One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets (Hardcover)

by Bliss Broyard (Author) "Two months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned about a secret, but I had always sensed that there was something about my..." (more)
Key Phrases: separate car law, daily book critic, New Orleans, African American, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
For Broyard, who was raised as white in Connecticut, the discovery that her father, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard, wasn't exactly white raised the question of how black I was—a question that set her in search of the history of the most well-known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the first section, Broyard weaves her privileged childhood together with later travels to New Orleans (her father's birthplace) and Los Angeles (where there is a determinedly white set of Broyards as well as a determinedly black set). Part two extends from the first Broyard, a Frenchman arriving in mid-18th century Louisiana territory, to six-year-old Anatole's 1927 arrival in Brooklyn. The last section is devoted to Anatole's life. Broyard's identity quest takes her on an odyssey through social, military, legal, Louisiana and general American history, as well as U.S. race relations and her family DNA, introducing innumerable relatives, classmates, friends and employers, and making for a rather overstuffed account. Fortunately, she's got an ear for dialogue, an eye for place and a storyteller's pacing. But the most compelling element is her ambivalent tenor: Was my father's choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred?... Was he a hero or a cad? Part eulogy, part apologia, the answer is indirect: But he was my dad and we loved each other. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (September 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316163503
• ISBN-13: 978-0316163507
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #318,122 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sins of the Father: Race, Identity and Secrets, November 8, 2007

By	Dera R Williams (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When her mother exposed her father's secret while he was dying in 1990, Bliss Broyard accepted it but was not ready to deal with the complexities of learning her father was of Black heritage. She was not ready when an essay, "The Passing of Anatole Broyard", appeared in Henry Louis Gates' collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man in 1997. When she was finally ready, Broyard wrote a wonderful tribute that is a memoir, a family history, a discourse on race, culture, and identity that is worthy of being a classic.

What does a twenty four-year old woman, born and raised in Connecticut with all the trappings of an upper-class WASP environment do when she finds out she is an impostor of sorts? That she is not White...well not according to the one-drop rule that this country imposes. That her father kept a part of him from her, thereby withholding a part of her history? Bliss' reaction and that of her older brother, Todd, was why all the secrecy? Why was it kept from us?

Unfortunately, Bliss did not get the answers from her father, Anatole Broyard, the New York Times critic and writer. Thus, she began the journey that would lead her to the truth. That journey took her to meet relatives in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, where she met her aunt Shirley, the sister her father had avoided for most of his adult life. With the help of her newfound family, Bliss began to trace the Broyard family history. But it was the emotional and mental journey about race and identity that would prove to be the most complex.

It began with Etienne Broyard of France, Bliss' great-great-great grandfather who came to New Orleans from France in the 1700s. Succeeding generations included mixed-race women of African heritage or mixed-race and Free People of Color also known as Gens de Libre Coleur. The majority of the family had a "white looking appearance" and at different times, passed for White, most often for economic reasons. Economic reasons were the main reason Anatole's parents, Paul and Edna, passé blanc when they moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York in the 1920s when he was six years old. In order to secure employment as a carpenter, Paul became White in the daytime. When Anatole started college he slowly began his journey of subterfuge.

To understand Bliss' angst and confusion about where she fit on the color line, one must first understand the dynamics of the Creole of Color culture and the convoluted caste system of Louisiana. The three-tier racial categorization; White, Black, and Creole/mixed race was an accepted practice. But as no race or culture is a monolith, there are different feelings among Creoles about identity today. Some Creoles have assimilated either into the white culture intermarrying/mixing/bleaching until the African blood is obliterated, while others have assimilated into the African American community and identify as Black. Bliss' family fell into both categories as well as those who held themselves separate and viewed themselves as a stand-alone race and or culture. Bliss began to navigate the terrain of race and how identity is viewed in America. What did it mean that her father was of African heritage to her existence? From the New Orleans Mardi Gras balls and the Seventh Ward to the Creole neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bohemian Greenwich Village where her father lived his young adult life, Bliss used her journalistic investigative skills to find out the mystery of it all. Cloaked in myriad of emotions; anger, frustration and feelings of betrayal, she came to know the flawed man who was her beloved father and why he chose the path he did.

Broyard's left no leaf unturned in her impeccable, exhaustive research. The interviews, resources and bibliographies will keep one researching for years. There has not been such a personal undertaking on the meaning of race and identity as exhibited in this work. I commend Bliss for taking on such a delicate, monumental task. This book is highly recommended for those who study race and culture, as well as those who research genealogy and history. This is definitely one to keep in the family library.

Dera Williams
APOOO BookClub

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, unblinking, and kind -- I couldn't put it down , September 28, 2007

By	Lavinia G. Schwarz (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read this book in three sittings -- plus two middle of the
night wakings up where I read for hours more.

Not only is it wonderfully written, but Bliss Broyard is willing to turn
over all the stones and gems she finds, and look directly at what she sees. Like A.M. Homes, and Tobias Wolff, Broyard has a clear-eyed
willingness to review the past and to experience new things while still remaining a thinking, sensitive person. She doesn't compromise or lose herself despite the demands of others. Instead she grows and lets us grow along with her.

The creole experience in New Orleans is unique in American race relations. It takes time and an open mind and heart to explore the world of the free people of color in the French colonies. Much of this history doesn't overlap with the experiences of others from the African diaspora. We learn about the horrors of the Middle Passage slave trade in school and through film, but a first introduction to the creole world, especially after learning it is your own ancestral world, can be astonishing. This book is not only a personal journey, but a wonderful introduction to the rich and ongoing history of creoles in the United States.

I cannot recommend One Drop more highly.

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Personal Observations on Bliss Broyard's One Drop, September 30, 2007

By	Frank W. Sweet (Palm Coast, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Personal Observations on Bliss Broyard's
One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets
(New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007)

Let me say right off that we at Backintyme Publishing enjoyed the book and recommend it without reservation. But do not be fooled by the misleading marketing blurb (more about this later); One Drop is not a book about a White woman who suddenly discovers that she is "really" Black. It is not about Bliss Broyard's father. It is not even about her search for her father's roots among the Louisiana Creoles. The book introspects Ms. Broyard's feelings about what she found while searching for those roots.

Anatole Broyard died in 1990 after an illustrious career as literary critic for the New York Times. He was one of the intellectual beacons of the U.S. twentieth century. Six years after his death, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of Black Studies at Harvard, published an essay "outing" the late Broyard as a Black man who had lived a lie by pretending to be White all his professional life. According to Bliss, she and her older brother Todd only learned about their father's Colored Creole ancestry shortly before his death when she was twenty-four. Apparently, it then took her over a decade to assemble the facts to refute Gates's racialist ignorance.

I lay my cards on the table. I am not objective about U.S. racialism. I am of a culture that is as proud of its African ancestry as of its European and Native American roots. (By coincidence, I happen to have the same fraction of sub-Saharan genetic admixture as Bliss.) I feel as at home among Creoles, Melungeons, Redbones, and Seminoles as I do among my own Puerto Rican people. I love seeing siblings accepted as routine, whom the newspapers would breathlessly report as "one chance in a million." But, like Anatole Broyard, I am not African-American, and I will dispute anyone who ignores my culture and accuses me of betraying my "race" merely because my genome is typical of New World inhabitants, as Gates did to Broyard after his death.

The overt villain of this book is Gates and he is essential to its existence. Had Gates never accused Broyard's corpse of being a race traitor, this book about Bliss's genealogical quest could not have been published. Had Gates never advised Bliss's mother that "the best thing she could do was to help [Bliss] accept her blackness," Bliss might not have resolved to learn the truth. Had Gates not suggested that they petition Connecticut to alter Bliss's birth certificate to show "black" ancestry, he might have seemed rational. As it is, you conclude that Gates is delusional--an honest believer in the false dichotomy of the U.S. color line: if you are not White, then you must be Black, like it or not. He apparently wants to infect others with his foolishness that any African ancestry makes you INVOLUNTARILY Black.* In short, we should all be grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Without him, this excellent book would probably not exist.

The book answers two questions but leaves two others unanswered. First and most-often asked, did Anatole Broyard hide his Colored Creole ancestry? He did not. Did he cut off his children from their Creole roots? He did. Why? We shall never know. Did he deny being Black? That is a non-question with a false assumption.

The book also has a covert villain--Anatole Broyard himself. Although Bliss clearly loved her father and admires him, he comes across in this book as self-centered and demanding. Most of all, it is hard to forgive his cutting off his children from their Creole culture. Why would anyone deprive his own children of such a proud and colorful family?

The canonical answer is that he feared that they would be seen as Black and suffer prejudice. But that answer simply does not hold water. It is belied by Bliss's book. Anatole's wife, his friends, his business associates at work, his neighbors, some of Bliss's and Todd's little childhood friends, even the handymen who worked on his house, all knew of Broyard's ancestry. Judging by the book, the only two people on the planet who did not know that Anatole Broyard was of Colored Creole heritage were Bliss and Todd, and I have my doubts about Todd.

Obviously, there was a falling out with his relatives. Anatole never let his children meet their Creole relatives and, in turn, he was vindictively and explicitly excluded from his sister Lorraine's will. We shall probably never know what caused the rift. Nevertheless in the end, for whatever reason, he deprived his children of their rich cultural heritage.

The fourth question, whether he denied being African-American, is a non-question with a built-in false assumption. Why would anyone expect him to claim to be Black? He was not of the African-American ethnic community any more than are millions of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and tens of thousands of other Creoles, Lumbees, Melungeons, Redbones, etc. The world is far richer than those who preach White "racial" purity would have you believe. I would love to know how Anatole Broyard filled out census forms in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. (According to Bliss in an NPR interview, she checked three "race" boxes in census 2000.)

Despite all this, the book is not about her father. It is about Ms. Broyard's own feelings towards what she learned while searching for her father's roots.

Evidently, when she was under Gates's influence Bliss believed his racialist silliness that if you have any African ancestry, you have no choice--you are Black. The first third of her book continually presents Black/White as an either/or choice with no other alternatives. Worse, she often repeats notorious racialist stereotypes. She attributes her skill at dancing and her father's love of sensuality to her "Black" ancestry, as if such traits are carried in the mythical "one drop." At one point she even expresses surprise that the dancers at a New Orleans Creole ball are no more graceful than any other random collection of middle-class Americans.

As she became exposed to the Creoles, Bliss Broyard began to learn of the existence of cultures of mixed Afro-Euro ancestry who are not ethnically Black. To my sensibilities, the funniest moment of the book is Bliss's horror at discovering that her Colored ancestors, far from being tragic slaves kidnapped into the middle passage, were powerful slave owners who immigrated from Haiti. (Half of the Colored residents of 1839 New Orleans owned slaves.) By the end of her journey, she apparently began intellectually to grasp that the bizarre U.S. one-drop rule is, well, dumb. Unfortunately, she never seems to absorb this new knowledge at an emotional level, and continues to use "Black" and "African ancestry" as synonyms to the very end.

Any molecular anthropologist can explain that as many as 30 percent of White Americans have detectable sub-Saharan DNA markers from slave ancestors who crossed the color line. (See "Afro-European Genetic Admixture in the United States" at http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=5 .) And it is easy enough to compute that about 35,000 European-looking Americans every year switch from calling themselves "Black" to "White" when they leave high school. (See "The Rate of Black-to-White 'Passing'" at http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=8 .) The good news is that this book will educate readers at a personal family level just how this happens. The bad news is that its author inadvertently reifies Americans' false dichotomy because she is apparently still struggling with the realization that mixed Afro-Euro-Native American ancestry is the norm in this hemisphere, and that the obviously counterfactual U.S. myth of White "racial" purity is the strange pathological exception.

The biggest flaw in the book is not in the author's writing, which is entertaining and informative. Its problem is lack of truth in advertising. It is marketed as another one of those tedious books whose theme is: "Oh woe is me! I thought that I was a rich White but it turns out I am really Black. Taxis no longer stop for me! Cops have started harassing me! What will I do?" (All this written by someone who, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, is "white enough to suit Hitler and passing for colored.") In reality, this book is the story of the Louisiana Creoles who are many things, but "Black" (in the Harlem Renaissance sense) is not one of them. Nevertheless, the book is marketed thus.

Most reviewers repeat the theme: "White woman discovers that she is really Black." The NPR interviewer challenged, "so now you consider yourself `Black'?" (To which, Bliss replied, "Yes. I have mixed-race ancestry.") The first paragraph of her book-jacket bluntly affirms about her father, "he was black." Diane McWhorter's endorsement praises Ms. Broyard's "discovering that she is black."

It is not that such books lack a market. Many have been published in the past decade by Matthews, Williams, Piper, Kroeger, and others. They must be selling well, because new ones keep coming out (pun intended). The notion that a European-looking person discovers that he is "really Black" and that this suddenly makes taxi drivers ignore him (a claim actually made by an author in the online discussion group that Backintyme sponsors) seems to attract a certain kind of reader.

The problem is that, despite the book's own jacket, despite all the reviews, despite the interviews, this is not one of those books. It is not about a White woman who is "really" Black. Instead, it is a presentation of the history and culture of the Gulf Coast Creoles by someone who is one of them by ancestry, although cut off from them in childhood, and who is now desperate to learn about them and to share her discoveries with the rest of us.

And so, readers who are turned off by the false dichotomy of the color line will not even open this book. Those who consider the "I was a rich White but it turns out I am really Black" genre puerile will pass it by. Those who resent others shoehorning them involuntarily into an ethnic group will advise their friends to avoid it.

On the other hand, those who gloat over traditional passing-as-deception stories so loved by academia, and who smirk when the wicked passer gets her "just comeuppance" will read the blurb and buy the book but then be disappointed. They will claim false advertising and some will likely demand their money back.

In short, those who would enjoy this book (including millions of people of mixed ancestry) will be turned off by its marketing hype and not buy it. And those who believe its color-line-reifying blurb will buy it but be disappointed and warn their friends. This is a shame because it is an outstanding book and well worth the price. Perhaps these personal observations will help.

* * * * *

*Is it just me? Or does anyone else find it odd that the most highly respected and diligent protector of White "racial" purity today is a college Black Studies teacher?