One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  But as the Depression worsened, colored employment in New York City wasn’t an option for my grandparents. Nat worked mostly in Manhattan, where he ran less risk of bumping into someone who knew about his background. For Edna, whose job was only a half mile from the family’s home, the threat of discovery was greater. Other blacks tended to protect people who were passing—by not acknowledging the person when in public—but a white neighbor wouldn’t be as inclined to keep a black person’s secret.

  My grandmother was well known around Stuyvesant Heights. She often stood by the front gate of the yard, chatting with passersby. She had a talent for drawing people out about the difficulties in their lives and would freely offer advice about what someone should do in any given situation. She also had a habit of unconsciously mimicking a person’s accent. Before long she’d fall into an Irish brogue, Caribbean lilt, or the Yiddish inflections of a neighbor, which made her daughter Shirley worry that people might think her mother was mocking them.

  While visiting my aunt Shirley, I try to ask, gingerly, what it was like for her to grow up under these circumstances. The subject is uncomfortable for the very fact that Shirley, unlike the rest of her family, couldn’t pass for white. In New Orleans I heard stories about Creole families who rejected their own children because they were too dark. Sometimes these families justified their decision by the fact that the child made it impossible for them to live as white at a time when passing was one of the few means of survival. Other times a family had simply absorbed the prevailing attitudes about skin color to such a degree that they willingly betrayed their own flesh and blood.

  Shirley acknowledges that her childhood was probably very different from her brother’s and sister’s. On the street or in school, people knew what Shirley was by looking at her, which made her prey to the kinds of subtle prejudice—a waiter ignoring her at the lunch counter, a white classmate rebuffing her overtures of friendship—that black people experienced all the time. My father and Lorraine, on the other hand, could go through their day unharmed by such offhand cruelties. But I wondered if these differences in experience extended to their home life too.

  We sit at Shirley’s kitchen table, where we always sit during our visits. Post-its decorate the cabinet doors, with reminders about upcoming appointments, calls to be returned, bills to be paid. In her early eighties, my aunt still goes out most nights, to meetings of her book club or performances at Lincoln Center or the Brooklyn Academy of Music—but I recognize these reminders as the efforts of a proud woman to resist the tide of aging. My aunt isn’t the type to talk easily about her vulnerabilities.

  “Do you think that your mother or father ever had any close calls at work?” I ask. “It must have been sort of stressful for them. And for you.”

  Shirley dismisses the question with a shake of her head. She says that she doesn’t know for sure, but she doubts that her parents ever worried about being found out. “I never worried about it myself,” she adds.

  “But you knew, for example, that you couldn’t visit your mother at her job.”

  “I had no desire to go to the Laundromat. It didn’t interest me.”

  Shirley explains that after school she and Lorraine would do the grocery shopping and start dinner, and when their mother came home, she would finish the cooking. Their home life was just like other families’.

  I tell Shirley that my father described the experience a little differently to a friend. He said that one day his father had sat the family down in the living room and announced that they were no longer going to be black. Because Nat and Edna had to pass as white for work, the kids had to be white now too. “Imagine having someone say that to you!” my father had exclaimed to his friend.

  “Well, if it happened, I wasn’t there,” Shirley says flatly. I can see why she might doubt this account. How, after all, could her father have acted as if race was elective, when for his youngest child it obviously wasn’t?

  Shirley tells me that she was never treated any differently in her family. “The only thing I can remember,” she says, pausing, “is them teasing me about being the cookie they left in the oven too long.”

  I can’t help laughing. “They said that?”

  Shirley laughs too, in amazement. “Yes, I was the brown sugar cookie or the ginger snap.”

  “That must have hurt a little.”

  Her face clouds. “Well, I still remember it, so I guess it made an impression.”

  It’s clear from talking with Shirley that there wasn’t much conversation in her family about racial identity. It seems possible that my father and his sister could have grown up under the same roof with vastly different understandings about what race they were supposed to be. Neither my father nor his sisters were advised, for example, about how they should present themselves when applying for a job or meeting new classmates. Shirley doesn’t know how my dad and Lorraine were perceived in high school. “We never discussed it,” she says.

  The example set by their parents had to be confusing. While the family visited with black people, attended black social events, and remained in the neighborhood even as white people moved out, Nat and Edna avoided being labeled as “black” themselves. Shirley remembers how the family sat apart from the other black families at the beach in Coney Island. In 1930, when the census taker came around, Edna claimed that her mother was born in Portugal, and Nat reported that his parents came from Mexico. Despite these attempts to explain away their dark hair and tawny complexions, the census taker recorded the family’s race as black anyway. When I ask Shirley about the deception, she shrugs and says, “Still trying to keep up the fiction.”

  Around the time of the 1930 census, Nat’s brother James and his nephew Jimmy Jr. arrived in Brooklyn from New Orleans. Jimmy Jr. moved in with my father’s family until he found a place of his own. When I track him down in Louisiana, Jimmy, who is eighty by this time, tells me that my grandfather was never colored in New York. Jimmy knows that this was true, because Nat and Edna had told him so. Yet he also recalls black people visiting the Broyard house, which seems unlikely if the family was trying to pass among its neighbors.

  Kathy Jeffers, who was my aunt Lorraine’s best friend during the latter part of the 1930s and was herself recognizably black, also has the impression that Nat was passing both for work and around home. One day in the early 1940s, she saw Mr. Broyard in the street and said hello, but he kept walking without acknowledging her. She confessed the incident to Edna and Lorraine, and she recalls being told that Nat was trying to protect his employment. But again this explanation didn’t quite make sense, since Shirley, and later her brown-skinned husband, was living in the Broyard household.

  When it came to race, however, Nat wasn’t known for being logical. Shirley describes her father as “the biggest racist you ever set your eyes on,” adding that he hated everyone: blacks, Catholics, and Jews alike. Every night my grandfather read William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper, the notoriously conservative Evening Journal. She remembers her father agreeing with everything the paper said and even saving the front page each day for posterity. When the editors of the Brooklyn Eagle suggested that the influx of blacks into Stuyvesant Heights was bringing down the neighborhood, Nat agreed with them too. His disdain for African Americans underscored his feeling of separateness from them—a line of distinction that only deepened as the complexion of his neighbors darkened.

  With the onset of the Depression, residents of Harlem began relocating to Brooklyn to escape the worsening ghetto conditions. But those same problems followed them across the East River. The deteriorating economic climate forced black homeowners in Stuyvesant Heights to take out second mortgages and then take in renters to pay for them. In 1931 the Brooklyn Eagle first described the central Brooklyn neighborhood as Bedford-Stuyvesant, linking together Stuyvesant Heights and adjacent Bedford Corner. Over the next ten years, the moniker gained currency—usually with negative connotations—as the boundaries of Bedford-Stuyvesant were increasingly defined by th
e presence of black people.

  Ironically, federal policies implemented by Roosevelt’s New Deal hastened the neighborhood’s downfall. In 1933 the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established to stem home foreclosures and bank failures. The agency developed lending guidelines to help ensure that struggling financial institutions would get back on their feet. To that end grades of A, B, C, or D were assigned to a neighborhood based on condition of its housing stock, transportation and utility services, maintenance of homes, and “quality” of the population. Specifically, federal agents looked at the percentage of blacks and foreign-born residents in a community and whether either population was on the rise. Needless to say, Bedford-Stuyvesant earned the worst grade, D.

  The historian Craig Steven Wilder, in analyzing the HOLC’s “Residential Security MAP” for Brooklyn in his book A Covenant with Color, found that while a heavy concentration of Jews, Irish, or Italians risked bringing a neighborhood a negative rating, the presence of African Americans absolutely guaranteed it. “Bensonhurst and a portion of Flatbush, with sizable Italian populations, managed at least B2 grades, just as a number of Jewish areas received B or better ratings. In contrast, not one of the eighteen neighborhoods that received a B2 or better had any black residents, except for Crown Heights, where the black population was described as ‘Nil,’ meaning ‘2 or 3 families.’”

  Neighborhoods with D ratings appeared in red on HOLC’s map, which led to the infamous term “redlining.” By deeming these areas bad investments, the federal government helped to make them so. The difficulty in obtaining loans to buy homes or maintain existing properties in Bedford-Stuyvesant further decreased property values. Trying to cut their losses, whites sold their homes, often to unscrupulous white investors, who would then break up the houses into apartments, which they would rent out at inflated prices to blacks who found themselves unwelcome elsewhere.

  As the black community in Bed-Stuy grew, class conflicts sparked between the old “colored” group and the new “black” population, with the flash point often occurring among the teenagers. The lower-class kids knew, if perhaps implicitly, that my father’s family, for example, fared better than their own because his parents could pass as white. Despite rough times there was never any shortage of food or serious deprivation for the Broyards. Edna continued to make her apple pies and yellow cakes throughout the worst years of the Depression. One December, when my grandfather hadn’t worked for a while, it looked as if the family would have to forgo Christmas. But at the last minute, Nat landed a job and surprised them by coming home with a tree and a bag full of presents.

  During high school my father and his friends had the leisure time and pocket change for a jam-packed social life. In the summer they played tennis at the courts down on Fulton Street. In the winter they skated at the rink on Atlantic Avenue. On the weekends they took their dates to the movies at Lowe’s theater and then to Bruggerman’s for ice cream afterward. On any given night they could be found at one of the girls’ houses listening to records—Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins—and polishing their moves for an upcoming dance.

  Most dances were sponsored by private clubs and were invitation only. The Guardsmen, a social club started by the black bourgeoisie in Brooklyn, held three parties annually, often at the Savoy Theater in Harlem, at which the Duke Ellington band regularly played. The biggest event of the year was the formal Christmas dance thrown by the Comus Club, usually held at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. Young men and women from the best black families in Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston flocked into town to attend the annual party.

  Meanwhile, by 1938 the Brooklyn Urban League was reporting that 90 percent of black Brooklynites depended on some kind of relief. Many children had to drop out of high school to look for full-time jobs. Their families were crammed into one-bedroom apartments, and they had no hopes of attending college. Needless to say, they weren’t invited to the Comus Christmas dance.

  “Other blacks were jealous of us. We got into a lot of fights,” remembers Robbie King, one of my father’s friends. These other kids called Robbie and my father’s circle the four hundred, after Lady Astor’s four hundred—the members of New York society deemed worthy of an invitation to her annual ball. Marjorie Costa, a childhood friend of my aunts, tells me how in high school a gang of darker-skinned, poorer kids targeted their crowd. “Your aunt Lorraine was beaten by one of the gangs,” she explains. “They were going alphabetically.” With her turn coming, Marjorie got a rival gang to fight for her, but she understood the roots of the tension. “Many of our group were snobs and didn’t want to talk with [other kids] if they weren’t the right color and didn’t dress the right way.” The hard-off boys particularly resented that the girls in my dad’s clique wouldn’t go out with them. At the same time, lighter-skinned boys, including my father, were fooling around with the girls in their crowd. “They only wanted them for sex,” Marjorie says, disapprovingly. “They wouldn’t take them to a movie or to Bruggerman’s ice cream parlor.”

  My dad once told a friend in whom he had confided about his racial background that he’d become such a fast runner from being chased by black kids during his childhood. Sometimes these kids caught up with him and he’d come home with his jacket torn, but his parents never asked what happened. Perhaps Nat didn’t want to acknowledge that his passing for white and superior attitude toward blacks had contributed to his son’s problems. Or he simply viewed these street scuffles as a boy’s rite of passage. Nat had probably gotten into fights with the American blacks in New Orleans when he was a kid. But for my dad, his father’s feigned ignorance was so painful that recalling it to my mother fifty years later made him break down into tears. It was the second and last time my mother ever saw my father cry. (The first was during his best friend’s funeral.) During childhood, though, it was easier for my father to turn his hurt into anger, which he eventually redirected toward black people.

  Learning about my father’s experiences growing up made sense of a story that my father liked to tell from my own childhood. When my brother was eleven or so, my dad took him to the movies in Oak Bluffs, a town in Martha’s Vineyard with a large number of African American vacationers. After the film my father had to use the bathroom and sent Todd outside to wait for him. When my dad exited the theater, he found my brother in a doorway down the street, having a fistfight with a black kid a head and half taller and three or four years older. My father, who had taught my brother how to box, would jab and feint at this point in the story, demonstrating how his son had knocked down this kid twice his size.

  The detail that always struck me was not Todd’s prowess at boxing but my father’s disconcerting glee that my brother had trounced a “tough black kid.” Todd couldn’t remember anymore what started the fight, but he did recall that our father had stood back and watched him rather than breaking it up. People say that having children gives you the chance to relive your own childhood. With his victory Todd had unwittingly settled an old score for our father.

  In a similar vein, Todd was taken out every month or so for “father and son nights,” while I had no special dates with our dad. Since my brother, particularly as a teenager, was himself a fairly silent character, my father claimed that if he didn’t hold Todd captive at a dinner table once in a while, he would never learn anything about him at all. My father was hoping that he and my brother could learn to talk as friends the way he and his father never did.

  My grandfather had trouble simply looking my father in the eye. In his spare time, Nat liked to make furniture in a workshop that he’d set up in the basement of their building. As a young child, my father followed his father downstairs and tried to place himself in the way so that his father was forced to meet his gaze. Sometimes Nat would talk to himself as he worked, and my dad would strain to listen, in case his father mentioned his name.

  As an adult my father blamed New York for turning his father into this taciturn, evasive man. In New Orleans his f
ather had been “a popular figure, a noted raconteur, a former beau, a crack shot, a dancer, a bit of a boxer.” He was the kind of man who would suddenly throw himself upside down and walk on his hands over to a friend’s house for a laugh. But after moving north, Nat became preoccupied, always listening for something, “some New Orleans jazz, or a voice telling him a story.” My dad decided that his father “lived in New York under protest, a protest that he never admitted even to himself. He was ashamed to think that he had been pressured into leaving the city he loved.”

  What my father didn’t acknowledge was that in Brooklyn, Nat was just another light-skinned black guy who could only make it in the larger world by presenting himself as something that he wasn’t. My grandfather was reacting not only to New York but also to the question the city forced on him: Was he black or was he white? Yet for my father to see the box that race had forced Nat into, he would have had to recognize that he was similarly hemmed in.

  My father attended Boys High, located in Stuyvesant Heights, not far from where the Broyards’ apartment overlooked the El. Although no tests were required for entrance, the high school had a reputation for being where the smart kids went. The students, who came from across Brooklyn, were mostly the sons of Jewish emigrants from Poland, Russia, and Germany. A handful of my father’s friends from the neighborhood also attended Boys High. In the 1930s there wasn’t much racial tension, and the black and white students mingled easily with each other. A white classmate, Harold Chenven, assumed that my father was white too until their junior year, when my dad leaned over during a break in Ms. Wilson’s literature class and whispered that he was a Creole from New Orleans.