One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  For Henry Broyard, being in the Native Guard was probably the first time he experienced such prejudicial attitudes firsthand. No matter that the recent 1860 census identified him as a mulatto, he had still been walking around the world looking like and being treated as a white man. But now, as Henry marched alongside the other members of the Native Guard, the jeers of the crowd and taunts of “coward” and “damned nigger” fell on his ears too. At camp he felt the cold stares from the white soldiers. He listened to the hollow promises about the colored men’s pay that was endlessly delayed, and his family suffered because of food rations that never came. Henry learned what it meant to be black in the antebellum South by making the concerns of people of color his concerns, by joining their fight.

  -16-

  When I wasn’t researching my dead relatives, I tried to spend time with the living ones. Every person of color I asked—at the library, my taxi driver, the waiter at a restaurant—seemed to know a Broyard. (White people, on the other hand, had never heard of them, unless they happened to know of my dad through his writing.) I was eager to meet my family, but I also wanted their help in figuring out just how black or white my father might have felt himself to be.

  Not everyone was excited to meet me. All my talk about race put off some; my interest in telling the Broyard story bothered others. After all, I hadn’t been raised as a Creole, nor had I grown up in New Orleans. And I hadn’t suffered from the discrimination in the South or the confusion of looking like one thing and being told that you must be another. At the library one day, a cousin who was also researching and writing about the family history loudly upbraided me for only hanging around with white people. Another older cousin, in hearing I wanted to meet him, commented: “So this girl finds out her daddy’s black and now she’s come down here and wants to be black too? That’s plain foolishness.”

  Part of the problem was that Creoles tended to be private by nature. Years of living in an insulated community had made them cautious about sharing their personal business, as had their legacy of secrets, about who was living “on the other side” or the adultery once common among free people of color. “Live and let live” was a motto I often heard. “Ask me no questions, and I’ll you no lies” was another. But Creoles were also wonderful storytellers, and a compelling history—full of heroic achievements and ironic twists—had given them some tales that were too good to keep to themselves.

  Ultimately my New Orleans kin seemed as curious about me as I was about them. As in cases of identical twins separated at birth, our interactions offered an Alice in Wonderland view of how we might have turned out if we’d grown up on the other side of the color line.

  On a Saturday afternoon, I headed over to visit Rose, the grandmother of Sheila, my cousin whom I had initially teamed up with to research the family. Rose lived in a two-bedroom bungalow in the Seventh Ward, an area of New Orleans known as the Creole ward for much of the twentieth century. In her late seventies, Rose had been there nearly all her life, first in the house across the street, where she’d lived with her grandfather Paul Broyard, and then, for the past fifty years, in this house that she and her late husband had built at the time of their marriage.

  Up until the 1960s, the Seventh Ward was an integrated, middle-class community. Some residents owned their shotgun houses, named so because a bullet fired in the front door could pass straight out the back, or the bungalows that eventually replaced them. Along Claiborne Avenue were the fancier town houses, with cast-iron balconies or porches accented with fluted columns, in addition to the many pharmacies, barbershops, laundries, funeral homes, restaurants, bakeries, and markets that made the street a bustling African American business district. Down the center of Claiborne ran a wide grassy promenade, where the city’s black population gathered under the shade of the tall live oak trees to picnic or watch the Zulu Social Club and Mardi Gras Indians parade during Carnival.

  In 1966 construction of interstate highway 10 began. Designed to transport commuters from their (mostly white) suburbs into the city, I-10 was routed directly over Claiborne Avenue. The magnificent oaks were chopped down—in the middle of the night, according to some older residents. Given the size and number of trees, that seems unlikely, but that’s how it felt to people: one morning they woke up and their neighborhood was ruined. Businesses failed; people—especially whites—moved away; properties fell into disrepair and were abandoned.

  A few years back, the local African American museum spearheaded a project to adorn the pillars supporting the interstate with paintings of the live oaks, but it would take more than some concrete trees to make the neighborhood inviting again. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the city began closing its housing projects. Displaced residents moved into the Seventh Ward—occupying St. Bernard, another housing development, and properties for which Section 8 rental assistance was available. Suddenly members of opposing gangs were down the block from each other, and residential streets that had been relatively peaceful became the battleground for turf wars.

  In the middle of the increasing violence lived many older widows who, like Rose, refused to move despite the pleas of their children. They’d been in their homes all of their adult lives, raised their families there, and planned to die there too, even if it might kill them. (In June 2004, a few years after I first met Rose, her friend and neighbor, ninety-year-old dressmaker Durelli Watts, was fatally stabbed in her home by a robber on a Tuesday afternoon. Then Watts’s daughter, Ina Gex, a sixty-seven-year-old former high school principal, bumped into the robber as he was fleeing and was shot to death on her mother’s front porch before a handful of witnesses. Notices appeared in the newspaper pleading for these witnesses to come forward, but the threat of retaliation frightened many people into silence. Only after the amount offered for tips to a crime hotline was substantially increased did a call come in that led to an arrest.)

  “There was a time when I was knowing everyone on the street,” Rose said after letting me inside. “Now I look out my window and the faces are always changing.” But it didn’t bother her, she told me cheerfully, shuffling back to her seat. “I don’t get out much since I can’t walk so good no more.” Her daughters or Sheila brought over groceries or whatever else she needed. Anyway, inside the house, with the iron bars bolted across the doors and windows, the drapes closed, and the television on, the world outside was mostly kept at bay.

  Rose brought to mind my father’s mother, at least as I remembered her from that one visit to Connecticut when I was seven. My grandmother hadn’t been able to walk well either and spent most of the day in a lawn chair in the yard with her feet elevated. Rose spoke with the same New Orleans accent that I’d had trouble understanding as a child, pausing on the first syllables of words like “people,” “handsome,” and “babies,” her voice trilling with an unfamiliar music from her first language, French. She also looked a bit like my grandmother, slightly stout with thinning wavy brown hair, light caramel skin, and typical “Caucasian” features.

  Rose settled into her easy chair at the far end of the parlor, next to a tray table holding the television remote control, her address book, and the telephone. As I soon discovered, her phone rang constantly, often with calls from her Broyard cousins, many of them older widows like herself. Sometimes, after answering, Rose would roll her eyes, as if the caller was a nuisance, but it was clear that these frequent check-ins helped the housebound women pass their days. I had a feeling that my arrival in town had the telephone wires working overtime.

  “I love company, me,” Rose said, when I sat beside her. “I’m always glad when I see my people.” That I counted as her people made me smile.

  Rose said she figured she took after her grandfather that way. I asked Rose what else she recalled about him. “Paul was born before the Civil War,” I said. “Did he ever say anything about that?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about Emancipation, before all the black people were free?” I continued. “Did he ever talk about any r
elative being descended from a slave?”

  “Oh no,” Rose said, shaking her head again. Then she brightened. “But I can tell you, the house on Lapeyrouse Street, back when my grandmother was living, they had”—she paused—“not slaves, but servants. They lived above the horse stables in the backyard. So they could just come down and in through the kitchen and take care of the house.” She nodded up and down. “Umm-hmm.”

  This wasn’t quite the slave connection that I was looking for. “So Paul had a good bit of money there for a while?” I asked.

  “That’s what they always said.”

  I tried to steer the conversation back to the family’s racial ancestry. “Do you remember when you realized that being Creole also meant being black?”

  Rose put her hand to her chin and thought for a moment. “You know,” she said, “it was years and years, I’d sit and try to figure it out.” She pointed to my research binder. “Don’t it say in your notes? A woman from the islands, Jamaica or somewhere, married one of the Broyards way back.”

  “So you did know growing up that you were part black?”

  “Well, I always went to integrated schools,” Rose said. “We always went to school with them.”

  It took me a minute to realize that Rose meant she’d integrated with African American students. (She’d been in school in the 1930s, long before the Brown v. Board of Education decision ended black and white segregation.) That she saw blacks as “them” surprised me. Given the fact that she lived in a black neighborhood and that some of her children had married African Americans, I’d expected her to identify more closely with the family’s African ancestry. At the same time, she didn’t seem to see herself as particularly white.

  “In fact, we never passed for white,” Rose said, although that’s not what some people in the neighborhood thought. When I’d asked Rose if she had ever experienced discrimination, she mentioned a black woman who used to live across the street who’d accused the family of trying to be white. That—not some Jim Crow humiliation—was the only time she’d felt victimized by prejudice.

  A while later, her daughters, Nancy and Jane, arrived with some freshmade gumbo and rice and beans. We sat around, eating and talking, inquiring about one another’s lives, and I fancied that we all felt the ease of connection that came with being related. One of Nancy’s closest girlfriends vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard, and we discussed meeting up on the island sometime. Even Nancy’s kids hung around the table for the better part of an hour before retreating to the couch to watch TV.

  The next time I was at Rose’s house, I asked her what everyone had thought of me. At first she didn’t want to say. Finally she laughed sheepishly and offered, “Pure white.” My face must have registered my disappointment, because Rose touched my arm and reassured me that it was mostly my “Yankee” way of talking.

  Just as I had assumptions about my New Orleans kin based on their looks and upbringing, they held notions about me from the fact of my being raised as white in Connecticut. Rose’s cousin Jeanne, another older widow who lived nearby, joined us during a different visit. Rose’s daughters and Sheila were there too.

  In her midseventies, Jeanne spoke in hiccups and gulps, as if, having been raised speaking French, she wasn’t accustomed to fitting her mouth around the English language. As we talked she gestured at me intermittently to emphasize her point. Her hand trembled slightly, from age or the early stages of Parkinson’s disease—I wasn’t sure. Yet despite her apparent frailty, her conversation contained a surprising forcefulness. After a little chitchat, Jeanne blurted out: “So your family’s rich.” It was more a statement than a question.

  “Jeanne!” Everyone scolded, but their tone suggested that Jeanne’s bluntness was a familiar and often celebrated trait. Anyway, she was just saying out loud what people were already thinking. They’d all read the New Yorker article and knew about the homes in Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard. Also, Creoles tended to defend people who passed as white on the grounds that they were trying to improve their lot for their families.

  In that moment, though, with my family’s eyes upon me, I was too worried about their judgment or resentment to appreciate this point. I wasn’t yet comfortable acknowledging that life on the other side had been easier. With their label of me as “pure white,” I still felt implicated in the racial equation. And I didn’t know where such an admission would lead me: I couldn’t exactly give back these advantages, nor, if I were being truly honest, did I want to.

  “I wouldn’t call us rich exactly,” I hedged, knowing full well that if Nancy ever came to my family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, she wouldn’t walk away thinking of us as poor. “My parents always struggled over money,” I went on.

  But Jeanne wasn’t buying it. She pointed a shaky finger at me. “We know somebody’s niece who works up there in Manhattan. She’s an accountant at Random House, and she said that a check crossed her desk made out to your father, Anatole Broyard, for a million dollars!”

  I couldn’t help smiling—what an amazing coincidence!—but the claim was also startling. Random House was the parent company for my father’s publisher and was indeed the payer on the advance for his book about Greenwich Village (which was more in the low five figures range), but how could Jeanne have known that? This detail made me realize that the New Orleans Broyards had, in some fashion, been keeping tabs on my dad and our family.

  “Well,” I said. “I sure wish he would have shared that with me.” Everybody laughed, Jeanne sat back in her chair, and the moment passed.

  Ironically, as I got to know my New Orleans relatives better and stopped viewing them constantly through the lens of race, I was able to see more clearly the specific ways that race had impacted our respective lives. To take just one example, American real estate practices during the mid-twentieth century benefited white families like my own by allowing them to accumulate capital through homeownership that could then be passed down to their children, while black families such as my cousins were largely excluded from participating in the post–World War II housing boom.

  The sociologist Dalton Conley has suggested that the achievement gap between whites and blacks can be explained by differences in their net worth, which is largely a measure of inherited monies. My parents, for example, by buying and selling properties in Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard, were able to increase an initial investment of $110,000 to about $2.4 million over a forty-year time span, for a 2,000 percent profit. Conversely, the home purchased by my cousin Jeanne and her husband, Frank, in the Seventh Ward in 1965 for $10,000 increased in value to about $80,000 over the same time period, for a 700 percent return on their investment. (Neither example takes into account the effects of inflation nor the money spent on improvements.)

  The discrepancy can be explained in part by the differences between the northern and southern economies, but it was also rooted in racism. All over the country, lenders frequently deemed black neighborhoods as too risky an investment, which made it hard for African Americans to secure mortgages. Redlining, as the practice was called, was so widespread that whites received 98 percent of the $120 billion of federally financed home loans issued between 1934 and 1962. In New Orleans, passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 sparked white flight from mixed neighborhoods. Then construction of I-10 two years later, to provide access to the booming white suburbs, further segregated neighborhoods and depressed property values in the increasingly black communities. Black middle-class families began to leave too, exposing the Seventh Ward to more blight. (Many moved out to New Orleans East, a low-lying area adjacent to Lake Pontchartrain that would be devastated by Hurricane Katrina forty years later.)

  The neighborhoods where my parents had lived would never be similarly scapegoated by local planning policy. The substantial proceeds from their real estate investments will eventually be passed along to my brother and me, and used, most likely, to pay for our children’s college educations, further perpetuating my family’s legacy of privilege
.

  Until I thought through these specifics, the idea that race mattered in people’s lives remained an abstract truism that I mostly ignored. I hung out with my New Orleans kin, feeling vaguely guilty, occasionally making awkward gestures at compensation. One time I tried to pay for the takeout from Popeye’s that Rose had asked Sheila to pick up on our way over. “Grandma will get it,” Sheila assured me, with a slightly annoyed tone in her voice. She didn’t say anything, but I imagined her thinking, “Geez, she doesn’t think we can afford a bucket of fried chicken?”

  In fact most of my New Orleans relatives were earning far more than my measly freelance writer’s income. I still had to occasionally call my mother for a “loan” to pay my health insurance bill or the mortgage for my studio apartment (acquired with my mother’s help). Many of my cousins—working as nurses, social workers, small business owners, TV producers, radio talk show hosts, doctors, bricklayers, bar owners, firemen, carpenters, speech therapists, engineers, and technology administrators—had purchased their homes and the multiple cars parked out front, took their families on nice vacations, and sent their kids to college.

  But as my candid cousin Jeanne told me a few years after we met, it was a real struggle. Along with her husband, Frank, Jeanne had been active in the civil rights movement, registering black voters and boycotting white-owned businesses. Her son, Joe, helped to integrate the New Orleans Public Library, sitting with other demonstrators in the seats reserved for white kids; when the police came to kick them out, they moved the chairs outside to continue their protest.

  “I never miss the vote,” Jeanne said. “Even if I’m lying in bed. Because I fought for it.” Despite failing health and bouts of pneumonia that kept sending her to the emergency room, Jeanne made it to the polls for the 2004 election.