One Drop by Bliss Broyard

If you are interested in reading more about this book and the author visit: http://blissbroyard.com/

Here are two reviews of the book.

Books of the Times

A Daughter on Her Father’s Bloodlines and Color Lines By JANET MASLIN

Published: September 27, 2007

After the literary critic Anatole Broyard died in 1990, his family arranged a memorial reception at a suburban Connecticut yacht club. It was a club that claimed to have no black members until, after Mr. Broyard’s death, his mixed racial lineage was made known. After that, the club cited him as evidence of integration.

What was it like for Mr. Broyard to keep his secret in such surroundings? For a self-made man who had come so far in life, reading so many books in the process, did the clubhouse’s view of Long Island Sound bring to mind the grand illusions of “The Great Gatsby”?

Not likely, says his smart, tough-minded daughter, Bliss Broyard, in “One Drop,” an investigative memoir about her father’s life. (Mr. Broyard was a longtime book critic and editor for The New York Times and an essayist for its Book Review.) As this fascinating, insightful book makes clear, Mr. Broyard left a legacy of racial confusion and great autobiographical material, not necessarily in that order.

Ms. Broyard shares her father’s bracingly unsentimental spirit, to the point where she knows that he had none of Jay Gatsby’s self-congratulatory outlook or sense of American tragedy. More to the point, she says, “It never seemed to occur to him that someone might want to keep him out.”

When a guest at the memorial service noticed three light-skinned black people sitting with the Broyards, he was surprised that the family had so much help. But those weren’t the servants; they were black Broyards who had been kept at arm’s length by Anatole, whose birth certificate listed him as white. By the time he got to Connecticut, after early years in New Orleans, a Brooklyn boyhood and time spent in the Army and Greenwich Village, he no longer talked about his lineage. Black friends assumed he was black. Whites didn’t ask what they thought of as rude questions. It was a rare moment in the Broyard household — say, when dinner guests realized that Bliss and her brother, Todd, knew nothing about their black heritage — when race seemed to make any difference at all.

Only after her father died did Ms. Broyard begin to realize how little she understood. And so she began, in ways that elevate “One Drop” far above the usual family-revisionist memoir, to make up for lost time. She knew no Broyards in New York, but found plenty in Los Angeles, even bringing them together for a family reunion as an early step in her process of discovery. What made this gathering tricky is that some Broyards regarded themselves as white and others as black, drawing vehemently different conclusions from similar sets of facts.

Ms. Broyard knew that her father’s heritage was an open secret when she found a close confidant in Henry Louis Gates Jr., the renowned scholar. She got to know Mr. Gates by his nickname, Skip; she marveled at how generous he was with his time and interest. Then she learned that he planned to write the Broyard story for The New Yorker, and she was infuriated at having been so manipulatively treated. “Years later,” she writes astutely, “I’d realize that my biggest fear was that Gates, a stranger who had never even met my father, would understand him better than I could.” But she sharply excoriates Mr. Gates for his tactics, his glibness and the harm that she feels his article inflicted on her family.

When she published her first book, a story collection called “My Father, Dancing” in 2000, Ms. Broyard had not written about race. Yet her book was included in the African-American Book Expo in Chicago and on the Black History Month agenda. An investigation into her own past and her family’s was clearly something she could not avoid.

A half-hidden family history is no guarantee of an interesting one, however. And for all its prodigious research, “One Drop” deals more engrossingly with the stories of Ms. Broyard and her closest relatives than it does with the 18th-century origins of the Broyards in America.
Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that genealogical Web sites are almost as popular as pornographic ones, Ms. Broyard zealously assembled an account of her roots. Among the first things she discovers about a large, Creole, New Orleans-based family like hers is that racial delineations and stereotypes make no sense at all.

And slavery, which she regards as a defining issue in matters of black identity, holds its own share of surprises. “In a few short hours, I’d gone from believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she’d grown up in a family of black slave owners,” she writes after one fact-finding trip. “These weren’t the noble tragic figures I’d been expecting to encounter.”

Though its scope is large, the heart of “One Drop” lies with the author’s father. She must try — as Philip Roth did in “The Human Stain,” a book that was seemingly prompted by the Broyard story but goes unmentioned here — to understand the choices that he made, whether by action or omission. In a speculative account of what happened when her father applied for a Social Security card, Ms. Broyard guesses at how he might have been flummoxed by the decision of what racial identity to choose yet unaware of how important this choice would be. “I doubt that my father walked away feeling that he’d redirected the course of his life,” she writes.

Drawing on both her father’s autobiographical account and some of what Mr. Gates had to say, “One Drop” culminates in a cultural and intellectual history of Mr. Broyard’s life and times. His Greenwich Village days (described in his book “Kafka Was the Rage”) were full of ambition and contention, not to mention consummate lady-killing. (Mr. Broyard was “New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic,” according to the hotblooded diarist Anaïs Nin.) And some of his most assertive early essays about race and hipness made his bona fides clear.

Mr. Broyard proudly kept a 1950 issue of Commentary near the family’s dinner table. But the author’s identifying note had been neatly cut out of the contributor’s page. Now his daughter knows what it said: that Anatole Broyard was “an anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world.” And she wonders, with lucid and sharp introspection, how her own life would have changed if she had known that sooner.



From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

For most of the 1970s and '80s, Anatole Broyard was a staff book critic for the New York Times, writing two or three reviews a week for its daily pages, as opposed to its Sunday book section. My own career in that same line of work was just getting under way, and I paid close attention to what he was doing. He obviously was intelligent and erudite, but I sometimes felt that he was more interested in showing his technical skills than in giving books deep, fair readings. Still, he enjoyed considerable influence and was widely known in literary circles.

Broyard died in October 1990 after a long, painful and debilitating struggle against cancer, but continuing interest in him was insured by the disclosure that he was, as his wife told their two adult children, "part black." According to Bliss Broyard, "My mother explained that my father had 'mixed blood,' and his parents were both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race-mixing had been common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was, or was supposed to be." Broyard's response to this, as he moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village and began to live a bohemian life in the postwar years, was to "pass for white." He did so for the rest of his life, though many who knew him were aware, or suspected, that his racial identity was not precisely as he presented it.

Six years after Broyard's death, the New Yorker published an article by Henry Louis Gates, the well-known professor of African American studies, called "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," which was, predictably, the cause of much heated gossip in literary, journalistic and publishing circles. Now Broyard is back in the news with the appearance of this family history and memoir by his daughter. One Drop, Bliss Broyard tells us, takes its title from "the 'one-drop rule,' which classified as black any Americans with the tiniest fraction -- just one drop -- of 'black blood.' It had grown out of a practice dating back to slavery known as hypodescent, which assigned someone of mixed parentage to the lower-status race, and had become the legal and social custom in the era of legalized 'Jim Crow' segregation." The book is an account of her effort to discover just "how black" her father was and thus, obviously, "how black" she is.

It's a peculiar book. The author's sincerity and honesty are evident and appealing, and her subject is of continuing interest and importance even now, when an appreciable amount of heat has been drained from our old obsessions and fears about race. The problem is that One Drop is actually at least five books -- her father's story, her own story, her family's story, the story of "passing" and the story of racial identity in the United States -- and its author doesn't do a very good job of weaving them together into a seamless, coherent narrative. For well over 100 pages, she wanders this way and that, telling this story and that, interviewing this person and that, circling around the one story of greatest interest -- her father's -- but never really pouncing on it. Then she takes a detour of nearly 200 pages to explore the Broyard family's history in New Orleans. Not until she gets past page 300 does she finally focus fully on her father, and one can't help wondering how many readers she will have lost by then.

"My father had left behind so much unfinished business," she writes, and her hope is to wrap it up. This would be a difficult task in any circumstances, but it is all the more so in this case because of the exceedingly complex life, character and legacy of Anatole Broyard. He was by most accounts immensely charming and energetic, positively catnip to women (and quick to take advantage of it). But he was also boastful and vain, as well as an operator who, as one friend told Gates, was "exorbitantly in control" and "fastidious about managing things." Thus it is extremely difficult, for example, to figure out why he chose to pass for white, or to get much sense of how this choice weighed on him, as anecdotal evidence suggests it did.

He was born in New Orleans in 1920, into a family that had been there since the early 1750s when Etienne Broyard, "a white man from France . . . landed in the Louisiana Territory." Within a century "the Broyards had begun to be identified in public records as mulatto or free people of color." Bliss Broyard's research has convinced her that "the moment of mixing in the Broyard family" occurred in 1855, when her great-great-grandfather married a free woman of color. Her account of how subsequent generations of the family dealt with (or ignored) this legacy is interesting, but she insists on larding it up with a boilerplate history of American laws, controversies and customs regarding race. By her own honest admission she knew almost nothing about race in America until her father's secret was revealed, and to her credit she studied it closely; it really was not necessary, though, to regurgitate so much of what she learned -- most of which will be familiar to many readers -- in this book, which is too long by about 150 pages.

It's also unfortunate that she spends so much time fretting about her racial identity. The notion of crossing "from white to the other side" clearly has some appeal for her, and when her New Orleans relatives call her "pure white," she is uncomfortable, yet she just can't let go: "It had been nearly a decade since my father had died, since I'd learned of his -- and my -- African ancestry, since I'd begun reading and learning and talking about race. And despite my glimmerings of double consciousness, I didn't yet feel black. I was still waiting for an 'Aha!' moment, an affirmation of this identity down deep in my bones." Fortunately, within just a few pages of this unbearably PC declaration, Broyard admits that "the thought of how blinded I'd been in my obsession to find a slave ancestor made me feel sick with shame," which redeems her, as does this: "I hated the image of myself in [a black acquaintance's] eyes -- a silly white girl making a big fuss over nothing. I hated how uncertain I became when trying to locate myself on this racial landscape or even recognize its terrain. Torn between trying to pinpoint the boundaries between black and white and an urge to deny their existence at all, I was caught in a dialectical tug-of-war. The futility of my efforts reminded me of a skit I once saw in which a man kept moving a wooden chair around an empty white room, unable to find a spot that suited him, despite their being all the same."

As she seems finally to have understood, the whole notion of race is fraught with ambiguity. I won't reveal the results of the DNA tests she finally had done, but what they proved more than anything else is that racial identity is a complete mare's nest. In issues of race as in so many others, "Know thyself" is an injunction almost impossible to obey. Notions of racial purity are as false as notions of racial impurity; there's no such thing, though much of human history has been frittered away by people trying to legitimize race as the defining element in what passes for civilization.

Still, it's not really surprising that Anatole Broyard chose to live as he did. He didn't look in the least bit "black," and he wanted to enter the world of literature, which in the 1940s and '50s in this country was patently "white." He placed personal ambition ahead of racial identity or racial solidarity or whatever one cares to call it, and his daughter makes a pretty solid argument for him: "My father truly believed that there wasn't any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for who he was supposed to be was himself." To be sure, a black friend had a point when he "sniped that my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan," but that's the choice he made, and he managed to live with it.

His daughter asks: "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?" Those are good questions, and as Bliss Broyard well understands, they can never be definitively answered, though my own hunch is that "All of the above" gets somewhere close to the truth.

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