One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  The heat—pushing ninety degrees by 10 a.m.—didn’t help to calm the men. Neither did the whiskey bottles that were passed around as they waited. Three hours had passed when they heard the alarm that signaled trouble—twelve taps of the fire bell, the same signal used a few years earlier to warn city residents that Union warships were heading their way.

  Also out in force that morning were members of Henry Broyard’s old regiment, the First Louisiana Native Guard. Between seventy and a hundred veterans had gathered downriver to march to the Mechanics’ Institute, armed with pistols, broomsticks, even a slingshot. Three drummers and a fife player led the procession, along with a black veteran carrying a tattered American flag, reportedly the bloodstained one salvaged from the charge at Port Hudson. I don’t know whether or not my great-great-grandfather Henry was among them. The exact whereabouts on that day of Henry and of my grandfather Paul remain unknown. Their names don’t appear in any of the surviving records, and as with so many other details of my family’s past, no mention was passed down of this defining moment in Louisiana’s and the country’s history.

  The trouble began when the Native Guard passed through the gauntlet of hostile whites lining Canal Street. A white boy pushed down a black marcher, yelling, “Go away, you black son of a bitch!” Blows were exchanged and a few shots were fired, but the procession managed to reach the Mechanics’ Institute, where the men were greeted with a roar of cheers. Some of the black spectators had also begun to drink in the hot sun, and their mood was growing increasingly rowdy.

  Before long the troublemaking white boy reappeared to continue his taunts. Some black men, by way of reply, began lobbing bricks from a nearby construction site. Then one black man removed his revolver and opened fire. The ensuing shooting match left one black man dead and two others lying bloody in the street. A handful of courageous policemen posted at the hall tried to intervene, but they were no match for the hostile crowd. A few minutes later, the twelve-tap alarm began to sound. The police officers, special deputies, firemen, and bands of armed white citizens who headed to the institute outnumbered the conventioneers and colored onlookers by more than five to one.

  Inside the Mechanics’ Institute, the white delegates, still hoping to conduct the meeting, urged the black spectators to disperse. The onlookers began exiting the building, but they found themselves surrounded by police and the armed white citizens. Before they could head back inside, the white mob started forward, firing their guns as they came.

  In the main hall, a white delegate took charge, commanding everyone to sit down—on chairs or on the floor—to indicate their lack of resistance. The Baptist minister moved through the crowd, telling the men to place their trust in God. The front doors were left open, in another display of submission, but when the policemen burst through the doorway, they opened fire without hesitation. Scrambling for cover, the crouching men cried out, “For God’s sake, don’t shoot....We are peaceable.”

  Repeated attempts to surrender were met with more gunfire. When the minister tried to exit the institute, waving a white handkerchief atop an American flag, a policeman shot him twice, causing injuries that would end his life six days later. The remaining men inside started to fight back. With flimsy cane chairs, they tried to fend off the guns and knives of the police and the white mob. But it was hopeless. When the fighting was over, the wooden floorboards were so wet with the conventioneers’ blood that they squished underfoot.

  A few white delegates managed to escape the hall and were taken into custody and protected by policemen who recognized them. Most blacks weren’t so lucky. Officers handed over black prisoners to the mob, who shot them and beat them to death. My friend Julia Hilla’s grandfather Arnold Bertonneau managed to slip out undetected and was hiding in an adjacent lot when a gang of whites discovered him. A policeman spotted Bertonneau and intervened, mistakenly thinking the light-skinned Creole of color was a white man.

  When it was all over, an estimated forty-four black men had been murdered, with another forty severely wounded. On the side of the police, only one man died—a young student who accidentally stepped into the line of fire—and no men at all suffered severe wounds. The commanding officer of the Union troops, in a report to Ulysses S. Grant, came to this conclusion: “The more information I obtain of the affair...the more revolting it becomes. It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre.”

  The following week a grand jury convened in New Orleans to determine the cause of the violence. None of the twenty-nine witnesses called were black or had been present inside the Mechanics’ Institute during the massacre. The all-white jury found the convention delegates and black spectators to blame for what they deemed a “riot,” and refused to charge a single policeman or white citizen for the killings. As one Unionist observer described the situation: “The rebels have control here and are determined to maintain it.”

  The New Orleans massacre proved the error of President Johnson’s claim that the Southern states could be trusted to reconstruct themselves. Not only had unarmed blacks been attacked, but white men—loyal Unionists such as ex-governor Michael Hahn and R. King Cutler, who’d been elected to the U.S. Senate—were badly beaten; and other whites, such as the Baptist preacher, had died from their wounds. More practically, rebuilding the Southern states after the devastation of the war was going to require Northern investment. But with the safety of Northerners and Republicans in the South uncertain, investors were unlikely to sink their money into the region.

  As the November 1866 congressional elections approached, word about the massacre spread across the country. The cover of the influential magazine Harper’s Weekly featured an illustration of the Baptist minister being fired upon while he waved a white handkerchief affixed to the American flag. A few weeks later, the American electorate—composed mostly of white Northerners—voted into Congress a two-thirds majority of Republicans, more than enough votes to override any presidential vetoes.

  With the power of the House now firmly in the hands of radicals and moderate Republicans, the lawmakers soon passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The bill divided the Southern states into five military districts, overseen by federal troops who would back up the authority of the local government. The act also required that every state write universal suffrage into its constitution and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment regarding citizenship as a condition to rejoining the Union.

  Three years later Congress wrapped federal protection around the black man’s franchise with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ensured that the “right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, the wording of the amendment left open the denial of the vote on grounds of education level and property ownership, a loophole that would be exploited soon enough.

  But for the moment, the reformed Southern society imagined by Paul Trévigne and his compatriots appeared tantalizingly within reach. Back in New Orleans, the radicals began calling for civil equality too—particularly the desegregation of public spaces. The Tribune commented: “All these discriminations that had slavery at the bottom have become nonsense. It behooves those who understand the new era...to show their hands, and gain the friendship of the colored population of this State.”

  Pragmatic whites such as future governor Henry Clay Warmoth assessed the state’s changing political landscape, where black voters would soon outnumber whites by nearly two to one, and followed this advice. In 1868 an interracial coalition of delegates, elected by Louisiana’s first-ever multiracial electorate, headed back to Mechanics’ Institute, where they peacefully wrote Louisiana’s new constitution. The conventioneers, including Arnold Bertonneau, granted the vote to all men, except for the Confederate officeholders disfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, and ended segregation in schools and public places. Two years later the newly elected state legislature—more than half of whom were colored—ventured into the last bastion of equality, the bed
room, and quietly removed the ban against intermarriage that had been in place since colonial days.

  After fifteen years together and the births of eight children (six of whom survived), my great-great-grandparents Henry Broyard and Pauline Bonée saw their union legally sanctioned at last. A few months later, the census enumerator came round to the Broyard house on St. Ann Street. When he was there in 1860, the enumerator had recorded everyone in the family as “mu” for mulatto. But this time Henry let it be known that he was actually white, although his wife and their six sons were mulattoes.

  According to his death certificate, Henry was still a white man when he died three years later. It’s unclear whether his death from “a violent nosebleed” was sudden (resulting perhaps from a brain aneurism) or the result of a lingering illness, whether his identification as white on the certificate was his last wish or a spontaneous decision made by his wife’s nephew when reporting his uncle’s demise. Fittingly, after a lifetime of playing racial musical chairs, Henry went into the ground as a white man in the colored section of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 on the edge of the French Quarter.

  After stumbling across the location of Henry’s interment during my research, I spent a morning trying to find it, accompanied by my cousin Sharon Broyard. Sharon also lived in New York, where she worked for a financial services company, but the busyness of our lives prevented us from getting together much up north. She surprised me one June weekend in New Orleans by showing up at a genealogy conference where I was speaking about the free people of color. We decided to go look for Henry’s vault, to see if it provided any additional clues about his life.

  I was also hoping to find Henry’s burial place so that he might be included in the local tradition of visiting the tombs of one’s ancestors on the first of November, All Saints’ Day. Every year, on the days leading up to the holiday, Catholics flocked to the cemetery to repair and whitewash an ancestor’s tomb, plant fresh flowers, and clean up the grounds. On the evening of All Saints’ Day, when the tombs were decorated with pots of chrysanthemums and lit with votive candles, a priest came to bless the dead.

  I’d been to an All Saints’ Day celebration at a cemetery in Lacombe, a town across Lake Pontchartrain where another branch of my father’s family had lived. There, as in New Orleans, the dead were also interred aboveground. Live oak trees surrounded the small graveyard, and their twisted boughs trapped the pale glow from the candlelit tombs, forming an eerily beautiful open-air cathedral. As I moved through the ghostly light, scanning the faceplates for my family names, surrounded by other descendants of the people buried there, my connection to my dead forebears had never felt closer at hand.

  My cousin Joe, the son of candid Jeanne, was already tending two other family tombs in the “black” section of St. Louis Cemetery. His parents had purchased the second one in the 1960s during a secret meeting with some family members who were living as white. Because the tomb was in the colored section of the cemetery, this family didn’t want it anymore. Joe, who works as a fireman, laughed when he told me this story. But it still bothered him that nobody was taking care of a Broyard tomb in the white part of the cemetery. Joe couldn’t because of the unspoken code that kept the white and black branches of the family from mixing. He had no better idea than Sharon or I did where exactly Henry Broyard had been buried.

  The cemetery’s closing hour of noon was fast approaching. I started walking faster up and down the rows, trying to decipher the location of “tomb no. 8, left alley, facing east, upper arch.” I wasn’t sure why I’d suddenly become so anxious to find Henry’s vault. Visiting my own father’s grave generally left me feeling hollow and unsatisfied. If anything, the close proximity of his ashes just obscured my sense of him. Henry was an even more elusive character. The contradictory circumstances of his death made it impossible to finally locate him on one side or the other of the color line. I was hoping, improbably, that the wording on his vault might provide some conclusion—maybe even a reference to his race—and I would then know where the rest of the story of my mixed blood began.

  Yet as I scanned the walls of vaults and rows of tombs, I was struck by the tenuousness of all these distinctions—between water and dry land in this cemetery where the dead were buried above-ground; between the blacks and whites of this city who’d been intermingling for the last three hundred years; between the legacies of the past and their consequences on the future. If dividing lines existed at all, they were conditional, temporal things.

  The cemetery closed. We never managed to find Henry. Too many of the faceplates had been stolen or broken to figure out where he’d been laid to rest.

  -20-

  Unlike the members of his parents’ generation, my great-grandfather Paul Broyard had the chance to enter adulthood as an equal to other men, rather than as a colored man subordinate to whites. In his heart Paul may have already felt as good as or even superior to the white kids he knew from his neighborhood—mostly the children of Italian, German, and Irish immigrants. According to one of his grandsons, Paul could understand their languages but few immigrant children mastered his mother tongue, French. Many of his white counterparts were heading toward careers as laborers like their fathers, while Paul was apprenticed in the respected trade of carpentry, showing a flair for drawing and attention to detail that suited him for the practice of architecture. Paul had the Creole community to thank for these advantages. Their long presence in New Orleans and years of freedom had allowed them to create a supportive social network, with a focus on education, a tradition of activism, and a history of artisanship that they passed down to the next generation. That the former slaves lacked these opportunities further elevated young Creoles of color like Paul in New Orleans’s social hierarchy.

  Paul was also growing up to be handsome, which made him cocky. Of medium height, with long legs and a lean, sinewy build, he was known to strut around. Friends and family began referring to him as Belhomme—“beautiful man”—a nickname that would stick for the rest of his life. He wore his wavy brown hair parted on the side, and added a pencil mustache when he was older. With gently hooded pale green eyes, a long thin nose, and strong square chin, he could have easily passed for white. Only a yellow tinge to his skin alluded to his mother’s African ancestry.

  If Paul had any fears about his ability to compete with whites, he had a chance to allay them after a judge in 1870 finally forced the city’s schools to integrate. While no records exist of my great-grandfather’s education, the mixed schools with the heaviest Negro attendance were concentrated in his neighborhood, making it likely that Paul learned side by side with white children. In no other city throughout the entire South during Reconstruction were whites and blacks educated in the same classroom.

  A white reporter from the Picayune (a paper that didn’t usually favor black people) was assigned to cover the horrors of school integration. Instead he found “white ladies teaching negro boys; colored women showing the graces and dignity of mental and moral refinement...; children and youth of both races standing in the same classes, with black teachers pushing intelligently up into the intricacies of high school mathematics.” The journalist was almost certainly author George Washington Cable, who later wrote that the experience of reporting on desegregated schools convinced him that blacks and whites must share equally in public rights if the South were to thrive.

  While arguing for school integration in the Tribune, Paul’s godfather, Paul Trévigne, had observed, “The objection ‘too soon’ is but laughable....When will the right time come? Is it, per chance, after we have separated for 10 or 20 years the two races in different schools, and when we shall have realized the separation of this nation into two peoples?” But many recently freed blacks weren’t comfortable demanding full and immediate integration. For ex-slaves living in the countryside, this conciliatory stance was partly a matter of self-preservation.

  In 1867, in response to the Reconstruction Acts, some white men in the town of Franklin, a hundred miles west
of New Orleans, founded a paramilitary group called the Knights of the White Camelia, designed to intimidate black voters. Other white citizen militias would spring up throughout Reconstruction, including the Ku Klux Klan. Over the next eleven years, between three thousand and ten thousand colored Republicans in the state would be murdered for political reasons, according to estimates by federal investigation committees.

  Integration wasn’t the only issue dividing the ex-slaves and the free people of color. The colored Creole radicals made a number of missteps that alienated the ex-slaves from the political process. The free men of color insisted on deputizing themselves the leaders of the colored constituency, despite the fact that the emancipated slaves made up the voting majority. While the colored Creoles were committed in theory to securing civil and political equality for everyone of their race—Trévigne, for example, had helped to defeat a bill introduced by white lawmakers that would have granted the vote only to light-skinned Negroes like himself—they often snubbed their recently emancipated neighbors in practice. The Tribune had no former slaves on its editorial board, not even in the English section that had been added specifically to address them. One editorial went so far as publicly scolding the ex-slaves for their lack of “discipline” and habit of “boasting.”

  The so-called carpetbaggers—white Northerners who’d come South as Union soldiers and stayed to make their fortunes—were happy to exploit these rifts in the black community. At the first Republican state convention following Reconstruction, the Tribune faction made the unwise decision to support in the gubernatorial race two former slave owners, one of whom had been among the largest Negro owners of slaves in the state. No matter that these men stood on the more radical end of the Republican platform, the newly emancipated blacks weren’t about to vote their old masters into office, especially not colored ones. The carpetbaggers, on the other hand, won the primary easily with their shrewdly chosen candidates: twenty-five-year-old white Illinoisan Henry Clay Warmoth, whose service in the Union army made him the face of liberation for bondsmen, and his running mate, Oscar Dunn, an African American barber who was dark-skinned, English-speaking, and the son of a slave.