One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  My aunt Shirley takes the most definitive view: my father was raised black and became white. When she talks to me about her and my father’s childhood, she doesn’t refer to him as Bud or Anatole or the more distant “your father,” but “my brother.” As Shirley repeats “my brother” over and over—as if she must remind herself of their connection—she reclaims him and the truth about her family’s identity. As the only survivor, she has earned this right. Also, after forty-five years of marriage to a civil rights lawyer and a lifetime of thinking about race issues, Shirley had no question about what she was, and she seemed unable—or unwilling—to imagine herself or her family members as ever feeling otherwise.

  To reveal the young colored boy that my father had been, I had to carefully strip away the father that I had known. It was like uncovering a pentimento, the part of a painting that is hidden beneath the surface of the paint, the artist’s first try. My father’s portrait contained hints of this earlier picture: in some places, the underlying image matched up perfectly with my sense of my dad; elsewhere it had been obscured completely. And then every once in a while, both portraits came into focus simultaneously, and I could see how each version of my father had informed the other.

  I found him after all, although he was different from the person I remembered: more vulnerable to others’ opinions and less self-assured about the choices he’d made. He seemed both needier and more selfish, less heroic and more human. I imagined him impatient with my eagerness to figure him out. It would bruise his ego to think that a problem he wrestled with all his life could be resolved. I imagined him defending himself, and I imagined him wanting to be forgiven.

  -27-

  My father’s family settled in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which in 1927 was known as Stuyvesant Heights. It was middle-class, 90 percent white, and “one of the most attractive home sections in the entire boro,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle. By the time I moved to Brooklyn, in 1996, Bed-Stuy had long been recognized as one of the country’s worst urban ghettos. Its name—synonymous with poverty, gang violence, teenage mothers, and crack—served as shorthand for the hard lot of African Americans. Most whites, along with many blacks, wouldn’t dare to go there.

  When someone asked my father where he was from, he answered simply “Brooklyn” or offered nearby Brownsville (a neighborhood that, ironically, has since developed a similar reputation to Bed-Stuy). He may have justified his evasion by reasoning that the integrated middle-class environs of his childhood weren’t the same place as the notorious Bed-Stuy. But he was also trying to distance himself from the events that had brought about Bed-Stuy’s transformation—events that conflated blackness with desperation in white America’s imagination, that circumscribed the dreams and opportunities for a bright colored boy growing up on those streets, that made the desolation of Bed-Stuy inevitable. To my father’s mind, leaving behind this hard lot necessarily meant leaving behind his hometown and the people he’d known there too.

  Blacks have lived in Brooklyn since the midseventeenth century, first as slaves, then as free people of color after slavery was phased out in New York State in 1827. By the time my father’s family moved to Brooklyn, the borough had developed a reputation as home to a better class of colored people, but it didn’t offer much of a black community. By far in the minority, blacks were scattered across a half-dozen different neighborhoods. In the early years of the Great Migration, most southern Negroes who came to New York City were heading to Harlem, considered the “Negro Capital of the World.”

  During the 1920s alone, nearly 100,000 blacks streamed into Harlem, more than doubling its population. The influx of so many newcomers—who arrived with few resources and no jobs—quickly led to overcrowded slums, which helps to explain why my grandfather chose Brooklyn instead. Also, after growing up Creole, living in the center of American black life wouldn’t hold much appeal for Nat. Stuyvesant Heights, on the other hand, had enough black people that his younger daughter, Shirley, who was turning out to be browner than the rest of them, wouldn’t cause anyone to look twice, and plenty of whites among whom the family could get lost if they ever needed to.

  My grandfather found construction work right away. For $50 a month, he rented the family an apartment on the top floor of an apartment building on a busy avenue. At age six my father became a city boy. The double-laned roads filled with cars and lined with tall brick and stone buildings were nothing like the narrow streets and one-story wooden cottages of Tremé. In New Orleans my father had run around outside in his bare feet, eaten fresh figs from a tree in the backyard, sat under the overhang of the shed’s tin roof listening to the thrum of rain during storms. In Brooklyn he and his friends played stickball in the street, and he had to ride his bike to Prospect Park if he wanted to walk around without his shoes on. Anyway, it was usually too cold.

  The people in the neighborhood were different too. Russian, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants lived among a handful of southern Negroes and transplants from the West Indies. My father’s parents knew only one other Creole family, and they lived way out in Queens. My father later recollected: “In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic.... We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and the schoolyard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries.”

  My father’s two best friends during childhood were both “colored,” meaning that their families were mixed-race and tended more toward a middle-class lifestyle than “blacks.” The family of one of the boys, Carlos deLeon, became friendly with the Broyards and often shared Sunday meals with them. My father and the other boy liked to gang up on Carlos. My father would ask him how to spell a word, and Carlos would answer correctly, but my dad and his sidekick would insist that Carlos had gotten it wrong, enraging him in the process.

  Carlos was darker than my father, which introduced a subtle subtext into their play. As small as the Negro population in Stuyvesant Heights was, it contained a rigid hierarchy, with the light-skinned descendants of free blacks or Caribbean emigrants on one end and the darker sons and daughters of former slaves on the other. The fathers in the uppermost class were all professionals—dentists, doctors, or lawyers. Their wives didn’t work, except as volunteers at the National Association of Colored Women or the Brooklyn Urban League. These families owned their own houses and drove their own automobiles. During the summer they vacationed at one of the black resorts: Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard or Sag Harbor in Long Island.

  While this class thought of themselves foremost as Negroes—striving for the betterment of all their people—they didn’t mingle with the more disadvantaged among their race. The singer and actress Lena Horne, who has been described as America’s first black movie star, came from the colored bourgeoisie of Stuyvesant Heights. In her book about her family’s history, Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, described her maternal grandparents as representing “the upper class of America’s ‘untouchable’ caste—the small brown group within the large black mass.”

  No matter how light their skin or esteemed their profession might be, however, the white world still didn’t want any Negroes living or working near them. As Buckley points out: “Although members of the black bourgeoisie were vastly more successful than their poorer and blacker brethren, they rarely had opportunities to make real money....Who you were and where you came from—‘roots’—meant more than money.”

  In New Orleans the Broyards, by virtue of who their people were, had belonged to the better set of black people. But in Brooklyn they didn’t quite measure up. Their pale skin was all right, but neither Nat nor Edna had more than an elementary school education. Also, while the white side of the Broyard family tree had been in Louisiana since the colonial era and the African side had arrived from St. Domingue as free people, there weren’t any other Creoles around to attest to the illustriousness of their connections.

  The Broyards had been in Brooklyn for two years when Nat received word that his father’s house
in New Orleans had been seized by the sheriff for failure to pay back taxes. Fourteen years before, Paul had put the property in Nat’s name to protect his investment should his construction business ever run into trouble. Paul’s “slow horses and fast women” had finally caught up with him, and he needed to sell the house to pay his debtors. One May morning in 1929, Nat headed to a notary in downtown Brooklyn to get power of attorney authorizing his father to unload the property.

  Nat must have been grateful that he didn’t have to witness his father’s final fall from glory, but the sale of the house was also a loss for him. His dad had owned it since before Nat was married; it was where the family had always gathered. Nat likely celebrated his wedding there and the baptisms of his children. Even if my grandfather wanted to go back to New Orleans, he no longer had a home to return to. At the same time, Nat didn’t feel at home in Brooklyn.

  My father, reflecting on his childhood, noted that his father turned into a “silent and solitary figure in New York,” after being “dislocated by moving...from the intimacy and immediacy of the French Quarter to an abstract and anonymous city.” In New Orleans, Nat had six siblings and a dozen aunts and uncles. He was kin one way or another to almost everyone he knew. In Brooklyn he had no one with whom he could share all the Creole customs that had shaped his first thirty-eight years, no one with whom he could speak the French patois of his childhood. Yet there was no denying that living up north had improved his family’s chances for success in the larger world.

  My father and my aunts were attending a good integrated elementary school down the street. In New Orleans black people had to send their children to one of the private colored schools to get a decent education. If they couldn’t afford the tuition, the only other option was passing for white. In a few years, one of Nat’s cousins would change his last name—to avoid being associated with any black Broyards—in order to enroll his kids in a white school. His wife had never learned how to read in the city’s black schools and she was determined to secure a better future for her children.

  In Stuyvesant Heights, a person could go where he wanted without having to confront signs for coloreds and whites. While prejudice and de facto discrimination certainly existed—blacks of all shades were routinely refused service in local restaurants—white supremacy wasn’t always presumed to be the natural order. When the ushers at the Bedford movie theater tried to Jim Crow some patrons, charges of discrimination were reported in the Brooklyn paper. A local Episcopal minister who sent letters to his black congregants discouraging their attendance was met with a national outcry. White clergies from around the city publicly censured him while opening their own doors to his colored worshippers. Despite these improvements over the racial attitudes in New Orleans, a mood of loss and longing lingered beneath the cozy surface of the Broyards’ family life.

  At night my father and his sisters would do their homework around the dining room table, while Nat sat in his armchair, smoking his pipe and reading the paper. Nearby in the kitchen, Edna prepared dinner. Sometimes she brought out a bowl of peas for the girls to shell or a pot of potatoes for her husband to mash. In minutes Nat had the potatoes whipped into a high fluff, his arm moving up and down as fast as a piston. After dinner they listened to radio dramas, The Shadow or The Lone Ranger, or they played a few hands of fan-tan. Sometimes my dad made them laugh by putting on a record of the Cuban music that he loved and trying to imitate the dances.

  Edna doted on her son, worrying that he was too skinny, and regularly chased him around the dining table, trying to force Scott’s Emulsion or cod liver oil down his throat. During the summer months, she bribed him with Tarzan books to stay inside during the hottest part of the day, and his lifelong love of reading was born. Lying on his bed inside the dark apartment, the curtains drawn against the sunlight, my father could escape his father’s silences as he swung from vine to vine through the jungle.

  Eventually my father graduated to reading Alexandre Dumas, whose complete works, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, lined one shelf of the family’s dining room. Dumas’ father was the son of a Frenchman and slave woman in St. Domingue, a legacy that gave the writer a common history with Creoles. For my dad and his sisters, Dumas’ books, their mother’s unique recipes, and the strange French their parents spoke when they didn’t want the kids to understand them were everyday reminders of their Creole identity. Yet neither my father nor my aunts were exactly sure what Creole was. Shirley only understood that it was a different kind of African American.

  My father and his sisters weren’t taught to speak the language themselves, nor did they grow up hearing about the history of Creole activism and their own family’s contribution. From Nat’s perspective his father’s political career was a series of defeats. Nat was seven when the Plessy challenge was lost, nine when blacks were disenfranchised by the new state constitution, eleven when his dad was ousted from the Republican Party, and thirteen when Paul stopped voting in elections. Rather than recount these failures, Nat regaled my dad with tales of the impressive buildings his father built, his conquests of the ladies, and the stylish and charismatic figure he cut as Belhomme, the beautiful man.

  Perhaps it was these stories—or Nat’s animation in telling them—that sparked my father’s interest in his roots. As a teenager he decided that he wanted to learn how to speak Creole too. Maybe he could follow these foreign words to his father, the same way that he’d followed Tarzan on those jungle vines. But the Brooklyn public schools didn’t offer Creole instruction, and my father’s parents weren’t inclined to teach him themselves. What was the point of their son learning this vestigial language? Even with all its immigrants, New York was an American city that offered a chance at the American dream. Better that my father focus on his studies, so he could do well on the civil service exam and get a good job at the post office, with a steady income and a pension. Even if their place in society had fallen since leaving New Orleans, and even though Nat’s removal from the Creole culture had left him heavyhearted, Nat and Edna could console themselves that New York offered the chance to make a better life for themselves and their children. But then came the Depression.

  The stock market collapse in 1929 made things difficult for everyone in New York, but as the “last hired and first fired,” blacks were particularly vulnerable. There was no recourse for job discrimination during the worst years of the Depression—President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission until 1941—and newspaper want ads regularly specified “whites only” among their hiring specifications. Even jobs as maids or laborers, once considered the exclusive domain of African Americans, started going to European immigrants. When blacks did get work, they were routinely paid less than whites. Trade unions traditionally blocked the entrance of African Americans; in 1930 only one in twenty black workers belonged to a union, compared to one in five whites.

  My grandfather had joined the carpenters’ union when he first arrived in New York by passing as white. Membership qualified him to work on bigger commercial buildings, and his experience earned him a foreman’s grade, just one step below the superintendent. It was his job to translate the architect’s plans into orders for his crew of carpenters to carry out. Between this responsibility and his respectable paycheck, my grandfather was very proud of his job. On the work site Nat kept a hammer in the belt of his overalls, and regularly whipped it out to demonstrate how something was done. My father often bragged how his father could drive home a two-inch nail with two strokes of his arm. Nat had built an elaborate wooden toolbox outfitted with slots and compartments to carry his tools back and forth to the job site. In the neighborhood he could often be seen walking down the sidewalk with the long toolbox balanced on one shoulder, his other hand on his hat, ready to tip it for the ladies.

  But even passing as white couldn’t protect Nat during the Depression. He was out of work for much of the 1930s, losing his dignity as much as his income. Over an eight-ye
ar period, the family moved five times in search of ever cheaper apartments. In one place, Edna tended the building’s furnace to offset the rent. The next apartment was a railroad flat adjacent to the El—Lexington Avenue’s elevated trolley. For three years my father’s sisters slept in a room whose window was eye level with the train tracks. Finally, in 1934, my grandmother took a job ironing six days a week at a commercial laundry. The owners hired Edna because they thought she was white.

  Even before the Depression, utility companies, department stores, factories, hospitals, hotels, and New York City’s transit companies had all practiced racial discrimination in hiring. For the paler Negroes of Stuyvesant Heights, passing for work was commonplace and acceptable. Everyone knew that most of the salesgirls and elevator operators at the Abraham & Strauss department store in downtown Brooklyn were really light-skinned blacks. Other colored people often applauded these racial infiltrators, happy to see one of their own “getting over.” Some of the darker blacks even encouraged the practice, since it meant less competition for the few jobs available to their race.

  In New Orleans the phenomenon had been even more widespread. The ubiquity, however, didn’t make passing any easier. In the early 1970s, the historian Arthé Agnes Anthony collected oral histories about the practice from septuagenarian and octogenarian New Orleans Creoles. As a man who passed in order to work at a printing company explained, “The whites would be talking about Negroes and you’d have to take it. Once I had been seen at night...and I was later asked what was I doing with all those niggers. I told them that it was none of their damn business who I was with. They never asked me that anymore, but I didn’t like it.” This fear of detection and the stress of distancing oneself from one’s coworkers—you couldn’t socialize with them or ever invite them to your house—compelled many Creoles to return to colored employment, no matter the loss of wages.