One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Recalling this conversation sixty years later, Harold says, “I guess I was worldly enough then to know that he was telling me he was of mixed racial parentage.” In hindsight Harold surmises that my father wanted to pass for white and that his confession “was like trying it on for size.” Harold didn’t answer, but he thought to himself that Bud Broyard didn’t look like a Negro. His skin was as pale or even paler than his own.

  Not everyone was as worldly as Harold when it came to understanding that Creole suggested mixed race. By describing himself that way, my father could avoid the black/white question and let people draw their own conclusions. But this was more than a tactic of obfuscation. Just as this heritage could momentarily lift the fog of distraction and defeat surrounding his father, it also offered a way for my dad to explain himself to himself. In the absence of any real knowledge about his legacy, my dad turned New Orleans into a mythical city filled with irreverent characters: the swashbuckling pirate Jean Lafitte, romantic adventurers lifted from the pages of an Alexandre Dumas novel, and his own lady-killing grandfather. At college my father discovered how his New Orleans roots could even put an exotic spin on his difference from everyone else.

  -28-

  When my father entered Brooklyn College in January 1937, the first thing that people noticed about him was how out of place he seemed. He was only sixteen, having skipped two grades during elementary school, and one of the very few students who wasn’t Jewish. His classmates had never met someone named Anatole before; they’d never known anyone who was Creole or from New Orleans. He was also completely apolitical, while the rest of the students were swept up in the radicalism of the 1930s—reading the Daily Worker, holding antiwar rallies, and debating the relative merits of various socialist ideologies. My father later explained that he regarded politics as an “uninteresting argument with the real.” I imagine also that he couldn’t very well stake out a position on these social issues without first claiming his position in society, which was something he was unwilling to do.

  My father dressed differently from everyone else. Back then men put on dark suits and somber ties for school, and women wore knee-length skirts and plain sweaters. On top of the custom-tailored three-piece suit my father had bought with his earnings from delivering newspapers, he added a porkpie hat and short gray overcoat with hidden buttons that looked like the kind of cape someone might have worn to a nineteenth-century duel. A classmate later observed: “Anatole was the mysterious subject of many conversations, with everyone speculating about where he belonged.”

  The question weighed on my father too. After his first semester, Brooklyn College relocated from its rented office buildings in downtown Brooklyn to a new forty-acre campus on Flatbush Avenue, complete with colonial redbrick buildings and the beginnings of ivy trailing up their fronts. There the cafeteria became the meeting place and testing ground for the student body. It was, in the words of my father’s future best friend Milton Klonsky, “a crowded, bustling, feud-ridden, volatile, and at times cacophonous place that had a continuous life of its own apart from that of the college itself.” A person was identified according to where he sat: there was a table for the Trotskyites, the Stalinists, the Socialists, the Communists, the jocks, the Orthodox Jews, the Catholic girls of the Newman Club, the handful of Wasps, and the even smaller handful of black students.

  When Vincent Livelli first spotted my dad, he was standing alone in the cafeteria, looking for a seat among the crowded tables. “Nobody seemed to want his company,” Vincent recalls. “That coat was the problem. It was much too big for him—it must have been his father’s from New Orleans—but this was still the Depression, so I was willing to make allowances.”

  Vincent was a bit of an oddball himself: an Italian Catholic from the largely Scandinavian neighborhood of Fort Hamilton. After being turned away by various fraternities, he ran for student council and lost, losing his interest in politics along the way. When he encountered my father, Vincent was peddling penny cigarettes in the cafeteria. Hoping to sell him a “loosie” after his meal, Vincent invited the odd fellow in the cape coat to sit down. My dad accepted reluctantly—lest he appear resigned to a future among misfits—and then ignored Vincent for the rest of his meal.

  But the pair bumped into each other again riding home on the subway. Shouting over the loud clacking of the train across the ties, they discovered a mutual interest in Cuban music. From the time he was a kid, my father had listened to Xavier Cugat on the radio. Such was his love for the Latin bandleader that he was allowed to hog the family radio each week during Cugat’s program. Vincent impressed my dad by mentioning that he’d met some of the musicians who played on Cugat’s show in the nightclubs of Spanish Harlem.

  Before long Vincent and my dad were stopping off on the way home at a bookstore in downtown Brooklyn that sold Afro-Cuban records. After winding up the Victrola, they crowded into a listening booth to decipher the lyrics full of puns and sexual innuendos. One of their favorites was “El Plato Roto” (the broken plate), about the girl who was made pregnant during the encounter that broke her hymen. Another man was tricked into paying for her abortion, which my father and Vincent thought was bad luck indeed.

  One day Vincent came to my father’s house to loan him a record and was invited to stay for dinner. It was during this visit that Vincent realized, with a bit of a shock, that my father’s family was Negro. Over the years other friends of my dad’s would learn of his racial identity this same way. Yet this revelation didn’t induce them to start viewing Anatole as a black person. They all offer the same explanation: people didn’t think in racial terms back then, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the persistence of segregation. Anyway Anatole didn’t look or act like most black people. Vincent says that he was simply happy to have found a kindred spirit—someone more social than political and equally passionate about music, dancing, and women.

  Flora Finkelstein at Brooklyn College was my father’s first real girlfriend. She was Jewish, although after growing up in a socialist commune in the Bronx, she wasn’t religious, particularly interested in politics, or conventional in the least. Another classmate, the writer Pearl Bell (who is the sister of Alfred Kazin and the wife of Daniel Bell, two leading New York intellectuals), remembers: “Flora wore her bangs down to her eyes and had a way of taking her shoes off and dancing in the grass in the spring, which nobody did in those days. She was eccentric and so was Anatole.”

  Flora knew that my father was part black—he’d told her so—and it didn’t matter to her in the least. She was under the impression that it didn’t much matter to him either. The young couple could be seen walking hand in hand across the quad or hunched over a table in the cafeteria deep in conversation. They talked mostly about literature—not the dusty canonical texts, Beowulf and Swinburne, assigned for their English literature course—but the erotically charged works of D. H. Lawrence, the brutal nihilistic vision of Céline, and Kafka’s disturbed symbolic universe. Flora had a keen analytical mind, and her unusual upbringing gave her the courage of her own convictions. She listened closely to my father’s opinions, which made him phrase things more carefully in order to impress her. When he showed her the poems and bits of stories he’d begun to write, she encouraged him.

  My father had known some classmates at Boys High who had interesting things to say about books, but he’d never before had someone with whom to share his love of literature—someone who could join him in deciphering the secret codes that unlocked these imagined worlds and celebrating the patient exquisite precision that it took to create them. For my father and Flora, books and each other were their first loves, their true loves, with each feeling redoubling the other.

  In English class my father started to draw attention to himself. Pearl Bell remembers him as having a “wonderful capacity for hitting at the center of whatever it was that was being talked about.” The acuity of my father’s insights helped to erase the distance between him and the other students who were also “aware�
� about literature—which were the only people he cared about. In the cafeteria he took his seat beside the other literary men. Books became the place where my father could belong: his sole allegiance, his primary ethnic, political, and religious affiliation. They provided a refuge from all the boxes in his life, an opportunity to escape into himself, literally.

  Back in Bedford-Stuyvesant my dad wanted to spread the news. He loaned Shirley his collection of Kafka stories. After dutifully reading Metamorphosis, she opined that a guy turning into cockroach was pretty weird. “But you see that it’s operating on more than one level?” my father pressed. Shirley was still in high school, reading Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and didn’t know anything about different levels. Anyway, who talked like that—and to his kid sister! No one Shirley knew.

  My father couldn’t share his newfound enthusiasm with his neighborhood friends either. Many of them were bright, with some also earning spots at one of the free colleges, but they had more practical concerns on their minds, such as who would hire them when they graduated and what would their place in American society be. As they ventured farther from Bedford-Stuyvesant, my father’s friends had begun to experience discrimination for the first time—being turned away from clubs in Manhattan or refused service in a restaurant—and this had drawn them into the fight for racial equality.

  An old classmate from Boys High, Alfred Duckett, had also been passionate about writing, publishing his poetry in the school’s literary magazine, but when he got older, he turned his attention to politics—joining the local chapter of the NAACP, canvassing the neighborhood for signatures to demand that businesses hire blacks and picketing those that wouldn’t. Duckett’s writing career increasingly reflected his concerns—he published his poetry in Negro anthologies and eventually became an editor at the New York Age, a black newspaper.

  Being a black writer was exactly what my father feared. Given his racially indeterminate upbringing, he wasn’t exactly equipped to represent the black experience. Anyway, he wanted to write about the human condition—the existential problem of being, how to find meaning in an irrational world, and the possibilities of transformation; the subject matter of his literary heroes. My father saw himself as special—isn’t that what his classmates at Brooklyn College thought?—so why should he voluntarily consent to the indiscriminating smear of discrimination? Especially if he didn’t have to.

  In the evenings and on the weekends, my dad hung out in the neighborhood with his friends as usual, but more and more, his real life seemed to be taking place somewhere else. My father’s regular partner at the weekend dances, Lois Latte, remembers him as seeming very distant. “Bud wasn’t like the other fellows, who were raucous and loud and always carrying on, except for that he really loved to dance.”

  My father taught Lois steps that he had worked out to Artie Shaw’s hit version of “Begin the Beguine.” “I remember feeling so proud that your father wanted to dance with me,” she says. “He could have asked anybody he wanted.” Lois wasn’t surprised when she heard a few years later that Bud Broyard had gone to the other side. During the time they’d known each other, Lois’s mother had been supporting Lois by passing as white to waitress in a fancy hotel up in Westchester, making Lois inclined to defend my father’s decision. “There were times when you had to do what you had to do to live,” she reflects. And then she ventures a guess that the rest of their friends would have done the same thing if they could have.

  Shirley suspects that her brother was passing as early as Brooklyn College. To his parents and sisters, he certainly seemed to change around that time. But then again, going to college was unlike anything that had ever occurred in their family. Neither of their parents had even made it to high school. And Lorraine, who was the oldest of the siblings, had opted for secretarial school instead, so she could start earning money and contributing to the household income.

  “College could have meant that this is how you behave,” Shirley says. “You make new friends, you’re busy, you have homework, you have all these classes, and you have to make your way to Brooklyn College, which is not exactly around the corner.” You also learn things that make you discontented with the world that you’ve always known.

  It’s hard to say when my father started presenting himself as white, if he ever explicitly did so. What’s more likely is that he didn’t identify himself as black, neglecting to mention that he lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant and avoiding the colored students’ table at lunchtime. But his transformation wasn’t as sudden or absolute as that of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who woke up one morning to find that he’d changed into a cockroach his parents couldn’t recognize or understand.

  As my father became more articulate with his friends at Brooklyn College, he did grow less intelligible to his family—purposefully so with his father, using words that Nat wouldn’t know to pay him back for his years of silence. But his conflict wasn’t between black and white as much as it was between provincial and sophisticated, old world and modern, literal-minded and literary-minded. And this struggle wasn’t exactly uncommon among his college friends, as they too grew mysterious to their immigrant parents.

  My father’s situation differed in one important aspect. Besides the universal question Who are you? that all of them were asking themselves, my father had to confront the question What are you? on occasion too. In March 1938, when he was seventeen, my father visited the local field office of the Social Security Administration to apply for a social security card. While his responses on this application concerning race represent the first tangible evidence I have of what he considered himself, the form raises more questions than it answers.

  I’ve studied the muddled notations on the small sheet of paper countless times, spent hours wondering about my father’s train of thought as he completed the application. And while I don’t think that this visit to the social security office necessarily demarks a turning point in my father’s life, the occasion has become the repository for all my imaginings about the different moments over the years when he had to make a calculation about how to describe his race.

  Bud retrieves an application from a stack and finds a spot at one of the counters to fill it out. In his carefully rounded schoolboy print, he answers the questions: name, address, birth date, place of birth, full names of father and mother, sex, and then question number twelve: color, with the choices white, negro, or other.

  Bud has never faced a form like this before. He’s never had to answer this question. He hesitates, trying to imagine the future of this slip of paper—where it will go and who will see it; how question number twelve might affect his life. He knows very well, from his parents and people in the neighborhood, that he won’t be able to get any kind of decent job if an employer thinks that he’s black. But he also knows that no white person is going to suspect that he’s any different from themselves. He decides that identifying his COLOR on this form is merely a formality of the modern age, and whatever shadow self that is created from it will live on only in the dusty file rooms of federal warehouses. Convinced that his answer to question number twelve doesn’t matter, he touches his pencil to the piece of paper....But what should his answer be?

  Bud knows what “they” think: that his color should be negro, even though the arm resting on the counter before him is no darker than the arm of the young Italian guy to his right. For that matter, his hair is no curlier than the Jewish girl’s across the room. His lips are no bigger than the lips of her father. And his nose is no wider than the broken one on the Irish thug over there. But “they” have already decided this question for him on other slips of paper stored in dusty file rooms. Bud’s birth certificate identifies him as “colored” and that’s how the census taker recorded him and his family too. If a person accepted the one-drop logic of race that seemed to be the law of this irrational land, then Bud was colored, thanks to his great-granddaddy falling for the beautiful island girl from Santo Domingo...

  And what was so wrong with that? These distinctions
between black and white were exactly that, arbitrary distinctions that had been imposed by “them” with no basis in fact or science. Any intelligent person knew that whatever differences existed between the races were caused by social conditions, such as poverty. Professor Otto Klineberg, student of the “father of American anthropology” Franz Boas, had just lectured at Brooklyn College on that very topic. If Bud opted against electing negro on question twelve, then he would appear to be giving credence to the “crackpot race theories” that Klineberg had just exposed.

  And yet...and yet... Bud drums his fingers on the countertop. These slips of paper have a way of trailing a person around—like a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe. Hadn’t he heard stories his whole life in which a person’s “papers” figured as the punch line? There was the one about his uncle Jimmy, when he got into a scrape with the police down in New Orleans. They were going to lock him up in the colored part of the jail—which, needless to say, was full of roughneck lowlifes and not where his uncle belonged—until Jimmy protested that he was white and pulled out his driver’s license to prove it. The cops apologized, addressing him as “Mr. Broyard,” and let him go. Ha. Ha. Ha. His father slaps his knee. Just because Jimmy had those white papers...

  Bud shifts his pencil in his grip. Anyway, he wasn’t really a Negro like “they” thought of them—the sullen toughs that were moving into his neighborhood; the poor, downtrodden, uneducated masses. His people had never been slaves; they’d never bowed and scraped before white people. What did “they” know about the wide variety of Negroes—that they ranged in color from ebony to alabaster; that some of them spoke French or Spanish in their homes; that their history had taken them across not only cotton fields but battlefields, barricades, and fields of knowledge too? And who were “they”? Where were “they”? These invisible authorities with their nonsensical rules were like something out of Kafka.