“Well, that might work with some of the other Creole girls, but...”
Deforest burst into laughter, as if he’d been joking all along, then wandered off outside. With his wingman gone, Edwin seemed to lose his game and soon excused himself too. I never got around to telling Laura what Deforest had said, but she seemed to sense that my mood had shifted, and before long we called it a night.
Recalling this moment days later still sent a surge of heat roiling through me—anger mixed with anxiety and shame. I hated the image of myself in Deforest’s eyes—a silly white girl making a big fuss over nothing. I hated how uncertain I became when trying to locate myself on this racial landscape or even recognize its terrain. Torn between trying to pinpoint the boundaries between black and white and an urge to deny their existence at all, I was caught in a dialectical tug-of-war. The futility of my efforts reminded me of a skit I once saw in which a man kept moving a wooden chair around an empty white room, unable to find a spot that suited him, despite their being all the same.
I tried to explain my confusion to Cherry and Sissy. But as I heard myself voicing various complaints and objections, I imagined that I just sounded like someone mired in denial. And perhaps I was hesitant to separate myself from my white-girl roots because I feared losing some social advantage. Maybe Skip Gates had been right when we’d argued about his writing the piece about my dad: I was afraid of being stigmatized by calling myself black. Sissy, reclining on the bed, smiled benevolently as I babbled on. Stretching her arms out to her sides, she gave a big yawn. “I hear you, girl,” she said. “The whole coming out thing is really really hard.”
“All finished,” Cherry exclaimed, coming around to face me. She clasped her hands at her chest. “But wait till you see how fabulous you look! Now put on that dress and let’s take some pictures!”
There’s nothing like hamming it up for the camera, coached by two transsexuals, to make you stop taking yourself so seriously. Heading over to the party in a taxi, I got to thinking that maybe Sissy, Cherry, and the folks at the Plantation Revelers all had the right idea. Identity was a performance of sorts; I was just arriving late to rehearsal. Perhaps before Deforest turned into a Jamaican “rude boy,” he’d been a choirboy in New Jersey. Maybe Edwin picked up his racial politics at Howard after a childhood in white suburbia. Sissy and Cherry had certainly found expression for their femininity through the theatrical side of womanhood, with their interest in fashion and makeup and penchant for Sex and the City–style girl talk. We were all straddling fences of one kind or another. We were all in the process of becoming the person whom we felt ourselves most to be.
At the Bunch Ball, Keith’s services as a dance partner were in high demand, since single men seemed in short supply. I spent much of the night sitting at the table, feeling like an overlooked Cinderella. Then at the stroke of midnight, everyone started to leave in a big rush, heading off to the Zulu party, to which I hadn’t been invited.
Luckily the writer Toi Derricotte, who was in town teaching at a local university, had come too, so we could keep each other company. I’d met Toi after reading her thought-provoking memoir, The Black Notebooks, in which she explored her racial identity as a light-skinned black woman who sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, had passed as white. While I could relate to the many awkward moments in the book when someone realized Toi’s “true” identity, she wasn’t questioning what she was. She described her intermittent flights from blackness as moments of denial or experiences of being an impostor.
In conversation with Toi, I had the impression that she viewed the Creoles’ tendency to distinguish themselves from African Americans as similar rejections of their black roots. When I first came to town, that’s certainly how I saw the insistence of some relatives on calling themselves Creole rather than black or African American. Despite their explanations about the unique Creole culture and history, I still interpreted their clinging to this designation as a way to set themselves apart—and above—the rest of the African American population. To avoid accusations that I was dodging my own African heritage, I’d avoided the label of Creole myself.
Yet learning the history behind the distinct Creole of color and African American cultures in New Orleans had made it harder for me to write off someone calling himself Creole as self-hating or a bigot in denial. Certainly comments about their neighborhoods “being invaded” and the problem with “the niggers” revealed prejudice on the part of some Creoles. But to judge them solely in terms of their distance from an African American identity seemed to miss a larger point. What had brought people together at these Creole balls was more than an agreement about what they were not. Rather they were united by all they held in common: their gumbo mix of European, African, and Native American ancestries; their French language and Catholic faith; and their legacies as artisans and activists. They shared family recipes, holiday traditions, a love for storytelling. They attended the same high schools and churches. And they were united by a complex kinship in a community that, for better or worse, had been culturally, geographically, and legally segregated from both whites and African Americans for more than a century and a half. After so many intermarriages in the Creole community, everybody was to some degree cousins with everybody else.
Home has been described as the place where people understand you. The people at the Bunch Ball made sense to each other. They could even make sense of me. Being among them did make me feel at home.
Toward the end of the evening, before everyone left for the Zulu Ball, the band started up a second line number. As at the Plantation Revelers Ball, the partygoers flocked to the dance floor. Toi headed off with someone too, leaving me alone. I was debating getting up myself, when I noticed a group of women rushing toward an older man seated in a wheelchair at the table next door. “It’s your song, Grandpa,” I heard someone say. One of the women pulled the wheelchair back from the table, and everyone closed around the old man, his face lit with joy and anticipation.
The women began to clap and step their feet in time to the music. The old man raised one hand, waving the traditional napkin, and with the other rotated the wheel of his chair back and forth. Delighted by this familiar trick, the women laughed, egging the grandfather on. He swung the chair forward and backward, angling it one way and then another. One of the younger women began to wag her behind, hands on hips, and turn in circles before him. The old man thrust out his chest and gyrated his shoulders, dipping them up and down. He took the girl’s hand and twirled her.
Watching the young woman dance with her grandfather brought my own grandfather to mind. He had also been confined to a wheelchair at the end of his life. He died from bladder cancer in 1950, long before I was born, but I knew some details about his death from a few autobiographical stories that my father had written. One of them is about a son visiting his father in the hospital. His dad is seated in his wheelchair, alone in a corridor, as the narrator watches him for a moment through a small window in the door. “Throwing his head back, [Father] closes his eyes and listens again to something only he can hear. He stays like that for a while and then he opens his eyes and claps his hands. I can hear it through the door. He’s beating a rhythm, and when the chair starts to move again, I understand that he’s dancing.”
I fantasized briefly about joining the group at the next table, imagining that I’d be welcomed into their circle. They would see that I knew the joy of dancing with your family; that I understood how this atavistic pleasure could give a person a sense of her rightness in the world. But I stayed seated. When my father’s family had moved away, they’d left behind these people and their music and rituals, forfeiting my spot along the cultural continuum.
In his writings my father described his father in Brooklyn as a “displaced person.” I was beginning to understand what he meant. No one in New York could grasp the particulars of my grandfather’s life. He’d become a man without a context, which left his children adrift to chart their own courses in the world.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, the blunt force of Jim Crow cut through New Orleans’s colored Creole community, scattering people on opposite sides of the color line, threatening their livelihoods, insulting their manhood, and toppling the institutions that had always sustained them. Every trip to the movie theater, beach, or opera house; every ride on the streetcar or visit to a hotel or restaurant; every stop in a public bathroom and drink from a water fountain posed the question: Was a person “colored” or “white”?
For those Creoles whose appearance made clear their black ancestry, there was no decision to make. They headed to the back of the streetcar or the balcony of the movie theater, where they sat alongside the American Negroes, who made up the majority of the city’s black population. Other Creoles who could have passed for white joined them there—people who didn’t want to abandon their friends and families or to deal with the trouble that could come from bucking the city’s color line. Over time some of these Creoles not only resigned themselves to the label of Negro, but they began taking on aspects of the lifestyle that went with it. They stopped teaching their children how to speak French. Because the public schools offered instruction exclusively in English, a new generation of Creoles grew up unable to understand what their elders were saying. On the political front, they joined forces with the American Negroes in the local chapter of the NAACP, after its opening in 1915, where they worked together to fight discrimination.
Many other colored Creoles, however, saw the bifurcation of the racial order in the city—and its elevation of a person’s blood over his culture and accomplishments—as a crude American invention. Obeying it meant conceding to the gradual effacement of their Creole identity. Already their claim to the term was threatened by the white Creole population, who since Reconstruction had been trying to redefine “Creole” as strictly Caucasian, lest the northern newcomers suspect them of being “tainted by the tarbrush.” And so many colored Creoles—rather than relinquish the sense of themselves that had fueled their self-worth over the last century—put off choosing between “white” and “colored” for as long as they could. They turned inward, to their church and clubs, to their Creole neighborhoods, and most of all to their families. In this way Jim Crow at once crystallized the colored Creole identity while also fracturing it. It encouraged Creoles to set themselves apart, where they stood proud, protected, and finally sidelined by history. The trajectory of my great-grandfather’s life—from a proud Creole businessman to a man who, in his grandson’s words, “was as shabby as shabby can be”—echoed the colored Creoles’ demise.
In the early decades of Jim Crow, Paul Broyard and his family could avoid situations where they’d be reminded of their second-class citizenship. When my grandfather Nat rode the streetcars, he might head past the white and colored sections to stand on the back platform. Or if he or his sisters went to Canal Street to go shopping, they could make sure to use the toilet at home rather than having to choose between the different public restrooms. And in Tremé or the Seventh Ward, it was pretty much business as usual. While Paul was no longer the Republican ward boss doling out treats from his goody bag of patronage, his successful construction business still earned him a respectful “Monsieur” from his neighbors.
With most blacks shut out of skilled work in factories and from jobs in white-collar professions, many colored people were beginning to feel the economic sting of Jim Crow. But the Creoles of color continued to dominate the building trades, of which carpentry was considered among the most prestigious. With a construction firm and an architect’s office in town, Paul was doing better than most. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he was regularly hired, mostly by whites, to build residential housing and rental properties, with as many as three jobs going at once. By 1905 he was able to purchase a two-story home on a nice block in Tremé, with plenty of room for his seven children.
In his house Belhomme could be assured of receiving the treatment due the man of the family, no matter how low his standing in the world might fall. My grandfather Nat, along with his two brothers, worked for the family business, while the four girls helped out with chores and tended to their father. My grandfather liked to describe for my father how on hot evenings Paul would retire to the porch, where one daughter would bathe his feet in a tin of lemon-scented water, another would wind the gramophone to play his French opera records, the third would bring him a cold drink and the paper, and the fourth would ply him with a fan.
At work Paul would have had to act respectfully to his white employers: taking off his hat in their presence, calling them “Mister.” But white people had always expected that treatment. Only one building contract out of three dozen secured by the Broyards in the two decades following the Plessy verdict stipulated that the construction be supervised by a white man. Otherwise the white men hired Paul, paid him his money, and left him alone.
On the job site the color line worked a little differently. All the skilled workers under Paul’s hire—the carpenters, lathers, plasterers—were Creoles of color, while the laborers—the men digging foundations, sawing boards, nailing up shingling—were American blacks. The two groups didn’t mix. During lunch hour they sat apart. They headed to different water barrels when they were thirsty. Posing for a photo, Paul and his brothers stood, while the darker-skinned laborers were seated beneath them. Compared to these men, the Broyards were the bosses, the ruling class, the whites.
In oral histories collected by the historian Arthé Agnes Anthony about the Creole of color community during the early twentieth century, an interviewee recalled the Broyard family as belonging to a “high class” group of Creoles. That meant that my grandfather and his siblings grew up speaking French at home, the family’s bookshelves displayed their Francophile tastes in literature, they visited the French Opera House to hear the latest performers. And as a general rule, they didn’t socialize with darker-skinned American Negroes.
Unlike the situation in previous generations, a formal education wasn’t needed to belong to the upper crust of Creole society. Following the resegregation of public schools in 1877, many Creole families opted against sending their children to the “colored schools,” which were seen, according to another of Anthony’s interviewees, as “for the poor and those with limited backgrounds.” Yet few people could afford private schools or tutors. Many in my grandfather’s generation left the classroom after the eighth grade. In Nat’s case, rather than continue on to secondary schooling, it made more sense for him to begin apprenticing in his father’s business, given that carpentry was the best occupation available to him.
Creoles with social aspirations were also expected to conform to a certain standard of respectability. Mothers made sure their children were outfitted in clean, neatly pressed clothing, with their hair combed and shoes shined. Families were to be seen in church on Sunday. Daughters must be kept close to home until they were married, young children were expected to mind their elders, and no one in the family should ever have babies out of wedlock or engage in extramarital affairs. Families whose members began to stray might find themselves snubbed at a Creole dance or church services. They could run into difficulties when trying to court a girl from a good family or they might become the subject of gossip among the grocers at Tremé market. Many believed that by continually improving his character, the colored person might even one day convince whites of his worth in the world.
In the early days of Jim Crow, black leaders around the country were also stressing the importance of respectability. Ida B. Wells, famous for her crusade against lynching, encouraged blacks to “strive for a higher standard of social purity” through her activity in the National Association of Colored Women. Booker T. Washington suggested that African Americans, through hard work and the demonstration of their Christian virtues, would “give lie to the assertion of his enemies North and South that the Negro is the inferior of the white man.” Even the educator and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’s push
for higher learning and acculturation for African Americans contained a note of moral uplift.
Still, a decade into Jim Crow, it became increasingly clear that no matter how useful to the economy or inoffensive to society southern blacks strove to be, whites weren’t going to get rid of segregation or restore universal suffrage anytime soon. They had too much economic self-interest to voluntarily concede their superior position. If anything, the separation of the races was making white prejudice more deeply entrenched. The formation of the NAACP in 1909 and the subsequent ascendance of Du Bois over Washington as the leader of the country’s black community signaled a change in tactics. Agitation, not accommodation, was the only way to win back their rights. It would take almost fifty years of fighting before the Supreme Court would finally acknowledge in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that separate status had never been equal.
By 1920 the Louisiana legislature had passed the bulk of statutes that formalized the legal wall between the black and white population in the state. Now blacks were lawfully prevented from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. Prisons, mental institutions, and circuses too all drew the color line. In 1916 the Catholic Church segregated worshippers in downtown New Orleans with the inception of Corpus Christi, an all-black parish in the heart of the Creole Seventh Ward. Many Creoles, including my great-grandfather Paul, stopped attending services in protest.
Between the clampdown of Jim Crow laws and the stiffening of the moral code in the community, a man like Belhomme was left with little room to move. He had always lived best by living large. And the more white southerners tried to make him feel small, the bigger his personality became.
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