’s genealogical explanation for how the world became populated. According to the Curse of Ham, blacks and whites were descended from the same family tree, making them distant cousins to each other. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment’s movement away from religion toward science offered a resolution to this problem.
In 1774 the British historian Edward Long first advanced the “scientific” theory that blacks and whites belonged to different species, based on his observation that their offspring were generally incapable of producing children with each other. This hypothesis of “mulatto sterility”—with the very word “mulatto” invoking “mule”—gained support throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. (The large number of mixed-raced people in the country—nearly half a million by 1850, according to the federal census—many of whom were having children with each other, was conveniently ignored.) Proslavery forces in the United States began arguing that the inevitable miscegenation that would follow emancipation would lead to the extinction of mankind altogether.
For Henry, though, no matter what the world told him about the biological difference between him and his colored siblings, Eulalie’s kids were among the shrinking number of people—white or black—who shared his last name. Even though the Broyards had been in New Orleans for four generations by this time, the family had mainly produced girls. The few sons who were born either died young or failed to have sons themselves. When Henry started fathering children in the 1850s, he was the only Broyard passing on the name to appear in the city’s sacramental or civil records.
At the same time, New Orleans’s population was more than doubling, jumping from 46,000 in 1830 to over 100,000 in 1840—mostly through foreign immigrants—which helped to throw into relief all that the white and black Creole communities had in common. The city limits exploded to handle the growth, overtaking swamps here, cypress marshes there, with city improvements close behind. Stones began to cover the streets’ dirt surfaces; gas-powered lamps replaced their hanging lanterns. Luxury hotels sprang up to accommodate the many visiting businessmen, with their high domed roofs shining above the city’s skyline.
The Americans tended to concentrate upriver of Canal Street in Faubourg St. Marie, while the French and Creoles of color stayed downriver, pushing inland into the Tremé neighborhood or farther south in the Faubourg Marigny. The arriving immigrants went where they could find housing, often along the riverfront and among the lower parts of the city. A single block in the Tremé might be home to natives of Ireland, Germany, France, Cuba, St. Domingue, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana; to people who were white, black, or mulatto and worked as carpenters, cigar rollers, laborers, or seamstresses. Surrounded by all these foreign tongues and traditions, a shared language and customs could make people forget about their differences in skin tone.
In 1835 a local newspaper had predicted that within twelve years New Orleans would rival New York City as the commercial capital of the United States. But squabbles between the French and American factions in the city council hampered progress. In 1836 the state legislators agreed to divvy up New Orleans along ethnic lines into three separate municipalities, with Canal Street as the dividing line. The Americans controlled the second municipality, upriver, and the French were in charge of the first and third, downriver. Each mini-government operated its own schools, promoted its own language, and oversaw business and economic development.
The Broyards lived among other French people in the first municipality—the French Quarter and the Tremé—where race relations were more relaxed. Free colored people were making money alongside the whites during this boom time: in 1836 they had over $2.5 million worth of real estate and slaves, with an average net worth among the property owners of $3,000, or more than $56,000 in today’s dollars. This made them the richest population of free blacks in the United States, wealthier than the whites of some southern cities, and certainly better off than Henry Broyard and his father, Gilbert.
Gilbert had tried to cash in on the building boom too. In the early 1830s, he purchased at auction a lot out on Bayou St. John, in the neighborhood that ran along the busy commercial waterway leading out to Lake Pontchartrain. But Gilbert ran into bad luck—before he was able to build his house, a problem arose with the property title, and he was forced to sell the lot at the price he’d paid for it. He never purchased any property again.
When Gilbert died, in 1851, he left no estate to pass along to his son. Being the sole legal Broyard heir meant nothing for Henry in the end. At the same time, the Creole legacy was rapidly dying out. It didn’t take long for the American sector to outpace the rest of the city, with more new buildings, better-kept streets, a superior public school system, and more wealth. In the cultural tug-of-war, the Americans had been helped along by the European immigrants. They’d come to the country for a piece of the American dream, and they soon realized that all its rules were written in English.
The Americans returned the favor, pushing for the right to vote for the German and Irish immigrants, despite the fact that most of them were illiterate. The move disgusted the free colored population—many of them had been educated in Europe or by private tutors and had fortunes a hundred times that of the unskilled laborers, and yet they weren’t entitled to vote. Finally, in 1852, when the Americans felt confident that they had the upper hand, they moved to reunite New Orleans, and with that, Creole dominance—over the French sections of the city, the general culture, or anything else—was finished.
-14-
I was staying in New Orleans at a guesthouse recommended by my cousin Mark in Los Angeles. The owner, Keith Weldon Medley, was Creole and a writer too, at work on his own book about an ancestor: Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the famous legal case that established the “separate but equal” precedent for permitting and expanding segregation. After a day at the archives, I’d often join Keith in his kitchen, where we’d drink wine and chat about our research.
One night his friend Beverly joined us. She later told me that Keith had invited her over to check out the writer from New York who was in town doing research for a book about her newfound racial identity. Bev, as I came to know her, had balked on the phone: “This chick finds out she’s got a little black blood in her, and suddenly she’s black. This I’ve got to see.”
After pouring herself a glass of wine, Bev launched into
news from her day. It didn’t take long for the discussion to move on to the local black community. Bev let it be known that she found their obsession with skin color irritating. “In San Diego, where I’m from, people didn’t go around with inferiority complexes”—she stretched out the phrase—“because they didn’t have good hair or they were darker than a paper bag. Nobody cared if you were yellow or brown; you were the same black motherfucker.”
Bev was medium brown and petite, with short dreadlocks, carefully applied deep-red lipstick, and quick emphatic gestures. If you said something she liked, she fixed her gaze on you, poked a finger at your chest, and declared, “Exactly!” making you feel as if you’d never been so right before. She worked raising money for Bishop Perry, a Catholic school for disadvantaged African American boys. It stood on the site of the Couvent School, started in 1848 by free blacks for their children, so she knew all about the history of the New Orleans free people of color.
In her spare time, Bev volunteered at WWOZ, the local public radio station. As I listened to her talk, I realized that I’d woken up a few mornings back to her silky-voiced entreaties during a recent fund drive. Suddenly she turned that silver tongue on me. “So, Keith tells me that you’re down here looking for your African roots.” She said “African roots” as if the words were surrounded by quotation marks.
“Actually I’ve been researching all of my father’s family,” I said. “The black and white sides.”
“But you didn’t know about the black side growing up.”
I told her that I found out when I was twenty-four, just before my father died.
“How’d you take the news?”
Bev’s voice contained a smirk I’d come to recognize from African Americans when they asked me this question. It was a dare for me to admit to my own racism. It held the sweetness of just desserts. I’d already heard stories from a research assistant at the library about white people who started to cry on hearing the explanation about what the “mu” stood for on the census record. Ironically, even if I had felt this way, my Wasp upbringing would have prevented me from making such a scene.
I told Beverly that at first I had thought that my black ancestry was cool—she smiled knowingly—until I realized that it was more complicated than that.
“What do you think now?” she asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said. “I want to know more.”
She looked me squarely in the eye. “Then there’s something you need to understand. Most African Americans didn’t have the same option as your father did. My grandmother, for example, had to endure prejudice. She never had a choice about where she could sit on the bus.”
I nodded, hesitant to speak for fear of sounding defensive.
“But your dad just glided on through without having to deal with Jim Crow or desegregating the schools or any of that. And he didn’t do anything to help the people who were stuck on the other side. That’s why your father makes black people so angry.”
Nobody had ever laid out the injustice of my father’s decision so bluntly before me. I held Bev’s gaze, seeing for a moment from her perspective the terrible unfairness and selfishness of my dad’s actions. After a few moments, I said quietly, “His choice makes me angry too.”
She inclined her head. “Why?”
“Because he cut me off from knowing about my history, my family,” I said. “And it’s hard to try to catch up now.”
Bev nodded thoughtfully. After a moment she looked at Keith and then clapped her hands, signaling that she’d made some sort of decision. She was an educator at heart, and she liked to have a project. She pointed at Keith’s chest. “You know what we’re got to do. We’ve got to take this girl to Indian practice. She’s got to meet the Chief.”
A few nights later, at Club Renaissance on North Galvez Street in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, a few blocks from the house where my father was born, I chanted a song of the Mardi Gras Indians, Shallow waters, oh mama, that Bev whispered was sung by Indian women washing clothes on the riverbank to let escaping slaves know where to cross; and I clapped and swayed with the rest of the crowd, most everyone besides me some shade of brown; and closed my eyes and listened to the thump and rattle of the tambourine and felt the wooden floor bounce, with the pounding feet of the men from the Yellow Pocahontas tribe and Big Chief Darryl Montana, a friend of Bev’s and Keith’s. And I pictured the women washing and the slaves running, their movements hurried along on our incantatory beat; and opened my eyes again to find the Big Chief right in front of me, turning on one foot, his arms splayed above him like the wings of a bird, fingers curled into claws, and then dropping low into his knees and raising up on tiptoe, rocking back and forth like that, his eyes staring out between a fray of dreadlocks at the eyes of Trouble Nation’s Big Chief, who had just entered the bar with his own tribe of men, wearing tracksuits or suit jackets, their necks and teeth flashing with gold; these men pushing us into one end of the room while this new chief pounded his chest and threw his arms skyward, declaring that he—not Darryl Montana—was the big chief; the chanting growing louder and the men’s rocking and turning and posing getting smaller and tighter, as if they were balanced now on a trembling rope high above us; and the crowd pushing back against me—Give ’em room; give ’em room—and the air wet with the men’s sweat that smelled nervous and sharp, and the spicy liquor breath all around me and the musky smell of the old bar and the rice and beans cooking in the back, and everyone fixed on this encounter before us, our chanting urging these men along, to where the waters will either rise and drown them or carry them safely to shore; and I closed my eyes again, as though my not seeing might turn me unseen, and flew in my mind’s eye down the street to where my father was born to collect whatever remained of him in this place, and remained in me, to bring to this moment, which he may once have witnessed himself; and I forgot about the color of my skin and that I wasn’t raised like the people here, and with my father in hand, I crossed those shallow waters to the other side.
Earlier Keith, who had written about the Mardi Gras Indians for the local paper, told me about their history. For over a hundred years, African American men from the Tremé neighborhood had been “masking Indian” and running through these streets on Mardi Gras day. In the weeks before Mardi Gras, the tribes would gather in their local bars to “practice” chanting their songs, dancing their dances, and staging confrontations with their rivals. In my dad’s time, meetings between the tribes occasionally turned violent, but now the encounters had all the flaunting and preening of a beauty pageant. These men who worked as carpenters or plasterers by day spent their nights and thousands of their dollars sewing their world-famous Mardi Gras suits, and it was the “prettiest” Indian rather than the “baddest” one who ruled the streets today.
A typical suit might feature an apron with a flower garden, hand stitched from beads, pearls, and stones into a three-dimensional design; wings four feet wide and far too laden with feathers and glue to ever take flight; and a crown weighing near a hundred pounds, three layers high and as ornate as a wedding cake. On Fat Tuesday, these men, sweating under the burden of their pride, paraded through the streets of their neighborhood, on the lookout for rival tribes. Their friends and neighbors trailed behind them, accompanying their chanting on tambourines and cowbells; and when two chiefs met up, the crowd surrounded them while the men shook their giant wings and danced.
The tradition was rooted in the alliance between Indian tribes and escaping slaves during Louisiana’s colonial period—the suits often carried depictions of Indians fighting off white settlers. And the ritualized choreography harked back to the dances the slaves would do in Congo Square, which themselves harked back to Africa. Keith also mentioned evidence that the original Mardi Gras Indians were inspired in part by the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that came to town with New Orleans’s 1884 Cotton Exposition. The first tribe, begun by Chief Darryl’s great-great-uncle in the 1880s, was in fact called the Creole Wild West. What
ever the source, Mardi Gras Indians had been a way of life in this neighborhood for more than a century, with traditions, rituals, and roles that fashioned members of the community into leaders as established and respected as those of any church. Given my father’s own “masking” as white, being among these men who masked as Indians to honor their history seemed like the perfect place for me to imagine myself as black in order to honor mine.
But back at the guesthouse, I was reminded of my whiteness once again. We’d met up with another friend of Keith’s at Club Renaissance, a guy named Barry who was African American, and he joined us afterward. Bev had never met Barry before, but they immediately hit if off. She made a joke about the gold teeth of one of the guys in Trouble Nation, and Barry laughed first and louder than the rest of us. They slapped hands, and Bev, in a friendly jibe about Keith’s and my Creole backgrounds, declared, “It’s a black thing.”
As far as I could tell, Barry didn’t know my story, and I wondered if he saw me as one of those white people who liked to dabble in African American culture. In my travels I’d come across people who “masked” as black: white guys with dreadlocks, wearing brightly colored dashikis, and calling everyone “brother” while engaging in elaborate handshakes; or white women who peppered their speech with “girl,” accompanied by finger snaps and wagging head. And these people annoyed me, especially if I was one of the only other white-looking people there. I felt implicated by their pantomime of blackness and embarrassed by the presumption that a culture could be performed like the steps to the latest dance craze. Also, while black culture is most often appropriated for its “cool” factor, these masquerades looked anything but cool to me. I knew that many African Americans snickered behind these people’s backs and referred to them as “wiggers.” I’d try to indicate my disapproval too, rolling my eyes at my companions. Yet there was something about these white people that I secretly admired, or even envied. For whatever reason—the neighborhood they’d been raised in, some perversion of white guilt, or because they just felt out of place around people who looked like themselves—these “wiggers” seemed to feel at home in black culture. Whether they were accepted or not, they had the consolation of their own convictions. They weren’t waiting, as I was, for someone to anoint them.
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