One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets
By Bliss Broyard
Little, Brown, 514 pages, $24.99
Of what public consequence is the life of a light-skinned black man who decided to live as white and did so quite successfully, marrying a Nordic wife and raising two children in the upscale commuter provinces of Connecticut, a man who mixed with the cultural elite but all the while hid the truth from his son and daughter and evaded it with many co-workers and longtime friends, even his wife?
Principally it is of consequence because “One Drop,” the probing and often poignant account of his daughter’s search for perspective on that life and those it touched, has so much to reveal about race in America. Second, it was not exactly a private life, meaning we all have cause to care about the public psychology involved. As Bliss Broyard notes, her late father, Anatole Broyard, had an 18-year bully pulpit as a prominent literary critic at The New York Times, where, “From the beginning, African American writers and intellectuals believed that he was particularly hard on black authors.” In retrospect he was “the most well known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
Unlike a large social history, Bliss Broyard’s story of cousins and friends and generations and migrations, from South to North, from black to white and back again, plays out at a level of personal detail that defies stereotype in illuminating ways, and is occasionally wrenching. “I knew my father like you know a room that you’ve lived in for a long time — his frequencies, scent, and atmosphere were all familiar to me — but I didn’t know anything about him, his history or how he came to be,” Broyard remarks in her opening paragraphs. She credits her Aunt Shirley, Anatole’s younger sister, with taking “the most definitive view: my father was raised black and became white.” Yet she considers dramatist W.F. Lucas’ comment a snipe that when Anatole transplanted himself from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village as a young man, “my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan.”
Anatole never did reveal the truth to his children, despite pressure to do so over the years from his wife and their mother, Sandy. Bliss and Todd were told by Sandy only when they were young adults, at a despairing time when Anatole was in the hospital near death of prostate cancer, with the words, ” ‘Your father’s part black.’ ” Todd and Bliss asked questions — after all, their father did not look black. Sandy responded that he was the lightest of three siblings, a Creole family originally from New Orleans, “and the fact that his two sisters lived as black was one of the reasons that we never saw them.” Sandy went on to tell them: “Anyway, you kids aren’t black. You’re white.”
Bliss, who had considered her self-isolated nuclear family to be “well-bred bohemians” and “our own special breed of Wasp,” begins to wonder:
“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?”
All elusive questions, which she chases throughout the book. One problem, Broyard writes, was that even up to the time of her father’s memorial service in 1990, when she was in her mid-20s: “I’d never had a conversation about race. In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject. The people I knew lowered their voices when referring to a black person.”
She does recall one direct questioning of her father in her teens when she asked him, ” ‘What are you again?’ ” and he replied, ” ‘French.’ ” When Bliss asked if there wasn’t something else, he answered, ” ‘Maybe a little Portuguese.’ “
This, of course, is well at odds with the truth. Bliss contends that she hasn’t found anyone else “to whom he unequivocally, directly lied,” although that discounts lies of omission, which seem to have been common in his behavioral repertoire. She reports, for example, that her parents had married in 1961, and by the time Todd was born in 1964, Sandy had asked Anatole about his racial background and, “He’d mostly evaded the question, saying something vague about ‘island influences.’ ” When race came up in conversation, Anatole “would either reveal his ancestry, avoid answering the question, or, if cornered, occasionally grow angry and walk away.”
It should be noted that some of the ground Bliss Broyard covers, the broad outline of her father’s life, was prominently written about a decade ago by black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (head of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University). “The Passing of Anatole Broyard” can be found in his book “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” but it originated as an article in The New Yorker. Gates contends that Broyard’s story is “equal parts pragmatism and principle,” filled with “cunning half-truths”; society “had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affinity.” Rumor surrounding Broyard of “a distant black ancestor was, in a sense, the reverse of the truth,” Gates wrote, as Broyard tried to shed his past. “It was as if, wedded to an ideal of American self-fashioning, he sought to put himself to the ultimate test.” Yet “to pass,” Gates suggested, “is to sin against authenticity,” and, “Racial recusal is a forlorn hope.”
Bliss Broyard mentions Gates’ reporting in “One Drop,” citing family anger over aspects of his characterization of Anatole and also colleagues of her father’s who “disputed the extent to which my father’s racial identity was described as a secret.” Reading the two accounts side by side, one feels that “One Drop” is in part intended as a rejoinder to Gates, softening some of his conclusions, but in the end they share much in common, even many sources. Bliss Broyard’s attempts to document her father’s openness on the racial question constitute the widest disparity; she points out that of 10 women she spoke with who dated her father in the 1940s and 1950s, “all but one were aware of his racial identity,” although not all of them were told by him.
Comparative versions of Anatole’s life are fascinating in a historical sense, but much of the real ferment in “One Drop” can be found among the living. After Gates’ article appeared, Bliss received a call from a cousin in California named Vivian Carter who told her: ” ‘The article was full of lies. Your father was white.’ ” Eventually, Bliss ventures to Los Angeles to meet varied cousins, some of whom live as black and others of whom live as white; had she not been told beforehand who did which, she would not have been able to guess. (Of the Carters, she observes: “I believed that most white people accepted the couple as white. Black people, on the other hand, would recognize their roots in an instant.”)
The malleability of race and the distorting power of social stereotypes — the captivity in which they can hold individuals, the anger that develops, the split-ups of families — are themes played out again and again as one proceeds through “One Drop,” even in its rather looping forays into American history. Anatole’s parents both passed as white to obtain work (hardly a rarity); Anatole was cut from his older sister Lorraine’s will “for reasons known to both of them”; searching for possible slave ancestors, Bliss finds slaveholders instead; a great-grandfather passes from white to black in order to marry a free woman of color in New Orleans without breaking anti-miscegenation law; the grandparents of one of Bliss’ cousins, a couple who had lived as white for more than 60 years, cut off contact with their granddaughter for investigating family roots; a New Orleans acquaintance lectures Bliss, ” ‘Most African Americans didn’t have the same option as your father did. . . . And he didn’t do anything to help the people who were stuck on the other side. That’s why your father makes black people so angry.’ “
The central paradoxes found in “One Drop” do not resolve, although Bliss Broyard may have reached a sense of personal peace. In his private journals, she reports, her father never referred to himself as black, even indirectly, and in his writings he emphasized identity as “an act of will and style.” Deep in the narrative, Broyard discusses an essay her father wrote, “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” which appeared in the July 1950 issue of Commentary magazine. In it he argued for ” ‘adherence to one’s essential self,’ ” or ” ‘innate qualities and developed characteristics as an individual, as distinguished from [the Negro’s] preponderantly defensive reactions as a member of an embattled minority.’ ” She recalls seeing that issue of Commentary around the house during much of her childhood but did not pick it up until a few years after her father died. The contributor’s note on Anatole had been razored out of the magazine. The author’s acquaintance with black life was a subject ” ‘he knows at first hand,’ ” the excised text would have informed any casual reader.
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Art Winslow, a former executive and literary editor of The Nation, is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
