I told Janis in a quiet voice that I would have liked to know her if I’d just been given the chance. I hoped that my yearning now to be part of this family could make a small amends for what my father had done.
Unlike some families, for whom seeing each other feels more like a duty than a pleasure, the attendees at the reunion couldn’t wait to get together again. For so many of us, even those who stayed on the black side, the color line had come between people in some way, and we were eager to get past it. The New Orleans Broyards began having lunch once a month. When I was in town, I would meet up with them too. The clan in California began to include more of the extended family at their gatherings. The handful of us in New York got together as a group or one-on-one on occasion. And Gloria kept us posted on the milestones in people’s lives with a family newsletter. Everyone clamored for another reunion. The natural choice would have been 2006—five years after the first one—but then Hurricane Katrina devastated the city that had been home to generations of Broyards and scattered many family members across the country.
The majority of my New Orleans relatives’ homes were located in the flooded neighborhoods. My cousin Sheila, who started me on my family research, her aunts Nancy and Jane, and her grandmother Rose managed to leave in time, but all of their houses were destroyed. The nursing home where my outspoken cousin Jeanne had moved because of her worsening asthma had no provisions to evacuate its residents. She arranged a ride to the Superdome herself and then spent three days and nights praying that the emergency generator would continue to power her respirator. Eventually Jeanne was airlifted to a hospital in Baton Rouge, where a nurse contacted me after spotting my inquiry on a Red Cross list.
In the weeks following the hurricane, a network of cousins and I managed to locate all the New Orleans Broyards who had attended the reunion to ensure they were safe. More than a year later, however, I’d lost track of many people’s whereabouts. Some were headed to Austin and Houston; others planned on settling in Baton Rouge or Lafayette; still others spoke of going to Atlanta. I only know of two family members who returned to New Orleans. One of them, my father’s second cousin, O’Neil Broyard, was the proprietor of the Saturn Bar, an infamous dive in the lower Ninth Ward that was popular with locals and visiting celebrities for the surrealistic murals that covered every inch of its walls and ceiling. After being forcibly evacuated to St. Louis by state troopers, O’Neil came back to reopen his bar and then died of heart failure in the midst of cleaning it up.
The city’s black middle class, to which the majority of my family members belonged, has mostly disappeared. Thousands of city employees and schoolteachers—the bulk of whom were black—were laid off, which meant that the black lawyers, doctors, dentists, and businesses that served them lost their clientele. Despite the celebration by the national press of the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, my friend Keith Medley, whose guesthouse was spared by the hurricane, pointed out the absence of black Carnival balls compared to twenty or thirty in the past.
The uncertain future of New Orleans East—where many family members and other middle-class blacks lived—makes deciding whether to return particularly difficult. In large areas city planners are waiting to see who comes back before committing to providing basic services such as working sewers or police patrols. Those who decide to rebuild anyway risk having their houses demolished if their neighborhoods don’t attract a critical mass of residents. These sections would then be turned into “green spaces” that would provide flood drainage for the rest of the city. Better schools, more job opportunities, and less crime in the evacuees’ newly adopted hometowns give them other reasons to stay away.
The demise of these black middle-class neighborhoods threatens the future of what remained of Creole culture in New Orleans. The community’s previous diaspora, in the beginning of the twentieth century, spawned Creole outposts in Chicago, Houston, and especially Los Angeles. But the circumstances of Katrina not only made it hard for members of the community to relocate near each other, it destroyed their cultural touchstone in New Orleans too. Louisiana-based Creole genealogical groups such as the Creole Heritage, Education, and Research Society (CHERS) and the Louisiana Creole Research Association, Inc. (LA Creole), along with organizations such as the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center based at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, are working to preserve the culture, but the state grant-making institutions and local residents they rely on for funding and support are struggling too.
The situation of the displaced Creoles brings to mind my grandfather’s departure from New Orleans eighty years earlier. I wonder whether some of the evacuees will also turn into silent figures, pre-occupied by a vanquished existence that survives only in their imaginings.
For me the Creole culture of New Orleans provided the backstory for my father’s relationship to his racial identity. It explained why the label of black or African American was an uncomfortable fit for him, and it expanded my understanding of the black American experience outside the narrative of Middle Passage, slavery, and sharecropping. The constant shuffling of the Creoles of color between the categories of mixed, black, and white made it hard to believe in the legitimacy of any racial labels. It was in New Orleans that I finally understood the dilemma that history had created for my father.
Of course he never acknowledged being plagued by any dilemma; he clung to the belief that his actions were governed exclusively by choice. My father told himself, and me, that he didn’t see his family because he had nothing in common with them, that sharing blood with people didn’t obligate you to them. However, the other relationships in my father’s life suggest that he didn’t actually feel this way. Over the years, he often voiced his disdain for drunks, yet he stuck by my mother through the worst years of her alcoholism. After bemoaning my decision to attend the University of Vermont—rather than the type of prestigious Ivy League school that he expected for his progeny—he came to praise the school’s “quintessential New England college experience.” Todd’s fascination with home security alarms was as incomprehensible to our father as his own love of literature had been to his father; nevertheless my dad applauded the zeal with which my brother applied himself to his chosen career.
None of these are heroic gestures. All parents must reconcile their fantasies for their children with the choices their kids actually make. But I believe that my father was able to put aside his disappointments because he loved us; and that he loved us because we were his family; and that family mattered to him because he’d loved his parents and siblings too. Still, he left them, which perhaps explains why he seemed so determined to prevent us from ever leaving him.
When I was in high school, he proposed turning part of the second floor of our house into an in-law apartment and building a garage with another apartment above it. That way, he told Todd and me, we could save money on rent while starting out our careers. And then when we got married and had children, he went on, he and my mother would be on hand for babysitting. He’d catalog all the advantages to having some grandparents around. Dad, I’d groan. Don’t you want us to have our own lives?
My father couldn’t argue with a desire to make one’s own way in the world. But to his mind, the life that he’d provided for us hadn’t contained any disadvantages. He didn’t recognize how his very overprotectiveness might give us a reason to want to get away. Of course his parents had also been trying to do their best for their children, and that they “failed” by being identified as Negroes hadn’t exactly been their fault.
My husband, Nico Israel, and I are about to become parents ourselves, and I’ve begun to appreciate the complexity and responsibility of legacy. What values and traditions will we pass down? And what accidental flotsam from our pasts will float down unconsciously? Will our child have dark hair and dark skin like some of our ancestors? If our son or daughter asks, What am I? how will we answer? Daddy is a Sephardic Jew with roots in Spain, Greece, and Turkey, and Mommy is Norwegian, French, black, and Choct
aw Indian? Will our child’s birth certificate, school applications, and all the other bureaucratic forms encountered during life allow for the record of this complicated history? Since 2000, people have been able to check more than one box under the race question on the federal census, but many states are still following the single-box approach on school forms. What parts, if any, of this ancestral inheritance will our child want to mark down? And will these questions of origin even matter in the future?
From my own father, I inherited a legacy that connected me to the worst and best American traditions: from the racial oppression spawned by slavery to the opportunities created through becoming self-made. Recognizing my forebears’ place in the continuum of history has made me appreciate my own responsibilities as a citizen—of my community, my country, and the world—in a way that simply paying my taxes or casting a vote never did.
As T. S. Eliot put it in his poem “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” I began this journey with the revelation of my father’s racial ancestry. After sixteen years of exploration—and being by turns impressed and dismayed by my father and his choices—I feel I have only now, with a child of my own on the way, begun to know the dilemma for myself.
I may never be able to answer the question What am I? yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself. And with that realization, that letting go, I can finally say good-bye.
Every year on the anniversary of my father’s death, I have made a ritual of playing audiotapes of his voice. In none of the tapes I have is he speaking directly to me: one is a lecture he gave on Martha’s Vineyard about his frustration with the way Americans talk to each other; another is the address he gave at the University of Chicago Medical School about what he wanted in a doctor. But the way he offered his elaborate metaphors in a slow satisfied growl or his habit of stalling as he poked fun at himself, then exploded into a hoot of laughter recall his presence more vividly than any photograph or piece of his writing.
The one tape I could never bring myself to play after my father died was recorded at the funeral of Milton Klonsky, my father’s best friend from Brooklyn College. The only other time I listened to it I was fifteen. After overhearing my mother on the phone tell someone that my dad, in the middle of eulogizing Milton, had broken down, I noticed one day a tape labeled with Milton’s name lying on the desk in my father’s study.
I’d seen my dad lose his temper lots of times, and I saw the aftermath of his losing control that Mother’s Day after my grandmother Edna died. Sometimes he’d hinted at a deep sadness in his life before our family came along, and I sensed that he was plagued by vague unspoken regrets, but I’d never seen—or heard—him cry. And I’d thought that hearing such unrestrained emotion would reveal something essential about my father’s character that had been withheld from me so far.
This year, on October 11, the anniversary of his death, I retrieve the tape of Milton’s funeral from the shoe box where I keep my mementos of my father. I place it into a boombox and fast-forward until I come upon my father’s turn to speak, just as I did twenty-four years ago when I first stumbled across the tape. I listen to my dad recount visiting Milton in the hospital. A stroke had left him unable to speak except for a few words. Milton said to my dad, “Do what you have to do,” and then blurted out the word “debauchery.” My father describes trying to make sense of his friend’s enigmatic message. Of all people, Milton understood the bargain that my dad had made: he had introduced him to the literary life that my father eventually chose over his family.
In his typical crowd-pleasing fashion, my father’s portrait of his friend comes out sounding effortlessly artful; he pauses on certain particularly nice turns of phrase that capture the extraordinary qualities of his most luminous companion. And then he pauses for a longer moment, and the next phrase comes out sounding less certain, and his voice cracks as he tries again to speak.
I remember back to when I was fifteen, standing there guiltily in my father’s study, waiting to hear the sound of his tears. I’d been afraid that they might sound grotesque, after being twisted and stored up for so long, like some strange parasite that had taken root in his body years before. And then I remember the anguish I’d felt as the tape rolled on and I glimpsed the boundary beyond which my father would always remain opaque.
Seated at my desk in front of the tape player now, I find this idea less terrifying than strangely consoling. I listen for the moment when my father’s voice breaks off, followed by a distant muffled rustling in the background, the interminable whirring of the tape heads—louder and louder—and then the sound, brump-click, that signaled a button being depressed. Stop. Silence.
Afterword
In the years since I first learned about my father’s racial background, DNA testing has become increasingly popular among genealogists as a way to uncover their more distant ancestry once the paper trail goes cold, and dozens of companies have sprung up to accommodate their interest. The types of available tests fall into two categories: lineage tests that trace the geographic origins of the person on the top of your maternal or paternal line—i.e., your great-great-great-etc.-grandmother was Welsh, or belonged to the Kru tribe in Liberia—and “ancestral admixture” tests, which determine the percentage of your ancestors who were Indo-European, sub-Saharan African, Native American, and East Asian.
The genetic markers used by the DNA ancestry companies to link a person to a specific population group were developed with the same technology that allowed scientists to map the human genome. This is ironic, because while one of the most trumpeted findings of the Human Genome Project was that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis” since, in President Clinton’s words, “all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same,” the results of DNA genealogy tests tend to reaffirm people’s notion that race is a biological fact. For me at least, they dangled the possibility of a definitive “scientific” answer to the question How black am I?
I waited on the phone in Brooklyn while my mother pried open the little ceramic jar in which she kept the leftover ashes from my father’s burial urn. Her willingness to sift through her dead husband’s ashes for some sizable pieces from which his DNA might be extracted initially surprised me. But after a lifetime of being on intimate terms with death, my mother wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty with it. She even took some pleasure in the job. She’d put the phone down and I could hear her swearing in the background.
“What happened?” I asked when she returned. “You didn’t spill them?”
She laughed wickedly. “I couldn’t get the top off. But I have it now. Yup, there are some b-i-g pieces here.”
“Are you sifting them through something? A colander?”
“Just feeling around with my hands.”
“You’re touching them?”
“Sure, why not?” She made some lip-smacking noises. “Yum, salty...”
“Mom, be serious.”
“Oh. This one looks like Daddy’s tooth.”
My mother mailed off an assortment of chunks to one of the companies that provide DNA ancestry testing. But it turned out that the pieces were too small and charred to yield any insight into my father’s genetic history. And even my mother—a hoarder who was particularly loathe to get rid of anything pertaining to my father—didn’t still have a hairbrush or sweater lying around that might contain some of his stray hairs (with the root attached). I had to settle for testing myself and some of my family. Nevertheless, the results came as a complete surprise.
It’s generally agreed among population scientists that, according to our DNA, human beings originated in East Africa. What we recognize as racial differences—skin color, hair texture, facial features, and body types—are mostly the result of adaptation to new climates as we migrated across the globe. For people living closer to the equator, darker skin helped to protect against
potentially deadly exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Alternately, the farther north humans wandered, the lighter their skin became, to aid the development of essential vitamin D, which required absorbing adequate ultraviolet radiation. Curly or frizzy hair was better suited for hotter climates, since it trapped sweat near the scalp, prolonging the body’s natural cooling process.
According to the findings of the genome researchers, all these external differences only account for somewhere in the range of 0.1 percent of our genetic makeup, which is insignificant when compared with the thousands of genes that determine who we “really” are—our intelligence, our emotional sensitivity, our artistic talents—none of which can be sorted according to specific racial groups. Yet within precisely that 0.1 percent of difference also lie the clues about where our ancestors came from.
Two types of DNA that are exempt from recombination—the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA—pass down unchanged from one generation to the next, providing an unbroken link to our past, similar to the way a surname is passed down through the paternal line. However, just as the spelling or pronunciation of a last name sometimes altered slightly as a family moved through a region or across the globe, so did these normally static types of DNA undergo small copying errors as the human family ventured forth from its original home of Africa. These “spelling” variations—which usually reside on the “junk” portion of the DNA and don’t affect our looks or character—function like passport stamps on our genetic code, allowing scientists to re-create the different migratory paths taken by human beings as they populated the earth and pinpoint where our ancestors lived thousands of years ago.
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