One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  My father certainly had reason to feel betrayed. By singling out his racial identity, Brossard made him an exception to the prevailing Village credo that they were all free to discover themselves without being encumbered by familial or ancestral histories. In my dad’s case, the past could never be forgotten, because contrary to what he’d asserted in his essay, it made him fundamentally different from whites, no matter how much he might resemble them. In Brossard’s formulation, my father wasn’t inventing himself like everyone else; he was pretending to be something that he wasn’t. He was a “passed Negro,” which was how my dad’s friends from Bed-Stuy and his family saw it too.

  In the postwar years, the rest of my father’s family were growing more accepting of their black identity. Edna quit her job at the Laundromat, which meant that she no longer had to pass for work. Lorraine stopped considering whites-only positions. Even Nat showed signs of relaxing his antiblack attitudes. While he still had to pass at the construction site—as late as 1959, building trade unions in New York City remained segregated—he chose Sag Harbor, a popular black resort area on Long Island, when he bought a plot of land on which to build a weekend home.

  My father explained himself to Lorraine by saying that he wanted to be a writer, not a Negro writer. The critics may have hailed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a great novel about the human condition, but it was still praised in the New York Times as “the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro” that the reviewer had ever read. After five years in Greenwich Village, however, the majority of what my father had published did concern black people and black culture. In 1951 Commentary ran the essay “Keep Cool, Man,” in which my father explored how jazz music had begun to adopt the “rejected attitude” avenue of flight that he’d described in “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro.” This time the contributor’s note described him as “an anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.”

  It’s not the case that my father was assigned these pieces; he came up with them himself. The sociologist Nathan Glazer, who later led the charge against affirmative action and then reversed his position, was an associate editor at Commentary at the time. He recalls that Anatole Broyard wasn’t thought of as an American black writer in the same way that James Baldwin was, although it was common knowledge that Broyard wasn’t entirely white. Mostly, according to Glazer, he was seen as someone who was “au courant” on cultural matters. Yet when he tried to publish an essay that ventured outside the black world, “Marginal Notes on the Anglo-Saxon,” neither Commentary nor Partisan Review wanted it. More to their liking were Chandler Brossard’s tongue-in-cheek observations about how the gentile intellectual, finding himself New York City’s latest Alienated Man, had begun to mimic his Jewish friends.

  Eventually a subject that could transcend race presented itself to my father in the form of his father’s stiff neck. When the pain didn’t subside, Nat consulted a doctor, who diagnosed him with metastasized bladder cancer that had spread to his bones. He was dead within two years. Four years later, in the summer of 1954, my father published his first short story—a slightly fictionalized version of his father’s death called “What the Cystoscope Said.”

  In his exacting descriptions of the physical and metaphysical devolution that occurs at the end of a person’s life, my father conveyed the terror, love, and wonder of a son attending his father’s death. Everything he felt about his dad was poured into the story—his inability to talk with him; his desire to see him as heroic and recognition that his life was not; the gaps in generation, education, and sophistication between them; and the well of tenderness that rose up at the end—without mentioning the family’s racial identity. In the final scene, the son returns one night to his Greenwich Village apartment to find a package on his doorstep. It’s the box containing his father’s ashes. After bringing it inside and placing it on the bookshelf, he thinks to himself: “I’d heard that ashes were supposed to be scattered from a hilltop to the four winds, or poured into the headwaters of a river going out to sea, but as I looked at the box on the shelf, I knew that those were not our ways....It was my job to sift those ashes and sift them I would, until he rose from them like a phoenix.” In real life the ashes would be moved from one closet to another over the next forty years.

  A few months after “What the Cystoscope Said” appeared, my father published a second autobiographical story, “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn,” about the estrangement that a young man from Greenwich Village feels from his parents during his weekly visit to their apartment in Brooklyn. The narrator’s mother and father keep his picture on the mantel next to the clock, but he forgets about his parents each time he says good-bye. “Always, without realizing it, they were wondering what I was, whether to be proud of me or ashamed, whether my strangeness was genius, sickness, or simply evil, whether I had sold my soul like Faust or was still learning to walk, whether I was a hero or an abortion.”

  The theme of both stories—the painful, necessary process of separating from one’s family—resonated with many people. By year’s end every major publishing house in New York had contacted him to inquire about expanding these stories into a novel. Eventually my father signed a contract for a sizable advance with Seymour Lawrence at the Atlantic Monthly Press, who was responsible for publishing such writers as Katherine Anne Porter, Pablo Neruda, and Kurt Vonnegut. People in the literary world began waiting for Broyard’s novel. In Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer finds some complaint about nearly all contemporary writers except William Burroughs, whom he mentions in a footnote, and my father, about whom Mailer writes: “I’ve read two stories by Anatole Broyard. They are each first-rate, and I would buy a novel by him the day it appeared.”

  But that day would be a long time coming. My father had planned for the novel to chronicle a young man’s journey from a provincial Brooklyn boyhood to sophisticated Greenwich Village alienation, with all the discontinuities of self and culture that accompanied that transition. However, trying to capture the life of a young intellectual in the Village led to murky waters. In straining to be hip and smart, his writing started to come across as labored and abstract. After reading a story from this new material in a literary journal, Sheri Martinelli wrote to my father that he was trying too hard to impress other men. I think she was right.

  Like many young writers who receive a lot of praise too early in their careers, my father seems to have become paralyzed under the weight of everyone’s expectations. His journals from this period are filled with notes for the book—ironic dialogue (“My personality costs me so much money that I’m obliged to take it seriously”), elaborate metaphors (a character “opens his ego like a newspaper, puts it on in the morning like a necktie, blows his nose in it like a handkerchief”), and telling observations (a small boy’s dog urinates on stacked paintings at an outdoor art show)—but my father never managed to corral all this luster (or bluster) into a cohesive thing. Years later he confided to his friend Michael Vincent Miller that his problem with writing the novel was that he didn’t know how to get his character into and out of a room. There was no way to make that kind of scene setting brilliant or lyrical. And he couldn’t accept the idea that not every sentence had to be special, that he didn’t always have to be special, especially as other peoples’ expectations—and scrutiny—grew.

  “Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn” was included in a popular anthology of Beat literature, and my father’s photo ran in Time magazine as a representative of that generation. Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hughes, “His picture...makes him look Negroid. If so, he is the only spade among the Beat Generation.”

  For my father, trying to write honestly about his childhood without being honest about all its particulars was rather like trying to write one of those lipogram novels that never use the letter e. Reading these drafts, one gets the feeling that everything is disconnected from the “raw data of actuality” and shot through with dead ends. In desperation my father returned to the ground he’d covered in his e
arly stories and tried to mine it again, managing in the process to suck out any remaining vitality, so that even the scenes in his father’s hospital ward lost the sharpness of their tragedy. Rejection letters from literary magazines began piling up. While his publisher remained committed to the novel for almost fifteen years, people in the literary community stopped holding their breath.

  According to his notebook, my father planned for the book to end with his father’s death, which represented his final break from the past. While he had trouble achieving this narrative arc on the page, he made progress in real life. An analyst whom my father saw during the mid-1950s tells me about my father’s relationship to a man named Ernest van den Haag, who was a Dutch-born professor of sociology about six years my father’s senior. My dad, in the analyst’s view, came to view Ernest as the ideal father, after he came to terms with how disappointing his own father had been.

  While Nat had never shared any of his son’s interests except for boxing—once they’d relived punch for punch the most recent bout, they had nothing left to talk about—Ernest had “a mind as clear as light” and could engage my father in conversation for hours. My dad particularly admired how precisely his friend could express an idea, especially since he’d arrived in the United States in 1940 speaking no English. But my father’s choice of Ernest as a surrogate father seems a rejection of more than his dad’s inarticulateness.

  After meeting literally on the street shortly after the end of World War II, my father and Ernest began a daily habit of taking a walk around Greenwich Village. A close friendship soon developed that would last for the next forty-five years. After a few months, my father invited his new friend home to Brooklyn for dinner, where Ernest met my father’s family. “I was somewhat surprised,” Ernest told me before he died in 2002, “because they were all blacks, of course, and Anatole had not warned me of that.”

  Despite this omission Ernest never had the sense that my father was conflicted over his identity. “In my recollection he never tried to hide the fact that he was black,” he said. “But he never liked discussing it, because it wasn’t important to him.” For his own part, Ernest said, my father’s racial identity didn’t make any difference to him, which is rather hard to believe given the political positions he’d begun staking out at the time.

  In 1956 Ernest published Education as an Industry (an expanded version of his doctoral thesis completed six years earlier), in which he laid out his argument against school integration, claiming it amounted to “compulsory congregation.” The following year Ernest launched the first of a series of attacks on the famous doll tests conducted by the African American sociologist Kenneth Clark, which were cited in the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision as proof that segregation indeed affected the self-esteem of black children. Just as my dad was describing to his analyst why Ernest would have been a better father, his friend was proselytizing about why the races should be kept apart.

  For the next two decades, Ernest served as an expert witness against desegregation, appearing before U.S. House and Senate subcommittees and the U.S. Supreme Court. Among his arguments was his conclusion that black children would be more harmed by sitting in the same classrooms as whites, since their historical deprivations meant that they couldn’t measure up. The harmful effects of prolonging this injustice apparently didn’t concern him. For his finale, he testified before the World Court in The Hague about the benefits of apartheid in South Africa for the black population.

  When I was growing up, Ernest was a frequent presence in our house, sometimes joining us for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. My brother and I knew him as Uncle Ernest, and it wasn’t until I was eight or nine that I realized he wasn’t actually a blood relation. My father didn’t ignore Ernest’s more difficult traits: his penchant for holding unpopular opinions—he later became a leading proponent for the death penalty—and his general fastidiousness—he tortured my mother with his culinary requirements. But my dad always defended his friendship with his pal, saying that if it weren’t for him, Ernest would have no friends at all. The implication was that once you made a friend, you were stuck with him. Your family, on the other hand, was disposable.

  I didn’t learn of Ernest’s racial politics until after both he and my father were dead. I imagine, though, that if I’d had a chance to ask either of them about it, they would have dismissed it as immaterial to their friendship. In my conversations with Ernest, he described my father as his best friend and one of the brightest minds he had ever known. And my father gave the impression of being so secure in his own identity and intelligence (and so uninterested in any questions of race) that he was immune to feeling hurt or influenced by his friend’s antiblack positions.

  Yet my father’s adoption of Ernest as an ideal father had to involve some repudiation of himself and his background. And I’m not convinced that Ernest could completely ignore my dad’s racial identity, as he claimed. For starters, when my father proposed to my mother, Ernest tried to exploit my father’s blackness to scare her away. I can’t help feeling sad, and slightly sickened, by the thought that my father would choose such a man to become his—and my—surrogate family. It felt almost as if he had knowingly invited a robber into our house, someone who would rifle through our family albums and keepsakes, stealing and defacing things. But I can also see—from my father’s perhaps unconscious perspective—how Ernest helped to shore up his defenses by providing yet another bulwark against the mixing of whites and blacks. With him in his life, my dad had one more reason to keep the family in his past apart from the one in his future.

  -32-

  At my mother’s house in Martha’s Vineyard, there are three big boxes containing nearly every letter that my father ever received. The collection spans forty years, but the bulk of them date from the 1950s, when my father was living in Greenwich Village.

  Sitting on the floor of the living room, I sort the letters into piles: the ones from his mother and Lorraine; the ones from his first wife, Aida, and their daughter; the letters from friends—Ernest, Milton Klonsky, Michael Vincent Miller, Vincent Livelli, and a junkie named Stanley Gould who writes from prison to thank my father for sending him some cash and a change of clothes for his release. There are notes from fans about stories and essays he’d written, professional correspondence from editors at literary magazines and New York publishing houses, and letters from girls. Before long, the ones from girls overtake every other type.

  There are hundreds of them: dozens from a single woman and solitary notes from girls who never appear again. Most of the letters appear to be written in the midst of a romantic interlude between my dad and the author. Sometimes the girl has gone back to college or she is away for the summer. Or else she simply wishes to communicate things that are too delicate or risqué to say out loud. It’s clear from their letters that my father wrote these women back. I ran a query in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, asking to hear from people who knew my dad, and while I was contacted by some old girlfriends who remembered him vividly, none held on to his correspondence. I imagine that his letters were the sort that a woman burned, reluctantly, in some private ritual, before heading off to say “I do.”

  More than one of my father’s friends suggests to me that perhaps Anatole couldn’t finish his novel because he spent all his creative energies on seducing women. His analyst from the mid-1950s remembers that my father would often start a session by mentioning that he’d “made a new discovery,” meaning that he’d met a new girl. He picked them up on the street and in Washington Square Park, in bookstores and museums, and in the San Remo and Cedar Tavern, where men were said to follow him in hopes of getting lucky with a disappointed girl after my father had made his selection for the night. Writing was another kind of seduction—you had to entice your readers to enter your imagined world—but it took longer and required more work. With writing, my father wasn’t as sure of being successful.

  Significantly, my father was attracted mostly to blondes. The
analyst was unaware of his ever having a relationship with a girl who wasn’t white. If my father was worried about fitting into his adopted world, each woman who said yes—to an invitation for dinner or a request to make love—offered the warm embrace of social acceptance. Each woman who wanted him was a validation of his self-made man. His relentless womanizing, which persisted for most of his life, was also a way to keep his connection to the Broyard legacy and his grandfather Belhomme alive.

  The girls in the letters have sturdy American names like Ann or Susan or Sarah or Barbara. A few sign off with more exotic, boyish-sounding nicknames like Jae, Lou, or Mel. They write in curlicue handwriting on light blue stationery or in hurried-looking cursive on sheet after sheet of plain white paper. Some of them type their letters, carefully, with no cross-outs or corrections. One girl, a particularly young one, misspells “renaissance” three times—ranaissant, ranasance, ranaissance—before she gets it right. (She is writing a paper about renaissance art for her freshman year art history class and has asked my father to recommend some books. I imagine he dismissed this request: he’s twenty years the girl’s senior and has been contributing articles to the country’s most respected journals for over a decade. But to my amazement, the girl’s next letter thanks him for sending the lovely art books.)

  There are letters written in choppy English from girls who live in Denmark or Sweden; a few dozen written in French, and one written in Italian, a language that I didn’t know my father could read. These girls are dancers, models, students, potters, writers, or rich daddy’s girls who complain about the boring office jobs they’ve taken to pass the time. A few of them are married. A few others are deeply troubled. They write from mental institutions, thanking my father for his faithful correspondence; he is, they tell him, their one true friend, the only one who understands them.