photograph by Melodie McDaniel
One drop
Early in life, Anatole Broyard, celebrated writer and New York Times literary critic, let his heritage fade into obscurity. Born in New Orleans in 1920, he would live as a white man in the north as an adult, though he was African American by his ancestry and the “one drop” definition of the era’s laws. Across decades, he kept the truth from his son, Todd, and daughter, Bliss, an author and 1988 UVM graduate. It wasn’t until shortly before his death in 1990 that they would learn of their father’s and their own heritage. For Bliss Broyard that revelation would eventually drive years of research and writing culminating in last fall’s publication of her family memoir, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story of Race and Family Secrets. But for Broyard, who continues to wrestle with the difficult questions of race and identity, the story doesn’t end at the book’s final page.
“My goal in writing One Drop was not necessarily to defend my father’s decision or condemn,” Bliss Broyard says, “I just wanted to understand him. I understand the desire to live outside racial categories. But then again, life was and is circumscribed by race.”
Open and honest in conversation, Broyard has a lightness to her manner that belies the seriousness of her career as a writer and the gravity of this discovery in her life. She says that her mother, a psychiatric social worker, had encouraged her husband to tell his children the truth of their heritage, but Anatole Broyard continually refused, even as he was dying. Ultimately, their mother told them. While her brother shrugged off this family secret, Bliss felt its impact more forcefully. “I really identified with my father, and I actively sought his approval,” Broyard says. “Also, I look like my dad, and my brother looks like my mother (who is of Nordic descent). For him, it just doesn’t come up.”
While she felt some initial anger that this knowledge of her heritage was withheld, Broyard came to some understanding of her parents’ perspective. “I imagine it was because of an unarticulated fear for us growing up—not wanting to change our understanding of ourselves. I’m glad I didn’t have to keep this secret with and for my father.”
To write about her father’s choice, the young author felt it was essential to dig deeper for an understanding of the historical and political forces that came before him. She would spend the next several years studying the political and social history of the New Orleans, the America, and the times in which her father lived—and she would connect with paternal relatives she had never met.
Tracing the Broyard family tree, she found that many welcomed her and held no bitterness for her father’s denial. She learned from them that fair-skinned black people passing as white has a long history in African-American culture, and most of the Broyard families she met understood the impulse. But there was one cousin in Los Angeles who said, “You’re ruining me.” He lamented that he would have to tell his children that “there are Broyards in the country who still think of themselves as white.”
Considering her father’s decision and its impact upon his life, Broyard is frank that living the truth of his heritage would likely have meant a very different career. As a black man in mid-twentieth century America, she says, it’s doubtful that he would have been employed as a book critic at the New York Times.
Learning to hit fouls
Bliss Broyard, who lives in New York, grew up surrounded by books, of course, but points to her time at UVM as the beginning of her formal development as a writer. “I was not the most focused student,” Broyard admits. “My mother said I learned a lot about socializing. But I was serious about classes that I liked, mostly English,” she says.
One of those classes was with Professor David Huddle, poet and novelist, whom Broyard credits with taking her from merely writing to actually being a writer. “He took us seriously as writers,” Broyard says. “He talked a lot about the writing life, and he likened writing practice to baseball practice. He said that we had to get the foul balls—the false starts, the bad writing—out of the way. Now, having taught creative writing myself, I can appreciate his approach.” (Coincidentally, Huddle’s essay on writing/baseball practice, “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning,” was originally published in The New York Times in 1988. Huddle’s editor on the piece: Anatole Broyard.)
Huddle remembers Bliss Broyard as passionate and forthright. “She spoke more frankly in class than almost any student I’ve ever taught—and so she often generated controversy in workshop discussions,” he says. “What she had to say was the kind of thing a teacher might think of, but be reluctant to express in the classroom.”
Broyard had arrived at UVM from the idyllic Connecticut world lived and created by her parents. Her father, Anatole, had been part of the eclectic world of the Greenwich Village cultural creatives, including visual artists, writers, musicians, and others in the New York of the 1940s and 1950s. By the time his daughter was born, he had become a daily literary critic for The New York Times, where he wrote reviews and helped polish the writing of others.
In her book, Broyard describes her father as an athletic man, who in his prime greeted women friends with hugs that lifted them off the ground, and men with an aggressive arm around the shoulder. He often spoke to his family in literary turns of phrase and quotes from philosophy.
“All my life he’d appeared a powerful and assured figure,” she writes. “Of course many children are inclined to see their father as an important man in the world, but my dad’s job as a daily book critic for the Times caused some other people to see him that way, too. In Fairfield, or in the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, people would recognize his name and further ratify his authority in my eyes.”
Broyard grew up reading her father’s writings and developing her own version of his analytical inquisitiveness. And after graduating from UVM with a degree in English with a minor in anthropology, she began writing in earnest. Over the years, her fiction and essays were published in numerous journals, and her collection of short stories, My Father, Dancing, was a New York Times notable book of 1999. She has also contributed articles as a journalist to O, The Oprah Magazine, Elle Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. A regular paycheck came from work as a researcher and associate producer for the documentary division of MTV.
Making time for her own writing was a challenge. “For years, I used to write late into the night, when there was no danger of the phone ringing or emails coming in,” she says. “Being awake and working when everyone else was asleep helped me maintain the illusion that writing was something that I did purely for myself and wasn’t actually my job.”
And, as her life changed, so did her writing habits.
“Since I became a parent, I’ve had a hard time keeping to those hours, and I’ve been forced to treat writing more like a nine-to-five job.” she says. “On the positive side, having to pay a babysitter in order to get some work done has proven to be an effective cure for procrastination.”
But a deadline can still mean a night working long after her husband and baby have gone to sleep. “And then for the next few days, I slightly sleepwalk through my domestic life,” Broyard says, “spacey, but exhilarated with the thrill of having finished something.”
‘What am I?’
In One Drop, published last September by Little, Brown and Company, Broyard delves into her father’s life and that of his relatives and ancestors to tell the story of America’s racial lines as lived by people who could step over them at will. Among them is Broyard’s great-great-great-grandfather, a white Louisiana carpenter, who in 1855 got around the anti-miscegenation laws of the time by identifying as a “free man of color” in order to legally marry the black daughter of Haitian refugees.
More than 150 years and five hundred pages later, Bliss Broyard has gone from a taken-for-granted identity as a white person, to that of a woman of “mixed-race ancestry.” In the process of coming to this identity, she has found much contradiction.
“I used to feel worried that I would give the wrong answer to the ‘what am I’ question,” she says. “And I’ve gotten every reaction, from ‘Why don’t you embrace it?’ to ‘Don’t you dare call yourself black!’
“I would like to avoid ever having a short answer to the identity question, and to eliminate the notion of neat labels and categories,” adds Broyard. “But in some ways, you have to speak the lingo. You can see race as a social construct, but you can also see it as a real force.”
One example of that force, she points out, is how others —publishers, marketers and editors—categorize her work. “I’ve never had a prefix to my identity as a writer,” she says. “My own publishing experience has made me think about the process and consequences of being thought of as a ‘black writer,’ she says, noting that One Drop has been nominated for awards from Essence, the African-American women’s magazine, and the Hurston-Wright Foundation, which is named for famed black novelists Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.
“I’m honored to be a part of that tradition,” she adds. “But I also understand what my friends are talking about when they say they don’t always want to be thought of as a ‘black writer,’ to be put in this collective, and not necessarily voluntarily.”
Writing the book, as well as seeing responses to it, has also given Broyard the opportunity to turn back to her own experiences, reexamining them in the context of this newfound piece of her identity. Reflecting on her UVM years, she expresses surprise at the number of classes she took related to the African Diaspora. “Jazz, African literature, South African literature, African cultural anthropology— those were often the electives I chose,” she says. “There was, I think, a silent kind of osmosis coming from my father that influenced me.”
Excerpted from One Drop by Bliss Broyard...
—reprinted with permission from Little, Brown PublishingTwo months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned about a secret, but I had always sensed that there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn’t know. As a child, when I was left alone in the house, I would search through my mother’s file cabinets and my father’s study for elaboration, clarification, some proof . . .
Of what? I couldn’t exactly say.
My mother kept files on each of us, and I rifled through their contents: my father’s passport, a small cellophane envelope containing a lock of hair, a doctor’s report about my brother’s childhood dyslexia. In my own file, I ran my finger across the raised seal on my birth certificate, read again the story about an escaped tiger that I once recited to a babysitter and a comment I made about a dance performance that my mother jotted down, examined my report cards and class photos. While these artifacts made me understand that, as young as I was, I already had my own history and in some way that I couldn't articulate was always looking for myself too, they weren’t the evidence I sought.
In my father’s study, I shuffled through the items in the wooden box on his desk: a small red vinyl address book, bills to be paid, scraps of papers and old envelopes with scrawled phone numbers and phrases: “Their joy is a kind of genius.”
I stood on a chair and peered at a cardboard box on the back of a shelf in his closet. The box was square, a little smaller than a cake box, and unadorned. Sometimes I took it into my arms and felt its surprising heft. The mailing label listed a return address for the United States Crematorium, a Prince Street address in Greenwich Village for Anatole Broyard, my father, and a 1950 postmark. Sometime during the year I was twelve, a second cardboard box appeared. This one was a little lighter. Here were my grandparents, whom I never knew.
Neither box had ever been opened. At each seam the original packing tape remained intact. But I knew better than to think I'd find anything useful inside. These boxes held only ashes of answers, and all their presence meant was more mysteries, and a worry that someday something else might explode.
(for UVM staff)