One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Frank also has some war stories he could tell. He might start with his arrival with some white friends at Fort Dix for basic training, where he was separated from them and made to line up with the other black soldiers. It was his first experience with formalized segregation, and from then on Frank could sense his white friends’ acceptance of the new racial order. He could have told his wife’s family how he arrived at his camp in Arizona to find that the black soldiers had to sleep in tents, while the white men were housed in barracks. After a few weeks of marching in circles and cleaning toilets, he realized that the fort was nothing more than a holding pen. The officers, all white southerners according to army policy, had no intention of letting the black men fight, lest proving themselves on the battlefield might lead them to expect equal treatment at home. But this kind of talk—political, indignant, racial—wouldn’t be welcome at the Broyard table.

  At the end of Frank’s life, Enid Gort, a colleague and close friend, recorded his oral history in preparation for writing his biography. She tells me that Frank gave her the impression that he could pick up the phone and call his brother-in-law anytime he wanted, but because Anatole wasn’t interested in civil rights, they had nothing to talk about. “There was a lot of tension there too,” adds Enid, “that started with a sort of unspoken competition when they were young.” I can imagine Frank silently fuming at the dinner table as he watched my father receive the hero’s welcome befitting a returning first lieutenant—all because he’d passed as white. (In the war stories he told my brother and me, my father returned home with a captain’s rank, another example of his bending the truth.)

  If my father felt embarrassed or self-conscious in front of Frank, he didn’t show it. During their rare interactions, he was always friendly with his brother-in-law, but in private he referred to him as a “professional Negro.” Had they ever discussed their views on the race question, the men might have agreed that blacks shouldn’t accept being treated as inferior. But unlike my dad, Frank didn’t have the choice to opt out. He had to try to change the system instead.

  During the three years that my father was stationed overseas or on the West Coast, his childhood neighborhood had deteriorated significantly. In 1944 the health districts were redrawn, and Central Brooklyn officially became Bedford-Stuyvesant. A few years later, the Brooklyn Eagle sealed the neighborhood’s fate as the bastard child of the borough with its declaration that Bedford-Stuyvesant was “one big, continuous slum, largely populated by Negroes.”

  The decline of the neighborhood gave my father one more reason to escape. After months of searching for a place in Greenwich Village, he finally met a woman at a party who told him that she had two adjacent apartments in a tenement building on Jones Street, and that one of them might be available. The woman, Sheri Martinelli, was an abstract painter and a protégée of Anaïs Nin’s. The next day, when my father went to see the apartment, he found it jammed full, with an old printing press and piles of canvases, half-empty boxes, and clothes. Confused, he turned to Sheri and asked if the apartment was available. The way she smiled at his question led him to understand exactly what she was offering. “I’ll take it,” he said, meaning, of course, that he’d take her.

  My father went home, packed his things, and kissed his parents good-bye. They didn’t know what to say. Since he’d returned from the army, Nat and Edna had been treating him differently—calling him Anatole instead of Bud, asking no questions as he came and went at odd hours. When he told them he was moving out, they simply said, “You’re a veteran now,” as if his war experience had turned him into a stranger. As his taxi pulled away, Nat and Edna stood waving on the curb. Although he was only moving across the East River, a sense of finality marked the occasion. Nothing had been said out loud, but everyone understood that my father was embarking on a new life. His parents must have wondered if that meant that he, like his half sister Ethel, would disappear from their lives forever.

  -31-

  Living in Greenwich Village was everything my father dreamed it might be during those nights standing watch in the South Seas. The GI Bill provided a small stipend and paid for his classes in modern art and psychology at the New School. And Sheri gave him the chance to apply his professors’ abstract theories about avant-gardism and neuroses firsthand. He later wrote that she required a process of continual adjustment, “like living in a foreign city.”

  Sheri was unlike anyone my father had ever known. Dressed in dirndl skirts (to hide her heavy thighs) and no underwear (to my father’s consternation), she had a wide tall forehead, large pale blue eyes set under high arched brows, and a thin pointed chin. Among the piles of unopened mail that covered the ironing board perpetually set up in her kitchen were unopened checks for lingerie spreads she’d done for Vogue magazine. In a voice that placed equal emphasis on each syllable, as if she were speaking an unfamiliar language, Sheri offered her pronouncements: she didn’t trust what she read in books, she wasn’t interested in having orgasms, my father would never be a man as long as he expected to understand everything.

  Sheri liked to create mysteries. Not long after they moved in together, two different friends of my father’s came over to tell him that they were better matches for her than he was. After the second one, he realized that Sheri had put them up to it. Then she announced that a doctor had diagnosed her as having a defective heart and that she could no longer climb stairs. For the next few months, anytime they visited friends (who all seemed to live in top-floor apartments, which were cheaper and offered the painters more light), my father dutifully carried her up the five flights. He later realized that she’d made up the condition. Even as he loved her, he secretly believed that she was weird, while he worried that she thought he was too conventional.

  Yet they had things in common. Sheri had also left behind a failed marriage and young daughter. Her mother was born in New Orleans, so there was no need for my father to explain his Creole identity. And they were both drawn to the new trends in art and culture. Sheri introduced my dad to Anaïs Nin, who later described him in her diary as “New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic.” The couple passed their evenings with friends at the San Remo bar—derided by one poet as “the restlessly crowded hangout...and catch-all for whatever survived of dedicated Bohemianism in Greenwich Village.”

  Before long my father found an old junk dealer’s shop on Cornelia Street for his bookstore. After clearing out all the old boilers, pipes, and radiators, Nat helped him to make bookshelves for the front room. But my dad never had enough stock to fill them, and the few dozen copies of Kafka, Céline, Kenneth Burke, Paul Valéry, and García Lorca that made up his selection sat on a table near the door.

  Customers were few. Most of the serious readers in the Village already had more books than money, and my father tended to dissuade the nonserious readers who wandered in from buying books that he considered above them. He wasn’t being protective of potential clients but of authors. It would be a betrayal of his literary heroes to allow them to be read by someone who might not appreciate or understand them.

  While the bookstore was a financial failure and my father would eventually be forced to close it, it served as a hangout for the writers and intellectuals in the neighborhood. My father and his visitors would sit around a large potbellied stove in the back and talk. There were his friends from Brooklyn College Milton Klonsky and Vincent Livelli; the writers William Gaddis and Chandler Brossard (both of whom would later publish romans à clef negatively portraying my father); and art students such as Larry Rivers from Hans Hofmann’s Expressionist classes down the street. After hours, on a mattress pushed into the corner, there were clandestine visits from a parade of different girls.

  If it weren’t for books, my father later observed, the young men of his crowd would have been completely at the mercy of sex. Books gave them balance, gravity, something else to fill the waking hours. But literature wasn’t just a diversion from the corporeal pleasures of the real world; in some ways it compris
ed the real world. My father and his friends didn’t know where books stopped and they began. My dad’s favorite writers became his adopted family. “With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments.”

  It was a project he took very seriously. Vincent Livelli recalls my dad’s rehearsing his observations about a painter or memorizing lines of poetry to insert into dinner conversation at the San Remo later that evening. Together Vincent and my dad worked out a strategy to ensure that they controlled the topic of the conversation, so as to benefit from their prepping. Vincent might bring up the novel Tropic of Cancer, which would lead my father to mention Baudelaire’s influence on Henry Miller, spouting a few lines from the poet and Miller’s prose to make his point.

  Because Vincent wasn’t as intellectually inclined as the other young men, he welcomed this advantage. For my dad conversation was a sport and required training to be competitive like any other. Even with his best friend from college, Milton Klonsky—to whom he remained unceasingly loyal, even as Milton grew increasingly difficult and hermetic and lost most of his friends—my dad would try to verbally pin him to the floor. And Klonsky was no lightweight opponent. As he later said of himself: “I’m famous, not so much for what I’ve written...as for the cyclotron of my personality.” His literary contributions were limited to a few volumes on William Blake, but his intelligence was legendary.

  I recognize my father’s conversational style from my own family dinner table: his refusal to give up center stage, impatience with topics that he didn’t know anything about, and aggressive tactics even when he was clearly on top. Sometimes when I was in the middle of a story, he would interrupt me with such little regard that I would doubt for a moment that I’d been speaking at all. When I protested, he would silence me with the complaint that I was being “boring”—the worst imaginable crime.

  It’s tempting to blame this behavior on those nights at the San Remo. My dad, with his hangover of black intellectual inferiority, when seated among the other men—who were mostly Jewish and assumed by him to be naturally bright and analytical—turned into the runt of the litter, forced to bite and kick his way to the teat. But it’s just as likely that my father was simply as competitive as the next guy: determined to win the argument, get the girl, earn the others’ admiration at any cost.

  In some ways he never gave up his compulsion to be the most charming person in the room. Yet when my father was in his twenties, the figure he cut in the world was more than just a means to an end. It was all he had. Like an orphan who must make his way on his wits alone, my father no longer had family or community to fall back on. He literally dined off the strength of his personality, and it paid off.

  After a few years in Greenwich Village, writers and painters were crowding around the booth that the bouncer saved for him at the San Remo. From his job giving poetry lessons to a crazy millionaire, my dad always had money to buy a round or pick up dinner. Cover girls and daughters of famous men appeared on his arm at parties and later joined him in bed. Jay Landesman, the editor of the short-lived but influential magazine Neurotica, remembers the girl from the Midwest who hated Greenwich Village and kept complaining that she wanted to go home. “Someone finally asked her why she didn’t leave already,” Jay says. “And she said that she wouldn’t leave until Anatole spoke to her.” And most significantly for my father, the editors of those magazines that he’d read so religiously in college—Partisan Review and Commentary—began to publish his writing. This life was a long way from his upbringing as a colored boy in Brooklyn. Ironically, it was his knowledge of that world that helped him to secure his reputation.

  Greenwich Village had long been a place where people fled to make themselves over, but the postwar years were a particularly good time for reinvention. The New York intellectuals who crowded the neighborhood’s apartments and cafés had become disillusioned with their political idealism in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. While use of the atomic bomb had abruptly ended a conflict that they expected to drag on for decades, the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear technology meant they now had to live with the knowledge that they could be extinguished in an instant. Add to that the dawning horror of Hitler’s Holocaust, and the world had become a much more serious place. Nobody knew what to believe in anymore.

  In the classes that my father was taking at the New School, all the professors—many of them Jewish exiles from Germany—focused on what was wrong: with the world, with America, with the relationships between people. The very dependability of reality was called into question. The art critic Meyer Schapiro demonstrated how Picasso in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had fractured the picture plane. At the Cedar Tavern, the burgeoning group of Abstract Expressionists talked about ridding the canvas of any verisimilitude and focusing on the action of making the painting itself. French existentialism, by way of translations of Sartre and Camus in the Partisan Review, landed on the Village’s newsstands. Understood originally as more an emotional response to the war in Europe than a formal philosophy, existentialism’s emphasis on individual freedom and absurdity appealed to the prevailing zeitgeist. As Irving Howe, a contributor to the Partisan Review in the early cold war years, observed, “Ideology crumbled, personality bloomed.”

  Onto this unexplored frontier a new cultural hero appeared—the hipster. Famously portrayed by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” this latest incarnation of the American individualist rejected all pressures to conform, ignored society’s expectations and traditions, and lived only for the moment and according to the “rebellious imperatives of the self.” Found in New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, and especially Greenwich Village, Mailer’s hipster took inspiration from “Negroes,” particularly those associated with jazz. Although the hipster was a fleeting phenomenon—subsumed by the end of the 1950s by the Beats—he was crucial in cementing the link between counterculture and African American communities.

  Mailer’s essay may have preserved the hipster for posterity, but he wasn’t the first or only person to note his arrival on the Village scene. Nine years earlier, in 1948, my father described the hipster’s aesthetics in the Partisan Review in an essay titled “Portrait of the Hipster.” He was twenty-eight years old at the time, and the piece—his second publication after a short book review—was his attempt to establish himself among the Village intellectuals. The poet Delmore Schwartz, who was working as an editor at the magazine, gave him the assignment. He knew my dad through Milton Klonsky, who almost certainly shared with Schwartz why Anatole Broyard was particularly suited to this topic.

  Indeed my father portrayed the hipster’s hero—the black jazz character who hung out at the Savoy Ballroom—with a scientific specificity that only an insider could know: the thirty-one-inch pant leg of his zoot suit and the two-and-seventh-eighths-inch brim of his hat; the white powder streak he wore in his hair and the Ray-Ban sunglasses that perpetually covered his eyes; his secret handshake of brushing palms and preferred greeting of a raised index finger; and the shorthand of his jive speech. Solid “connoted the stuff, the reality of existence”; nowhere, “the hipster’s favorite pejorative, was an abracadabra to make things disappear”; and in there “was, of course, somewhereness,” which was the place the hipster longed to be.

  But it was into the hipster’s existential crisis that my father demonstrated the most insight. The hipster’s status, “always of the minority—opposed in race or feeling to those who owned the machinery of recognition,” made him especially anxious to relate to the world in a socially acceptable, meaningful way. Yet the alienated position into which he was born or had found himself made such acceptance nearly impossible. My father suggested in an early draft that the hipster “became a criminal because he was not allowed to become a citizen.”

  My dad’s recent change in circumstances offered him a front-row seat to observe the black model for the hipster. He a
nd Sheri had broken up, and when he couldn’t find another apartment, he was forced to move back to Bed-Stuy and live with his parents. During his jaunts to the dance halls of Harlem with his childhood friends, he became an undercover anthropologist, making observations and collecting the data that would help him make his name back on the island of Manhattan.

  Soon after the essay appeared, my father ran into Delmore Schwartz in the San Remo bar. Sitting with him were Clement Greenberg, the leading proponent of Abstract Expressionism, and Dwight Macdonald, a famous communist and critic of American culture. The men were talking about the “primitive”—Picasso and Hemingway, bullfighting and boxing—and they invited my father to join them. He sat down reluctantly, worried that his hipster piece would typecast him as “an aficionado of the primitive.” He wanted to be a literary man like them. Yet he couldn’t resist showing off his knowledge of the city’s rawer pleasures.