One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Recalling the author gives Bud a warm feeling in his chest, like the memory of a lover. Perhaps literature could provide an answer to number twelve. Bud thinks of the penultimate section of the brilliant Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” which had just been published. Yes, he would recite that to the clerk as his response to the question of his COLOR.

  Throw away the lights, the definitions,

  And say of what you see in the dark

  That it is this or that it is that,

  But do not use the rotted names.

  How should you walk in that space and know

  Nothing of the madness of space,

  Nothing of its jocular procreations?

  Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

  Between you and the shapes you take

  When the crust of the shape has been destroyed.

  You as you are? You are yourself.

  The blue guitar surprises you.

  The young Italian glances over. Bud has been mumbling under his breath. As he turns his attention back to the form, his father’s voice pops into his head: “Get your head out of your books for once, Bud. Check off white, hand in the slip, and walk away. That’s how people see you, and that’s all there is to it.”

  But it’s one thing to be mistaken for white and something else to actually present himself that way. Yes, the color line is shot full of holes, and crossing it could be as easy as crossing the East River. Every day people from his neighborhood who are black when they enter Fulton Street station become white just by taking the subway to Manhattan and going to their jobs. Bud knows that people’s perception of him changes according to his context—among his colored friends from Stuyvesant Heights he’s viewed as colored; sitting with his white classmates at Brooklyn College, he’s seen as white. But he also knows that people can become exiled on the other side of the color line. He thinks of Ethel, his half sister.

  When she arrived from New Orleans with her new husband, Walter, it was as if his father had woken from a long nap. Bud was ten, and Uncle Jimmy and his son, Jimmy Jr., had just come up to New York too. All of a sudden, there was a burgeoning Broyard clan in Stuyvesant Heights, and their house was its center. One Sunday his dad made a big show of having to fetch from the basement the extra leaf he’d made for the dining room table, but everyone could see how delighted he was to have so much family around.

  Watching his dad at the head of that table, carving the roast, telling his stories about the French Quarter, puffing away on his cigar after the meal—sending up regular clouds of smoke, like a miniature train locomotive—Bud felt himself shaking off a sort of slumber too. After supper he found on the radio some of the Latin music that he liked, and he began to imitate the Cuban dancers—braiding his steps as fast as lightning with his arms crossed in front of his face, snapping his fingers, and spinning his head left and right. He meant it as a joke—but then when everyone quieted and began to watch him, he started playing off the beat of the claves, stalling then rushing the tempo. When he was done, they laughed, but he could see that he’d impressed them too with his witty interpretations. Walter offered him a nickel to dance again.

  After Ethel gave birth to Charmaine, things started to change. His parents began talking in Creole all the time, so that he and his sisters couldn’t understand them. When his mother took care of the baby, sometimes Bud would catch her just staring at Charmaine’s face for minutes at a time. Then one day Ethel came home with her hair tamed into neat waves and a new set of clothes, which she referred to as her traveling outfit. She explained that they were going away for a while.

  “But where?” Bud asked. “When are you coming back?” He worried that his father’s newfound vitality would disappear with them. Ethel promised to write when they got settled and that Bud could come visit soon. Then she knelt down and hugged him hard, saying, “You’ll understand when you get older.”

  He still remembers the day that they left. His dad wanted to take a picture of Ethel—usually he made everyone go up to the rooftop because he didn’t think there was enough light on the sidewalk—but Ethel said there wasn’t time. Besides, she didn’t want to soil her traveling outfit by climbing up to the dirty roof. His father became insistent, nearly yelling that he wasn’t going to have his only photo of his eldest daughter ruined. Finally they compromised by walking to the street corner, where at least they weren’t under the shadows of the buildings.

  His father was right—the picture didn’t get enough exposure. Ethel’s face under her hat lies half in darkness. Her skirt blurs with movement, as if she has already begun to walk out of the frame. Sometimes Bud would take the photo out from his mother’s drawer and try to read his sister’s expression. Had she already made up her mind to disappear?

  By that time Bud was aware that life was easier for people who lived as white, but he couldn’t understand why Ethel should have to move across the color line so absolutely. They didn’t even know where she was, whether she was alive or dead. No one would think anything if they saw her with him, or with his father or mother for that matter. It was almost as if she was ashamed of them, as if she believed all the things “they” thought about Negroes.

  The Italian guy has gone. Bud needs to go too. “Don’t make this so complicated,” he thinks. “It’s just a slip of paper.” He closes his eyes and asks himself, What are you, Anatole Broyard? After a moment he opens his eyes and on the line following other, he writes in his careful print a faint C.

  The clerk is a young woman, just a few years older than Bud. As she looks at the young man standing across the counter from her, she feels her cheeks coloring slightly. He’s very handsome, she notes. Then she sees the corner of his lips raise slightly, as if he knows what she is thinking.

  “So Mr....” She pauses, puzzling over his name.

  “Broyard,” he supplies, rolling the r’s slightly. “It’s French.”

  “Right. I see here that you are from New Orleans, which of course was a French territory.”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “Very good. You’d be surprised, Miss...” He glances around her desk area.

  “Watkins,” she says, touching her chest. “My nameplate hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve just been here for two weeks.”

  “Miss Watkins.” He croons her name, making it his own. “As I was saying, you’d be surprised by how many people don’t know anything about the history of our country. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised—you must have met so many different people, working here for even a short time—that you have, as they say, seen it all.” He whispers this last bit.

  “Mr. Broyard,” she says reprovingly. “I don’t wish to take up any more of your time than is necessary. If I may...?”

  “Of course.” He rests his chin on his hand and stares at her intently.

  But she is more flustered than ever. The young man’s efforts to engage her in conversation have turned their interview more intimate than she would like. She frowns at the form, clarifies a few points, makes some addendums, and then says, “About number twelve, color, you indicate C. That stands for...”

  “Creole,” the young man says confidently.

  She shakes her head, indicating that she doesn’t know what that means. When he doesn’t explain further, she asks, “Is that black or white?”

  “Well, what do I look like to you?”

  His tone tries for affront, but he doesn’t quite pull it off. The clerk takes his question literally. He doesn’t really look black, but there’s something about him—a slight insolence maybe—that makes her think of Negroes. “Mr. Broyard, I can help you fill out the form,” she says, “but I can’t provide the answers for you.”

  “Very well, Miss Watkins. Creoles are from New Orleans. They are descended from the original settlers and date back to before the Louisiana Purchase.”

  “And so Creoles are...?”

  “French.”

  “I mean are they white or black,” she says, resenting the exactitude he has forced
upon her.

  “Well, they can be either. I myself am mostly white.”

  Miss Watkins raises her eyebrows.

  “I also have a little Indian blood as well as some”—he pauses—“Caribbean influences.”

  “Meaning that you’re colored?”

  “Well...”

  “Is that what it says on your birth certificate?”

  “Yes,” he says quietly.

  And the clerk feels like she’s won something, something that she fought hard for, only to discover that she didn’t really want it. She looks down at her desk, ashamed of her own tenacity. She reflects unhappily that the young man must think she’s prejudiced.

  She taps her pen on the paper, trying to think. She can’t risk running into trouble with her supervisor before her nameplate has even arrived. She’s lucky to have this job, given all the people out of work. “Well, it’s important for the success of the social security program to try to be as accurate as possible,” she says. She begins to make a check next to negro and then changes her mind and starts to write “Creole” in the space instead. Let them—the powers that be—decide what that meant.

  “Miss Watkins,” the young man says, beseechingly. With his confidence gone, he looks his seventeen years. She notices that the shoulders of his jacket stand out beyond his narrow frame, making his head look small and delicate. He must have bought the suit a few sizes too big, to stretch more use from it. Or maybe it was his father’s, borrowed especially for this trip. Life, she knew, was very hard for Negroes.

  “Is there a problem here?” Her supervisor is suddenly standing beside her. He nods to the long line that has formed in front of her desk.

  “No, sir.” Where did all these people come from? “I was just helping Mr. Broyard complete his form.” She cuts her eyes at the young man.

  “And what’s taking so long?”

  “We had just a little confusion on number twelve. Mr. Broyard is Creole, which are the group, as perhaps you know, who originally settled Louisiana. They were there since before—oh, what did you say?” She glances at the young man for help.

  “Miss Watkins,” the supervisor admonishes, “the Social Security Administration is not in the business of conducting genealogical surveys. This gentleman’s color is white. That’s as plain as the nose on your face.” He turns to my father standing at the counter. “I’m sorry, sir, for the delay. I’m sure Miss Watkins’s overzealousness can be explained by the fact that she is new and therefore eager to prove herself.”

  The supervisor looks on as the clerk scratches out “Creole” and makes a check next to white on the young man’s application. On the top of the form, she records the next available social security number and then fills out the card for the fellow to keep. She hands it over, mumbling an apology, and the young man with a wave of his hand indicates that all is forgiven. After he has turned to go, Miss Watkins places the young man’s application in her outbox to be sent to the main office in Baltimore and gestures for the next person on line to come forward.

  Of course I don’t know what actually transpired in that social security field office to explain the cross-outs and mysterious C that constitute my father’s answer to question number twelve. It looks to me as if a different hand made the check next to WHITE—likely the same person who made the other corrections on the form. But there’s no way to be certain. The original application was destroyed in the 1960s, after its image had been filmed for storage—not in a dusty file room but a defunct salt mine in Kansas, chosen for the aridness of its environment.

  I doubt that my father walked away feeling that he’d redirected the course of his life. Unlike his half sister Ethel, my father continued to travel back and forth across the color line—journeys that were often unconscious and inconsequential. As he came to be defined more and more by his intellect, the fact that he was part black became less and less important to him. By extension he made it unimportant to everyone else—or to his white friends at least.

  According to Flora Finkelstein, their crowd of aspiring intellectuals didn’t think of my dad as a black student or a white student, just a bright one who was a talented writer. In the late 1930s, there weren’t enough blacks at Brooklyn College to create anything like racial conflict. The factions of communists dominating the cafeteria were eager to demonstrate their solidarity with Negroes and would have happily embraced my father as a comrade-in-arms had they known about his background. But most people didn’t know, because my father didn’t tell them and they didn’t guess it on their own.

  “If someone came up to me in the course of my being there and said, ‘Did you realize that Anatole Broyard is part black?’ I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” observes Pearl Bell. “I also would have said, ‘Why is this important?’ [Race] just didn’t have the enormous significance that it came to have later on in the sixties.” The poet Harold Norse, who edited the college literary magazine and was a friend of my dad’s, insists that my father couldn’t have been black. “He didn’t look black,” Norse says. “Besides there weren’t any black students at Brooklyn College back then.”

  Well, none who registered on Norse’s radar. But among the small number at the “black” lunch table was at least one fellow who knew the details of my father’s background quite well. My dad’s best friend from childhood and the brunt of his teasing, Carlos deLeon, started Brooklyn College in the fall of 1938, six months after my father’s trip to the social security office. When deLeon spotted my father in the cafeteria, he went up to say hello, but my father took him over to a corner and said: “I didn’t tell you, but I’ve decided that I’m going to be white.”

  When I reached him by phone in Cleveland, Dr. deLeon—he became a psychiatrist and a professor at Case Western Reserve medical school—was in his late seventies. Age and health problems made his conversation difficult to follow (Dr. deLeon has since passed away), but his bitterness about this long-ago slight from his childhood friend was unmistakable. Harder to decipher was the rest of the story. Dr. deLeon also said that my father avoided him because he thought that Carlos was stupid. “But I graduated at the top of my class at medical school,” he insisted. “And I have many white friends.”

  To gain admittance to Brooklyn College in those days, Dr. deLeon had to have been bright, but he excelled in courses like math and chemistry. He wasn’t literary like my father’s new pals, which may explain in part why my dad was reluctant to welcome Carlos to his lunch table. But Dr. deLeon interpreted his rejection as a judgment against his intellect—those childhood spelling games left a deep impression—and then further extrapolated that my father had reached this conclusion because Carlos was black.

  That Dr. deLeon linked his racial identity to assumptions about his intelligence wasn’t simply paranoia. After he graduated from medical school in 1946, deLeon was interning for a black doctor located down the block from my father’s family’s apartment. By this time my dad had moved to Greenwich Village, but he bumped into Carlos outside the doctor’s office during a visit home. My dad said to him, “What the devil are you doing in a white coat with a stethoscope around your neck?” And Dr. deLeon answered, “Well, man, what would you think if you saw anyone else with a white coat and a stethoscope?” It was a reasonable question.

  If my father believed that being black held a person back—because of the general limitations imposed on the race, such as job discrimination, or the specific ways that being black hindered a person’s development, such as inferior schools and lower academic expectations—then he could feel better about avoiding a black identity himself. But African Americans who succeeded despite these obstacles forced him to rethink his equation. Was my father unwilling to claim a black identity because he simply refused to go along with the prevalent notion that blacks and whites were different in an essential way? Had the confusing racial climate of his upbringing left him feeling racially neutered? Or had he to come to believe what “they” thought about black people: that they were necessarily inferior
?

  Was my father’s choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred? Did it strike a blow for individualism or for discrimination? Was he a hero or a cad? And how did he justify his behavior to himself?

  -29-

  For many years my father had a recurrent dream that he was on trial for a crime that he may or may not have committed. He would never learn the nature of the accusations against him, but each time he elected to defend himself, making a speech “so moving that I could feel myself tingling with it.” When the jury foreman rose to deliver the verdict, my father would feel certain of his acquittal, but he always woke before learning of his fate.

  At the end of his life, my father interpreted this dream in light of his illness: “Now cancer is the crime I may or may not have committed, and the eloquence of being alive, the fervor of the survivor, is my best defense.” But he never shared any prior readings, so I must draw my own conclusions about what it meant and where it came from. Of course I wonder if the guilt manifested by the dream was connected to my father’s racial background. Did he feel remorseful about living among whites after being raised in a black community? Was his crime that he dared to treat his racial identity as if it were elective? Or was the accusation against him blackness itself? These racial interpretations gain currency when considered alongside the dream’s parallels to Kafka’s The Trial. The novel, which my father recognized as a great influence in his life, first appeared in English around the same time that he paid his visit to the social security office.