One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Over the next few years, Bev and I became close friends. Every once in a while, I’d ask her how she thought of me, as black or as white. And she’d offer the same response as my aunt Shirley and my friend Anjana from Charlottesville: “I think of you as Bliss. That’s how.” And she’d tell me again that she’d always been friends with all types, and that her own nephews and nieces, born to brothers- and sisters-in-law who were black, white, and Hispanic, made her family look like “the United Goddamned Nations.” Nevertheless, I had heard Bev talk about certain friends who were white, and the way that race could suddenly flare up and create a wall between them. And I wondered if that could ever happen to us.

  During my next trip to New Orleans, a story about me and my research into my father’s racial background appeared in the local newspaper. I’d felt comfortable with the reporter and had talked freely—and rather windily—while she took copious notes. I shared my theory about how in certain parts of the country, white people’s only interactions with African Americans tended to be with the clerks at the supermarket or drugstore, which led them to forming negative stereotypes (since few young people of any race working in dead-end minimum-wage jobs seemed eager to be there). Here’s what ended up in the paper: “[Broyard’s] newfound racial identity...has caused her to examine her prejudices more carefully, she said, to think before labeling a black grocery clerk ‘dumb’ or ‘lazy.’”

  The first phone call I got was from Bev, who told me that she’d been riding the streetcar to work with her daughter Brandi when she’d spied over a woman’s shoulder the headline WRITER EXPLORES HIDDEN BLACK HERITAGE. “And then the woman turns the page, and there’s your picture, and I’m up out of my seat, yelling across the aisle, ‘Brandi, Brandi, Bliss is in the paper!’” Bev went on, comparing herself to a woman from the projects, yelling from her front porch, wearing her shower shoes. “You should have seen the look that white chick gave me. She just folded her paper up and tucked it away.”

  “So you haven’t read the article?”

  “I just finished it.”

  “Bev, that reporter totally misquoted me.”

  “Right. I see how it is with you now.” Bev put on her ghetto voice: “You used to think dem niggers were lazy and stupid, ’til you realizes, uh-oh, I’m a nigger too!” She laughed heartily.

  “It’s not funny. All my relatives are going to read this. People are going to think I’m a racist.”

  “Yes, well, I expect they will. And what about this part?” Now she used her radio announcer voice: “‘Broyard is glad that her newfound racial identity has allowed her to explore African American culture.’ Is that what you’re doing here—exploring African American culture?” She didn’t add “with me,” but I understood that was what she meant.

  “Bev, you know that our friendship is much more than just race,” I said. “But I am grateful to you for bringing me places and showing me things that I wouldn’t have found on my own.”

  She considered this for a moment. Then she said: “Well, I do know you. I know Bliss, and so I know that whatever way you come off in the paper, that’s not the end of the story about you. But you better call dem cousins of yours, ’cuz you got some ’splainin’ to do.”

  I was relieved that Bev and I had come to know each other as people, yet I still felt as if I had to align myself with one racial group or the other. And I wasn’t convinced yet that a person could cross from white to the other side. Then I discovered a family member who had done just that.

  -15-

  My great-great-grandfather was surrounded by the noise of revolution. It was the spring of 1848, and Henry Broyard was a young carpenter, just eighteen years old. Night after night, cannon fire disturbed the air of New Orleans, revelers paraded through the streets, shouting “Vive la République” and singing choruses of “La Marseillaise,” ecstatic crowds cheered and applauded speaker after speaker at the St. Louis Exchange. Word had just arrived from France that a group of radical republicans and members of the working class had overthrown the monarchy that had been reinstated in 1814. Between increasingly repressive laws, a recent economic crisis, and the exploitation of the poor by the Industrial Revolution, the insurgents became fed up and forced King Louis Philippe to abdicate, restoring democracy to the country once more.

  For some people in New Orleans, especially people who, like Henry, were outside the merchant class, the state of affairs at home didn’t look very different from that in France. Over the previous two months, the city had been shrouded in cotton—nearly a million bales. It lined almost every inch of the levee and blocked off half their streets until it could be sold and shipped away. But the average worker would see only a tiny portion of the profits from its sale. Nor did much benefit trickle down through improved city services, especially not in the French parts of the city.

  The sanitation in New Orleans was still world-famously bad. Sometimes, when the wind shifted in the afternoon, carrying the stink into the Quarter, one house after another would start closing up its doors and windows until a whole neighborhood disappeared behind shutters. There were few public schools to speak of. And epidemics of yellow fever and cholera continued unabated. As Louisiana’s planters and the businessmen who brokered their cotton grew richer, it seemed as if the man on the street just dropped lower on the socioeconomic scale.

  But at the center of town, at the St. Louis Exchange, Louisiana senator Pierre Soulé took to the podium to lift up the workingmen. He singled out the laborers of France in whose “rough and bony hands” the aim of the 1789 revolution had been realized. A common workingman was invited to take the stage. “Oh how happy I am,” the laborer began, “to be able to speak in the midst of a gathering so large and so capable of appreciating the significance of the questions that I touch on and the prejudices that I fight.” The audience cheered in agreement.

  The next speaker was Thomas J. Durant, the federal attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, who read out a drafted proclamation to send to the people of France from the residents of New Orleans. It opened with the city’s response to the French provisional government’s decree that ended slavery for good in the French territories. (In 1802, eight years after the French assembly had abolished slavery in the colonies, Napoleon had reinstated it.) “A ray of liberty has come to shed its regenerative warmth over nations long weighed down under the detested yoke of slavery,” Durant read. The next resolution applauded the French government’s second decree, granting voting rights to all men, including those of African descent who had just been freed, because, as Durant read on, “man possesses the natural and inalienable right of self-government.” And finally the citizens of New Orleans offered their praise for this renewed appreciation of the worker. The crowd shouted their approval and raised their voices in three cheers apiece for France, for the United States, and for freedom in an uproar that was said to have echoed throughout the city.

  I like to imagine that at this moment Henry, as he hurrahed along with the crowd, decided that his life would be different. Perhaps he understood for the first time that his lot as a worker aligned him with the slave to some degree—both were being economically exploited. Or maybe he was just a young man swept up by a mood of rebellion. Public support for abolition or equal rights was not only unpopular in the Deep South but dangerous and illegal. Espousers of language “having a tendency to produce discontent among the free colored population, or insubordination among the slaves” could face imprisonment or death, at the courts’ discretion.

  It’s possible that feelings Henry had been storing up already were vindicated by this victory for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. All his young life, he’d watched the law draw a “line of distinction” between him and his colored half siblings and he’d heard science expound about their biological differences. Yet in all likelihood, he and his father’s colored children looked alike, with the same dark hair and tawny complexions. His relatives were probably at least as educated as he was, or even more so. According to the
1850 census, 80 percent of free people of color could read and write, while Henry had only learned how to read.

  Or maybe the course of Henry’s life changed simply because he fell in love. Whatever the explanation, in a few years’ time, he would meet and marry a free woman of color named Pauline Bonée. There was only one problem: intermarriage had been outlawed in 1808. And so just as hostility against free Negroes in New Orleans was reaching a boiling point, my white great-great-grandfather started passing—as black.

  Up in Washington, southern senators won passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850, engineered to maintain the equilibrium in the country between free and slave states. The new act, which allowed the capture of runaways on free soil, emboldened unscrupulous slave hunters, who began with increasing frequency to seize free blacks and sell them into slavery.

  Solomon Northup, a black man who had been born into freedom, had been kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841, even before the tightening of the fugitive slave laws, and sent by ship to the New Orleans slave market, where he was sold as a field hand. Northup described his capture and life on various plantations throughout Louisiana in his autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave, which was published in 1853, one year after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also set partly in Louisiana.

  Stowe’s melodrama pitting virtuous slaves against wicked slave catchers had become an instant success. (It would eventually outsell every other book during the nineteenth century except the Bible.) Twelve Years a Slave didn’t find as big an audience, but its “true story” aspect greatly stirred its readers. As a writer for the New York Tribune observed, “No one can contemplate the scenes which are here so naturally set forth, without a new conviction of the hideousness of the institution from which the subject of the narrative has happily escaped.”

  These books and other slave narratives made the cruelties of slavery real to many northerners for the first time. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act also meant that residents of the free states had to witness blacks being hunted down in their own backyards and were sometimes even forced to join the search posses themselves. As popular sentiment against slavery grew up north, so did hostility against free blacks down south. In New Orleans it was vexing to the proslavery forces that no matter how many articles ran in the newspapers promoting the old argument about slavery being the natural state for people of African descent, all anyone had to do was put down his paper and look around him to see that Negroes were handling freedom just fine.

  Strolling along the riverfront at night were free blacks riding in fine carriages, with their wives clad in silk dresses, velvet capes, and the occasional diamond. Nelson Fouché, a free black architect and contractor, had built himself a three-story brick house with fanlight transoms, French doors, granite lintels, and turned balusters. According to the 1850 census, the tailor Philippe Leogaster owned $150,000 worth of property (more than $3.6 million today), and the cigar maker Lucien Mansion had hundreds of workers under his hire, with white people likely among them.

  In 1848 Fouché, along with some other leading free black men of the city, opened the Catholic Couvent School, where their children could study English and French composition, history, rhetoric, logic, and accounting under the directorship of another colored man, Armand Lanusse. The city’s foremost intellectual of color, Lanusse was the publisher of a journal in which he and other colored writers wrote about the social issues of the day, informed by their reading of the European Romantic movement and German idealism. He had also edited a volume of poetry, Les Cenelles, whose publication in 1848 made it the first anthology of “Negro verse” in the country.

  Starting in 1850, the Louisiana legislature began to pass even more laws to reduce the rights of these free blacks, and by the end of the decade, their lives were nearly as restricted as those of the slaves.

  Henry Broyard’s wife, Pauline Bonée, didn’t come from the colored elite of New Orleans, but her family had prospered enough to annoy most southern slavery apologists. Pauline’s parents could afford to send her and her brother Laurent to one of the private schools for free colored children where they’d learned to read and write. Her father, Pierre, a carpenter, earned enough money in 1850 to support his wife, mother-in-law, two children, and a widowed stepdaughter and her child. And the family had achieved these trappings of middle-class comfort despite having arrived in New Orleans as refugees to a cold welcome only a few decades before.

  Pauline was first-generation American, born in New Orleans on January 24, 1833. Both of her parents had come to Louisiana as small children, among the St. Domingue free people of color who had fled the island’s slave revolt at the turn of the century. No specific details survive about either family’s early days in New Orleans, but their circumstances couldn’t have been easy. They’d left a homeland that had been scoured by astonishingly brutal violence—fetuses cut from living wombs and impaled on spears and people’s eyeballs yanked out with corkscrews. And these atrocities—committed by whites, free colored people, and ex-slaves alike—had come on the heels of a slavery regime so cruel that the threat of sale to St. Domingue was enough to keep slaves elsewhere in line.

  By 1850 Pauline’s family had settled in the Tremé neighborhood in a two-story house on St. Ann Street, the very same block where Henry Broyard lived. And so, while my great-great-grandfather might not have spotted his future wife sitting in a tree—according to my father’s mythology—he could have spied her sitting on the second-story porch of her parents’ home.

  A few years earlier, Henry had had a relationship with a different free woman of color, who gave birth to a daughter, but he hadn’t legitimized that union. If the timing of his wedding to Pauline is any indication, Henry didn’t reach the decision to marry her easily. The couple’s first son, Pierre Gilbert, was born two days after the ceremony.

  The mood regarding plaçage and “living in sin” had changed since Henry’s father’s day. In his publications, the colored intellectual Lanusse often included cautionary tales in which free women of color who took up with white men came to tragic ends. He also published poems that attacked the system of plaçage, accusing mothers of prostituting their daughters out of greed. One anonymous work, titled “A New Impression,” scolded: “...a shameless mother/Today sells the heart of her grieving daughter;/And virtue is no more than a useless word which is cast aside.”

  The campaign seems to have worked. By the 1850s the majority of baptisms for babies designated as free people of color occurred within wedlock. Pauline’s own parents, after living together for more than twenty years and having four children, finally consecrated their union with a wedding at St. Augustine’s in 1847. The sacramental record makes careful note that the couple’s two surviving children, Laurent and Pauline, now carried the status of legitimate, which entitled them to inherit their parents’ property.

  As Henry watched Pauline’s waistline grow, the public shame awaiting her must have weighed on his mind. What did he have to lose, after all, by making the free woman of color his lawful wife? The few family members that Henry had left were mostly people of color already. The name Broyard was already tainted with blackness. He didn’t have the money, property, or standing in society to entice a white woman. Why should he consider himself too good for another carpenter’s daughter?

  Because Henry was white. And no matter what else he lacked, to be white meant something in the 1850s in New Orleans. For some people it meant everything.

  In early 1854, a few months before Henry and Pauline’s first child was conceived, the city’s newspapers were dominated by coverage of a trial that came to be known as the Pandelly Affair. At issue was the racial identity of a man named George Pandelly. He had recently been elected to serve on the Board of Assistant Aldermen (who were responsible for maintaining the streets and sidewalks), but a gentleman named George Wiltz had contested the election on grounds that only white men could hold public office. Pandelly, Wiltz asserted, was colored throu
gh his maternal line.

  Pandelly denied the charge, maintaining that while he may have some Indian ancestors, as many white Creoles from the ancienne population did, there were no Negroes hiding in his family tree. Then Wiltz published a pamphlet to back up his claim, and Pandelly took him to court, suing for $20,000 in damages. The accusation was particularly scandalous because Pandelly’s mother was a Dimitry, sister to Alexander Dimitry, a prominent educator and leading spokesperson for the white Creole community. The New Orleans Crescent reported that one of Pandelly’s lawyers declared during opening remarks that “the [Dimitry] name would last when this trial and those concerned would be forgotten,” and then, overcome by emotion, he burst into tears.