I was staying in New Orleans at a guesthouse recommended by my cousin Mark in Los Angeles. The owner, Keith Weldon Medley, was Creole and a writer too, at work on his own book about an ancestor: Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the famous legal case that established the “separate but equal” precedent for permitting and expanding segregation. After a day at the archives, I’d often join Keith in his kitchen, where we’d drink wine and chat about our research.
One night his friend Beverly joined us. She later told me that Keith had invited her over to check out the writer from New York who was in town doing research for a book about her newfound racial identity. Bev, as I came to know her, had balked on the phone: “This chick finds out she’s got a little black blood in her, and suddenly she’s black. This I’ve got to see.”
After pouring herself a glass of wine, Bev launched into news from her day. It didn’t take long for the discussion to move on to the local black community. Bev let it be known that she found their obsession with skin color irritating. “In San Diego, where I’m from, people didn’t go around with inferiority complexes”—she stretched out the phrase—“because they didn’t have good hair or they were darker than a paper bag. Nobody cared if you were yellow or brown; you were the same black motherfucker.”
Bev was medium brown and petite, with short dreadlocks, carefully applied deep-red lipstick, and quick emphatic gestures. If you said something she liked, she fixed her gaze on you, poked a finger at your chest, and declared, “Exactly!” making you feel as if you’d never been so right before. She worked raising money for Bishop Perry, a Catholic school for disadvantaged African American boys. It stood on the site of the Couvent School, started in 1848 by free blacks for their children, so she knew all about the history of the New Orleans free people of color.
In her spare time, Bev volunteered at WWOZ, the local public radio station. As I listened to her talk, I realized that I’d woken up a few mornings back to her silky-voiced entreaties during a recent fund drive. Suddenly she turned that silver tongue on me. “So, Keith tells me that you’re down here looking for your African roots.” She said “African roots” as if the words were surrounded by quotation marks.
“Actually I’ve been researching all of my father’s family,” I said. “The black and white sides.”
“But you didn’t know about the black side growing up.”
I told her that I found out when I was twenty-four, just before my father died.
“How’d you take the news?”
Bev’s voice contained a smirk I’d come to recognize from African Americans when they asked me this question. It was a dare for me to admit to my own racism. It held the sweetness of just desserts. I’d already heard stories from a research assistant at the library about white people who started to cry on hearing the explanation about what the “mu” stood for on the census record. Ironically, even if I had felt this way, my Wasp upbringing would have prevented me from making such a scene.
I told Beverly that at first I had thought that my black ancestry was cool—she smiled knowingly—until I realized that it was more complicated than that.
“What do you think now?” she asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said. “I want to know more.”
She looked me squarely in the eye. “Then there’s something you need to understand. Most African Americans didn’t have the same option as your father did. My grandmother, for example, had to endure prejudice. She never had a choice about where she could sit on the bus.”
I nodded, hesitant to speak for fear of sounding defensive.
“But your dad just glided on through without having to deal with Jim Crow or desegregating the schools or any of that. 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.”
Nobody had ever laid out the injustice of my father’s decision so bluntly before me. I held Bev’s gaze, seeing for a moment from her perspective the terrible unfairness and selfishness of my dad’s actions. After a few moments, I said quietly, “His choice makes me angry too.”
She inclined her head. “Why?”
“Because he cut me off from knowing about my history, my family,” I said. “And it’s hard to try to catch up now.”
Bev nodded thoughtfully. After a moment she looked at Keith and then clapped her hands, signaling that she’d made some sort of decision. She was an educator at heart, and she liked to have a project. She pointed at Keith’s chest. “You know what we’re got to do. We’ve got to take this girl to Indian practice. She’s got to meet the Chief.”
A few nights later, at Club Renaissance on North Galvez Street in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, a few blocks from the house where my father was born, I chanted a song of the Mardi Gras Indians, Shallow waters, oh mama, that Bev whispered was sung by Indian women washing clothes on the riverbank to let escaping slaves know where to cross; and I clapped and swayed with the rest of the crowd, most everyone besides me some shade of brown; and closed my eyes and listened to the thump and rattle of the tambourine and felt the wooden floor bounce, with the pounding feet of the men from the Yellow Pocahontas tribe and Big Chief Darryl Montana, a friend of Bev’s and Keith’s. And I pictured the women washing and the slaves running, their movements hurried along on our incantatory beat; and opened my eyes again to find the Big Chief right in front of me, turning on one foot, his arms splayed above him like the wings of a bird, fingers curled into claws, and then dropping low into his knees and raising up on tiptoe, rocking back and forth like that, his eyes staring out between a fray of dreadlocks at the eyes of Trouble Nation’s Big Chief, who had just entered the bar with his own tribe of men, wearing tracksuits or suit jackets, their necks and teeth flashing with gold; these men pushing us into one end of the room while this new chief pounded his chest and threw his arms skyward, declaring that he—not Darryl Montana—was the big chief; the chanting growing louder and the men’s rocking and turning and posing getting smaller and tighter, as if they were balanced now on a trembling rope high above us; and the crowd pushing back against me—Give ’em room; give ’em room—and the air wet with the men’s sweat that smelled nervous and sharp, and the spicy liquor breath all around me and the musky smell of the old bar and the rice and beans cooking in the back, and everyone fixed on this encounter before us, our chanting urging these men along, to where the waters will either rise and drown them or carry them safely to shore; and I closed my eyes again, as though my not seeing might turn me unseen, and flew in my mind’s eye down the street to where my father was born to collect whatever remained of him in this place, and remained in me, to bring to this moment, which he may once have witnessed himself; and I forgot about the color of my skin and that I wasn’t raised like the people here, and with my father in hand, I crossed those shallow waters to the other side.
Earlier Keith, who had written about the Mardi Gras Indians for the local paper, told me about their history. For over a hundred years, African American men from the Tremé neighborhood had been “masking Indian” and running through these streets on Mardi Gras day. In the weeks before Mardi Gras, the tribes would gather in their local bars to “practice” chanting their songs, dancing their dances, and staging confrontations with their rivals. In my dad’s time, meetings between the tribes occasionally turned violent, but now the encounters had all the flaunting and preening of a beauty pageant. These men who worked as carpenters or plasterers by day spent their nights and thousands of their dollars sewing their world-famous Mardi Gras suits, and it was the “prettiest” Indian rather than the “baddest” one who ruled the streets today.
A typical suit might feature an apron with a flower garden, hand stitched from beads, pearls, and stones into a three-dimensional design; wings four feet wide and far too laden with feathers and glue to ever take flight; and a crown weighing near a hundred pounds, three layers high and as ornate as a wedding cake. On Fat Tuesday, these men, sweating under the burden of their pride, paraded through the streets of their neighborhood, on the lookout for rival tribes. Their friends and neighbors trailed behind them, accompanying their chanting on tambourines and cowbells; and when two chiefs met up, the crowd surrounded them while the men shook their giant wings and danced.
The tradition was rooted in the alliance between Indian tribes and escaping slaves during Louisiana’s colonial period—the suits often carried depictions of Indians fighting off white settlers. And the ritualized choreography harked back to the dances the slaves would do in Congo Square, which themselves harked back to Africa. Keith also mentioned evidence that the original Mardi Gras Indians were inspired in part by the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that came to town with New Orleans’s 1884 Cotton Exposition. The first tribe, begun by Chief Darryl’s great-great-uncle in the 1880s, was in fact called the Creole Wild West. Whatever the source, Mardi Gras Indians had been a way of life in this neighborhood for more than a century, with traditions, rituals, and roles that fashioned members of the community into leaders as established and respected as those of any church. Given my father’s own “masking” as white, being among these men who masked as Indians to honor their history seemed like the perfect place for me to imagine myself as black in order to honor mine.
But back at the guesthouse, I was reminded of my whiteness once again. We’d met up with another friend of Keith’s at Club Renaissance, a guy named Barry who was African American, and he joined us afterward. Bev had never met Barry before, but they immediately hit if off. She made a joke about the gold teeth of one of the guys in Trouble Nation, and Barry laughed first and louder than the rest of us. They slapped hands, and Bev, in a friendly jibe about Keith’s and my Creole backgrounds, declared, “It’s a black thing.”
As far as I could tell, Barry didn’t know my story, and I wondered if he saw me as one of those white people who liked to dabble in African American culture. In my travels I’d come across people who “masked” as black: white guys with dreadlocks, wearing brightly colored dashikis, and calling everyone “brother” while engaging in elaborate handshakes; or white women who peppered their speech with “girl,” accompanied by finger snaps and wagging head. And these people annoyed me, especially if I was one of the only other white-looking people there. I felt implicated by their pantomime of blackness and embarrassed by the presumption that a culture could be performed like the steps to the latest dance craze. Also, while black culture is most often appropriated for its “cool” factor, these masquerades looked anything but cool to me. I knew that many African Americans snickered behind these people’s backs and referred to them as “wiggers.” I’d try to indicate my disapproval too, rolling my eyes at my companions. Yet there was something about these white people that I secretly admired, or even envied. For whatever reason—the neighborhood they’d been raised in, some perversion of white guilt, or because they just felt out of place around people who looked like themselves—these “wiggers” seemed to feel at home in black culture. Whether they were accepted or not, they had the consolation of their own convictions. They weren’t waiting, as I was, for someone to anoint them.
Over the next few years, Bev and I became close friends. Every once in a while, I’d ask her how she thought of me, as black or as white. And she’d offer the same response as my aunt Shirley and my friend Anjana from Charlottesville: “I think of you as Bliss. That’s how.” And she’d tell me again that she’d always been friends with all types, and that her own nephews and nieces, born to brothers- and sisters-in-law who were black, white, and Hispanic, made her family look like “the United Goddamned Nations.” Nevertheless, I had heard Bev talk about certain friends who were white, and the way that race could suddenly flare up and create a wall between them. And I wondered if that could ever happen to us.
During my next trip to New Orleans, a story about me and my research into my father’s racial background appeared in the local newspaper. I’d felt comfortable with the reporter and had talked freely—and rather windily—while she took copious notes. I shared my theory about how in certain parts of the country, white people’s only interactions with African Americans tended to be with the clerks at the supermarket or drugstore, which led them to forming negative stereotypes (since few young people of any race working in dead-end minimum-wage jobs seemed eager to be there). Here’s what ended up in the paper: “[Broyard’s] newfound racial identity...has caused her to examine her prejudices more carefully, she said, to think before labeling a black grocery clerk ‘dumb’ or ‘lazy.’”
The first phone call I got was from Bev, who told me that she’d been riding the streetcar to work with her daughter Brandi when she’d spied over a woman’s shoulder the headline WRITER EXPLORES HIDDEN BLACK HERITAGE. “And then the woman turns the page, and there’s your picture, and I’m up out of my seat, yelling across the aisle, ‘Brandi, Brandi, Bliss is in the paper!’” Bev went on, comparing herself to a woman from the projects, yelling from her front porch, wearing her shower shoes. “You should have seen the look that white chick gave me. She just folded her paper up and tucked it away.”
“So you haven’t read the article?”
“I just finished it.”
“Bev, that reporter totally misquoted me.”
“Right. I see how it is with you now.” Bev put on her ghetto voice: “You used to think dem niggers were lazy and stupid, ’til you realizes, uh-oh, I’m a nigger too!” She laughed heartily.
“It’s not funny. All my relatives are going to read this. People are going to think I’m a racist.”
“Yes, well, I expect they will. And what about this part?” Now she used her radio announcer voice: “‘Broyard is glad that her newfound racial identity has allowed her to explore African American culture.’ Is that what you’re doing here—exploring African American culture?” She didn’t add “with me,” but I understood that was what she meant.
“Bev, you know that our friendship is much more than just race,” I said. “But I am grateful to you for bringing me places and showing me things that I wouldn’t have found on my own.”
She considered this for a moment. Then she said: “Well, I do know you. I know Bliss, and so I know that whatever way you come off in the paper, that’s not the end of the story about you. But you better call dem cousins of yours, ’cuz you got some ’splainin’ to do.”
I was relieved that Bev and I had come to know each other as people, yet I still felt as if I had to align myself with one racial group or the other. And I wasn’t convinced yet that a person could cross from white to the other side. Then I discovered a family member who had done just that.