One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  In 1915 Paul Broyard had given over his house to his oldest daughter and bought a second home on a mixed block of whites, Creoles, and a few blacks in the Seventh Ward. This house was even bigger than the first, with seven large rooms, two fireplaces, a wide arched hallway, and a side porch. Out back was a stable for his horses, above which were the servants’ quarters. The sight of these people working in the kitchen, who appeared phenotypically black compared to the nearly white-looking Broyards, helped Paul and his family to maintain their sense of occupying a middle position.

  Belhomme was nearing sixty but didn’t show any signs of slowing down. For much of his adult life, he’d been known as a ladies’ man. His grandsons—including my dad—would grow up hearing stories about their grandfather’s exploits: how he liked to say that if you spread a woman’s hair on the pillow and kiss her on the lips, she will open her legs like a Bible. Or that he would head to the Tremé market with six baskets on his arms—one to fill for each of his girlfriends.

  The women in the family clucked about Belhomme’s “outside children,” many of whom took the Broyard name. His son Jimmy, visiting a girl he liked across the river one day, spied a picture of Paul on her mantle. When he asked the girl why she had the photograph, she explained that the man was her daddy! Retelling the story sixty years after Paul’s death, Jimmy’s son, Jimmy Jr., laughed, explaining how his father had hightailed it out of there.

  It’s hard to know what Rosa made of her husband’s adulteries. During their forty-two years of marriage, Rosa bore eleven children and likely miscarried a few more. She might have looked past Paul’s transgressions because she simply didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. But she couldn’t stop the neighbors from gossiping about Belhomme’s excesses; nor could she prevent that talk from tainting the family’s good reputation.

  For Nat, having a father like Paul must have been both a badge of honor and a mark of shame. As a young man, he could either compete with his dad’s lothario behavior or reject such shenanigans completely, a choice between vice and virtue that was echoed by the city itself. In 1897 New Orleans’s city council voted to establish a legalized red-light district in a corner of Tremé in an attempt to regulate the rampant prostitution. The district was nicknamed Storyville after Sidney Story, the unlucky alderman who suggested the plan.

  When Nat was twelve, his father ran a saloon as a side business on the edge of Storyville, where people could stop off for a drink before heading to a gambling den, brothel, or cabaret. To entertain his customers, Paul might have hired a “professor,” one of the black piano players who were flocking to Storyville at the turn of the century, where they experimented with playing a new musical form, jazz. Segregation wasn’t strongly enforced in the red-light district; men and women of all races drank and flirted side by side.

  For a colored boy on the edge of puberty, the scene in Paul’s bar offered a shortcut to manhood, compared to the strategy of patience and virtue endorsed by the world at large. But this underworld was threatening too. These pleasures of booze and sex could anesthetize a young man, content him with the status quo, and condemn him to becoming the image drawn by his accusers.

  When it came time for Nat to begin courting, the consequences of his father’s behavior would make themselves known. If Nat’s marriage to my grandmother Edna Miller in 1917 was any indication, he was forced to look outside his family’s social circle. While the Millers were also Creoles of color, they didn’t belong to any of the community’s elite benevolent societies. Edna’s father was a laborer, and her mother hired herself out as a cook. By age thirteen Edna had quit school and gone to work rolling cigars in a factory and sewing for a local tailor to help make ends meet—another sign that her family wasn’t as refined as her future husband’s.

  There were also whispers that Edna’s grandmother had been a prostitute, and that her mother was the offspring of a white Confederate general. Whether or not the rumors were true, the fact that Edna’s grandmother had consorted with at least four different men, not all of whom she married, would have raised eyebrows. After a childhood like hers, Edna may have been inclined to look past Belhomme’s proclivities. Also, Nat had begun to get his own construction jobs: in their first three months of marriage, he landed contracts totaling almost $9,000 ($130,000 today). Edna must have been relieved to let someone else support the family for a change.

  When my father was born, on July 16, 1920, Nat and Edna were living in half of a shotgun house on St. Ann Street in Tremé. Edna’s mother lived there too, which made life in the three small rooms rather cramped for the young family. My father’s sister Lorraine was two years older, and Shirley arrived three years after my dad. My father’s few recollections of New Orleans paint an atmosphere that was congenial and cozy. In the evenings the neighbors sat out front of their houses and chatted with the passersby. Weekends were spent visiting with family. The days ran into one another, all hot and humid, wrapping my father’s childhood in a tropical sultry innocence.

  But there were tensions in the Broyard household too. While both Nat and Edna were playful and loving with their children, their differences in temperament grated on their affection for each other. Nat told wonderful stories, embellished with improbable details, while Edna clung literal-mindedly to facts. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist and she was sociable, making friends easily. He walked quickly—a man with a purpose—yet with style, arching his back and kicking out his heels. She moved slowly, “like a glacier,” because her feet were bad and she was always in pain. My grandfather shared a bit of his father’s fondness for excesses—he smoked a long pipe, wore his cap pulled down over one eye, pulled his pants up toward his chest to show off his long legs. Edna summed up life with the precision of an accountant and had a talent for advising people how to solve their problems.

  The real conflict, however, lay between Edna and the Broyard family. She was unused to such a patriarchal culture. Her childhood had been mostly dominated by women: her mother, aunt, and grandmother. As a Broyard wife, she was expected to wait on her husband, make all of his clothes (even his underwear), and defer to the men of the family. After working and earning her own money for so long, she didn’t take easily to this subservient role.

  And her father-in-law was such a domineering presence in their lives. Every Sunday the family was expected at Belhomme’s house for supper. Because Nat depended on his father for his paycheck, the family didn’t have control over their own purse strings. It was Paul who headed to the registrar to record the birth of my father in 1920. After his wife’s death, in the summer of 1921, Belhomme became even more overbearing.

  Rosa had always managed the household, watched the finances, and ensured that her husband’s peccadilloes didn’t interfere with the family dinner. But her death left Belhomme without a leash at the very moment that the city’s racial wardens were cracking down. Over the next ten years, he veered toward ruin.

  The story in the family went that after becoming a widower, Paul began spending the down payments from his construction contracts on “fast women and slow horses.” When he needed to buy materials for the jobs, he’d seize his sons’ savings to replace the squandered sums. Nat couldn’t stop his father because he had granted Paul power of attorney, but he probably would have given him the money anyway. Since Paul was sixteen, he’d taken care of everyone: his mother and five brothers, then his wife and seven children. Paul had provided jobs for his sons and looked after all of his kids’ families. He’d earned a little paying back. And he was the measure by which the fortunes of the rest of them rose and fell, so it was in their best interests to protect him.

  Nat would have been motivated to help his father by love and sorrow too. He must have seen how Paul’s life had become circumscribed by loss—of his wife, his Creole culture, and his place in the world. And so Nat indulged his father’s gambling and women—pastimes that could make Paul feel like a man again, at least for a night. But Belhomme’s indulgences began to hinder Nat from being a man
himself. Besides his three kids with Edna, he had to support another daughter, Ethel, from his first wife, who’d died back in 1915. And so when Edna began to nag her husband to move up north, where there was plenty of construction work and Nat would be able to hold on to his own earnings, he let himself be talked into the idea.

  Since World War I blacks had been fleeing the South in huge numbers in search of better economic opportunities and a break from Jim Crow segregation. During the Great Migration, as the movement was called, roughly 1.5 million African Americans moved to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit. For Edna the decision to join them, like so many things in her life, was practical. Anyway, she didn’t have the same attachment to New Orleans or its Creole culture that her husband did. She wasn’t raised speaking French. Her people hadn’t been active in the Republican radical movement. Her sense of self-worth didn’t depend on the fading Creole legacy.

  Nat was thirty-eight when he finally agreed to leave New Orleans. By this time, he might have realized that he had no choice at all—the world of his childhood was heading toward extinction. While he kept to his promise to never go back—although my grandmother and my aunts made a few trips down south during his lifetime—Nat remained nostalgic for the city he’d loved. He also was faithful to its Creole legacy, including the disdain for blacks, feelings of betrayal by the Catholic Church, and notions of manhood that had characterized the community in its waning years.

  If Nat also held his father and his extravagances responsible for the decision to move north, he kept these criticisms to himself. My father grew up hearing only romantic stories about the “operatic character” Belhomme. But neither, apparently, did Nat blame Jim Crow for his father’s decline in society. To acknowledge the effect of the color line on his family would mean acquiescing to its black-and-white depiction of the world, and Nat held fast, even up north, to the Creole’s intermediary position in the racial order.

  It was winter, early in 1927, when my father boarded the train for New York City with the rest of his family. He was six and a half years old. Any excitement he felt about the prospect of an overnight train ride to a fabled northern city may have disappeared on entering the Jim Crow car that his sister Shirley recalls taking. These coaches were typically positioned directly behind the locomotive, and the air stank of smoke from the engine’s exhaust. Baggage belonging to white passengers often occupied the seats, leaving little room for the colored riders. Bathrooms rarely worked, and the coaches were infrequently cleaned. Since blacks were excluded from dining services, families had to bring enough food for the forty-hour journey, adding to the smell and garbage. It’s not unlikely that this train ride was my father’s first foray into a “colored” facility.

  The world of my father’s childhood in New Orleans had consisted of his house, his grandparents’ house, his block, church, and school, and occasional trips to the Creole market in Tremé. He spent most of his time with people like himself: family members and other Creole kids from his neighborhood. If he’d been shielded from the contingencies that the South forced upon colored people, the trip north would have made them clear, especially after crossing the Mason-Dixon Line and arriving in Washington, DC. There Jim Crow service ended, and the family was able to move to the more pleasant cars and sit in the company of white people.

  The journey from South to North was my father’s first trip from black to white. He saw that crossing the color line could be as simple as walking a few steps down the platform of Washington’s Union Station and as devastating as his father’s mood on arriving in New York City. Looking back on this moment, my father later wrote, “[My father] had left the French Quarter a popular man, but he got off the train in Pennsylvania Station to find snow falling and no one there waiting for him.” Ten years later my father would himself eventually have to choose between the world of his family and childhood and a new world where he could create his own history, with all the contradictions that implied.

  III.

  Avenues of Flight

  -26-

  Back in Brooklyn I started to look for my father. It was a strange notion—searching for a dead person. For the first few years after my father died, I used to dream that he wasn’t really dead: he was just off somewhere and I hadn’t looked for him hard enough. In the dream he’d leave a message on my answering machine, or send me a postcard telling me where to find him. But always the message would be garbled or the directions would be unclear, and I’d wake up with a start, my sense of loss redoubled.

  When you lose a family member or close friend, people tell you, to console you, that your loved one will always live on in your memories. They act as if this process occurs involuntarily: a biological trick to offset your grief, just as the brain suppresses traumatic memories that are too difficult to handle. Your friends don’t tell you to record everything that you remember about the dead person because you will indeed forget many things over time. Nor do they warn you that your memories will become irreversibly mortared into a monument of the “dearly departed”—some myth that you fashion to help organize your recollections to better retrieve them. Nor are you told about the contaminating influence of other people’s stories, which seem all the more vivid compared to the familiar old statue in the corner of your brain. And absolutely no one will suggest that you might begin to wonder how well you knew your family member or close friend in the first place, now that it’s too late to learn anything more firsthand.

  I looked first for my dad in his large collection of writing: the essays and short fiction that he published in his twenties and thirties that established his literary reputation; the memoir about his life in Greenwich Village during the 1940s, when he first became a writer; his collection of articles about family life in exurban Connecticut that originally appeared in the Times in the 1970s; his book, published posthumously, about his experience of being critically ill; and even the 1,500 or so book reviews he wrote during his thirteen-year stint as a daily book reviewer. I also read the many drafts of stories that he wasn’t able to publish and the journals and notes he kept for the novel that he could never finish.

  Surprisingly for someone who was supposed to be concealing his identity, much of my father’s work focused on himself and his family. His first published story, in 1954, dealt with his father’s death four years earlier, when my father was twenty-nine. Based on its positive reception, my dad secured a contract for a novel expanding the story of his father’s death against the backdrop of leaving his childhood home of Brooklyn for Greenwich Village. After his mother became widowed, my father began increasingly to include her in his stories and essays, although he saw her less and less frequently. In his articles about domestic life for the Times, my father often recalled his youth, contrasting it with my brother’s and mine. In his journals my father jotted down scenes from his family’s life, from his refusal at age five to hand over some flowers that he’d been instructed to lay upon the church altar to the first forlorn Thanksgiving with his mother and sister Lorraine after his father’s death.

  I recognized the father I’d known in these writings, but the colored boy from New Orleans and Brooklyn was harder to locate. Even in his private journals, my father never referred to himself directly or indirectly as black. In some instances he wrote about black people—or Negroes and “colored,” as he called them in the 1940s and 1950s—but they were always “them,” people different from himself. In the late 1950s he made an observation about a “spade” at the Village Gate who says to a white girl, “I’m a very ethereal cat,” and the difference grew.

  At the same time, his writing contained clues that he wasn’t exactly white: listening to gospel on the family radio; taking on American jazz as his subject during a time, the 1940s, when it was considered the special province of African Americans; and displaying an intimate knowledge of Negro life—their social pastimes, slang, and attitudes about themselves—that a white person either wouldn’t know or dare to write about with such authority.


  I sought out the people who knew my father to find out what race they thought he considered himself. To his friends from his youth, he was just another one of the guys in their happy tight-knit gang of middle-class Negroes growing up during the 1920s and 1930s in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. They knew him by his childhood nickname Bud, and remembered him as handsome, a good dancer, a big tease, and popular with the young ladies. My mother, on the other hand, maintained that my father wasn’t “really black,” a position that backed up his right to define himself and distinguished him from the kinds of black people—poor, criminal, angry—that she encountered on the news. Yet the late writer Harold Brodkey recalled that my father himself, during a discussion about his racial identity in the early 1980s, had insisted that he was “really black.” Brodkey’s subtle grasp of the complexities of human nature, as displayed in his many short stories appearing in the New Yorker, made him not only one of my father’s favorite contemporary writers but also an insightful confidant. Harold had told my father that he didn’t believe he was black, or at least he didn’t believe that my father knew anything about the sort of lives that most African Americans lived.

  My father’s own record on the question of his race didn’t clear up the confusion. When he was seventeen, he completed an application for a social security number on which he had to identify his race for the first time. Marks appear next to both WHITE and NEGRO, and there’s a mysterious C in the space following OTHER, leaving me to guess at the circumstances that produced such a muddled response.

  Even the degree of secrecy that my father maintained about his background was unclear. My father’s best friend in his later years, the noted psychologist Michael Vincent Miller, who authored Intimate Terrorism, about the crisis in contemporary love, and has lectured widely on the topic of disappointment, would certainly have been a sympathetic audience, but the two men never discussed the subject. Although Mike had heard the gossip, he assumed that my father didn’t want to talk about it and therefore respected his wishes. Yet another writer, Michael Mewshaw, who hardly knew my dad, recalled being at a cocktail party together at the home of his editor in Westport, Connecticut, in the 1970s, where he heard my father reveal to a group of writers and publishing folk that he was a colored man according to his birth certificate.