When I arrived in New Orleans in the winter of 2000, I already knew from Internet research that the first Broyard to set foot on these shores was a white man from France named Etienne, and that he had arrived sometime in the early 1750s, thirty-odd years after the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, founded the city on behalf of the French crown.
I’d also learned that a hundred years later, in the 1850s, when my great-grandfather Paul was born, the Broyards had begun to be identified in public records as mulatto or free people of color. What I didn’t know was which man, or men, in the intervening generations was responsible for the change in the family’s racial identity. Nor did I know what the moment of mixing was like: Was it a rape in a slave cabin or the conclusion of a business deal between a white “protector” and his quadroon mistress? Did the couple feel tenderness for each other? Or love?
My father’s explanation of his origins, told to my mother and a few friends, played like a scene from a 1930s Hollywood romance, an inverted Tarzan and His Mate, one of his favorite movies: My father’s grandfather was walking along one day when he saw a pretty girl sitting in a coconut tree. He coaxed her down and made her his wife. The tree was my dad’s way—ironically, offensively—of acknowledging his great-grandmother’s Caribbean roots, her blackness. The story also paid homage to the long line of sweet-talking Broyard men and their helplessness before a lovely face. In his memoir about Greenwich Village, my dad described how he, when walking down the street, would ditch a friend in midsentence to chase after an attractive girl “whose smile held the very incandescence of meaning.” Ultimately, though, my father’s creation myth allowed him to dismiss his bit of blackness as just another accident of lust—as inconvenient as an unwanted pregnancy and as inconsequential too, if you could harden your heart enough to cut it out.
How much my father knew about the actual truth of his family tree is anyone’s guess. The preposterousness of his story tended to discourage further inquiries, as I imagine was his intention. But even among the relatives who had always known about their African ancestry, mystery or mythology seemed to surround the origins of the Broyards’ mixed-race identity. The version passed down to Emile Broyard out in California had the six brothers of my great-grandfather’s generation as originally hailing from Morocco—an account that explained away their looks without the taint of sub-Saharan Africa, slavery, or rape.
During my first full-scale research trip to New Orleans, I was lucky to team up with another newfound cousin from the black side, Sheila Prevost, a native of the city, who wondered the same thing I did: how mixed we were and how we got that way. Sheila and I had first bumped into each other a few months earlier on a genealogy Web site. She’d been corresponding on a “Broyard” message board, and I stumbled across a chat in progress about the New Yorker article on my father. After lurking for a while, I mustered up the courage to join in with the announcement that I was the daughter of the man under discussion.
Sheila, like many Broyards who stayed in the black community, viewed the outing of one of her “white” kin as both a hilarious comeuppance and a disturbing abrogation. When we finally met, she exclaimed, hooting with laughter: “Ooh, your father got caught,” and then turned serious. “But nobody can tell him who he has to be.”
We soon figured out that Sheila’s grandmother Rose, who was still alive, was my father’s first cousin. Rose didn’t remember my dad—she was four when his family moved to Brooklyn—but she’d met his sisters, Shirley and Lorraine, during the visit in 1935 of which I’d seen photographs in Shirley’s album. And Rose had known her grandfather Paul Broyard, who lived with her family for the first eighteen years of her life, until he died in 1940, at the age of eighty-four.
My father had also known his grandfather Paul, although he never saw him again after his family moved north, when my father was six. But his father would tell him stories, which my dad passed down to my brother and me and included in his writing. My father clearly identified with his grandfather: in his fiction, which was mostly autobiographical, he always chose the name Paul for his narrator.
According to my dad, Paul Broyard had been famous in New Orleans for his skills as a builder and his talent with the ladies. His nickname was Belhomme, beautiful man, and he was supposed to have sired “half the bastards in New Orleans,” many of whom took the Broyard name. But Paul, I’d eventually discover, was also the reason that my father’s family left town.
My great-grandfather was an overlap between my life and the lives of my New Orleans cousins. He made me feel as if the distance between us would be less than I’d imagined. As I planned my trip to New Orleans, I began to wonder what else Sheila and I would find in common. There was a directness in her conversation and a playfulness that was familiar to me. I started to fantasize that despite Sheila’s upbringing in a black community in the South and my childhood as a white girl raised in Connecticut, we’d find that there was hardly any difference between us at all.
My first afternoon in New Orleans, Sheila picked me up at the guesthouse where I was staying for a quick tour around town. I jumped into her car, we shared a brief hug across the gear shift, and then we sped off. We were shy with each other. As Sheila pointed out the locations of various archives and historical sites of interest, she kept stealing glances at me and saying, “This is so weird.” I wondered if what she meant was that my white appearance was weird. Like many of my Broyard cousins, Sheila had always known that she had kin “living on the other side,” but I was the first one that she’d actually met.
With her caramel-colored skin, wavy brown hair, little button nose, and full round cheeks, Sheila looked to me as though she could be any number of things: South American, Indian or Pakistani, Puerto Rican, or light-skinned African American. People in New Orleans, however, were accustomed to her Creole looks and seemed to generally recognize her for what she was. It helped that she spoke with the Yat accent—a kind of Brooklyn drawl adopted by locals—and greeted people with the popular expression “Where y’at, girl?” and called them “bay” for “baby.”
Sheila had always known about her Creole roots, but by the time she was born, in 1964, Creole identity in New Orleans had been folded into a larger black identity in the fight for civil rights. (Only in recent years have some Creoles of color started to reclaim their mixed-race ancestry.) After we had known each other for a while, Sheila confided that my interest in my black roots made her feel less self-conscious about searching out her white ones. Although many African Americans have European forebears, curiosity about this branch of the family tree is often viewed with suspicion by other blacks. But research into the black branch can often be a disappointing dead end.
Some African Americans have a precious handful of photos or letters or a Bible inscribed with their lineage that has been passed down from one generation to the next; others have stories—about the trials endured by a great-grandmother born into slavery or the whispered name of some prominent white man who makes a cameo on the family tree. Most black people who are descended from slaves, however, have missed out on accumulating family artifacts, since their ancestors were legally forbidden to learn to read or write, nor did they have the income to hire a photographer or the urge to capture for posterity the meagerness of their existence.
Census slave schedules list individuals only by age, skin color, and gender. Newspapers didn’t include details about blacks’ lives or were too prejudiced to be reliable as sources. African American publications were rare and more rarely preserved. Personal records such as receipts for slave sales, if they exist at all, often remain in the private hands of the descendants of slaveholders. Louisiana is an exception: unlike the British-derived common law used in the rest of the United States, the legal system bequeathed by its French colonial history was based on civil law, which required the execution of all financial transactions before a notary public. As a result the Notarial Archives in New Orleans contain records of slave sales and purchases, as well as wills, successions, and marriage contracts that often include details about slaves in the property inventory. Even with these abundant sources, however, it can be very difficult to locate an enslaved ancestor without the name of the owner. And documenting the trip across the Middle Passage can be impossible without the serendipitous mention somewhere of the ancestor’s African origins.
In the absence of a specific personal history, many African Americans have only the general narrative of black American history, much of which is tragic, in which to insert themselves. The other choice has often been to either mythologize the past with stories of African kings and queens or to ignore it completely.
On my second day in New Orleans, Sheila and I got down to work. We headed over to the Historic New Orleans Collection, where we spread our research across one of their large oak tables. After a couple of hours comparing notes, Sheila set down her best guess of the line of our male ancestors from Paul Broyard back through four generations to the first settler, the white Frenchman Etienne.
Sheila’s records were organized into separate binders for each branch of the family. She knew all the names, dates, and places off the top of her head. I tried to follow along with her reasoning, but I kept confusing this person with that person as I shuffled through my own heap of papers, on the verge of throwing my hands up in despair. However, a part of me was also relieved to find myself in the role of her apprentice, self-conscious as I was about the advantage my father had already secured me. But Sheila had no better idea than I did which of our white male ancestors was responsible for the origins of the family’s mixed-race identity. We started searching through the archdiocesan volumes recording all the Catholic sacraments performed in the city, looking for more clues.
As we worked, another researcher—a white woman—was scrolling through microfilm at a nearby reader. She called over to one of the archive’s assistants.
“It says here that the mother of my great-great-grandmother was born in St. Domingue. Where’s that?” she asked.
“Present-day Haiti,” the assistant explained. “It used to be a French colony.”
“Haiti?” the woman repeated in a surprised voice.
The assistant seemed accustomed to this response. She gave a little speech about how the island had once been populated by blacks and whites, many of whom emigrated to New Orleans in the wake of a slave revolt at the end of the eighteenth century.
“So it doesn’t mean that she was black,” the woman said.
Sheila and I, catching each other’s glance, had to fight back laughter.
“Not necessarily,” the assistant said. But the woman had learned all she wanted for one day. She packed up her things and stood to go.