Back in Brooklyn I started to look for my father. It was a strange notion—searching for a dead person. For the first few years after my father died, I used to dream that he wasn’t really dead: he was just off somewhere and I hadn’t looked for him hard enough. In the dream he’d leave a message on my answering machine, or send me a postcard telling me where to find him. But always the message would be garbled or the directions would be unclear, and I’d wake up with a start, my sense of loss redoubled.
When you lose a family member or close friend, people tell you, to console you, that your loved one will always live on in your memories. They act as if this process occurs involuntarily: a biological trick to offset your grief, just as the brain suppresses traumatic memories that are too difficult to handle. Your friends don’t tell you to record everything that you remember about the dead person because you will indeed forget many things over time. Nor do they warn you that your memories will become irreversibly mortared into a monument of the “dearly departed”—some myth that you fashion to help organize your recollections to better retrieve them. Nor are you told about the contaminating influence of other people’s stories, which seem all the more vivid compared to the familiar old statue in the corner of your brain. And absolutely no one will suggest that you might begin to wonder how well you knew your family member or close friend in the first place, now that it’s too late to learn anything more firsthand.
I looked first for my dad in his large collection of writing: the essays and short fiction that he published in his twenties and thirties that established his literary reputation; the memoir about his life in Greenwich Village during the 1940s, when he first became a writer; his collection of articles about family life in exurban Connecticut that originally appeared in the Times in the 1970s; his book, published posthumously, about his experience of being critically ill; and even the 1,500 or so book reviews he wrote during his thirteen-year stint as a daily book reviewer. I also read the many drafts of stories that he wasn’t able to publish and the journals and notes he kept for the novel that he could never finish.
Surprisingly for someone who was supposed to be concealing his identity, much of my father’s work focused on himself and his family. His first published story, in 1954, dealt with his father’s death four years earlier, when my father was twenty-nine. Based on its positive reception, my dad secured a contract for a novel expanding the story of his father’s death against the backdrop of leaving his childhood home of Brooklyn for Greenwich Village. After his mother became widowed, my father began increasingly to include her in his stories and essays, although he saw her less and less frequently. In his articles about domestic life for the Times, my father often recalled his youth, contrasting it with my brother’s and mine. In his journals my father jotted down scenes from his family’s life, from his refusal at age five to hand over some flowers that he’d been instructed to lay upon the church altar to the first forlorn Thanksgiving with his mother and sister Lorraine after his father’s death.
I recognized the father I’d known in these writings, but the colored boy from New Orleans and Brooklyn was harder to locate. Even in his private journals, my father never referred to himself directly or indirectly as black. In some instances he wrote about black people—or Negroes and “colored,” as he called them in the 1940s and 1950s—but they were always “them,” people different from himself. In the late 1950s he made an observation about a “spade” at the Village Gate who says to a white girl, “I’m a very ethereal cat,” and the difference grew.
At the same time, his writing contained clues that he wasn’t exactly white: listening to gospel on the family radio; taking on American jazz as his subject during a time, the 1940s, when it was considered the special province of African Americans; and displaying an intimate knowledge of Negro life—their social pastimes, slang, and attitudes about themselves—that a white person either wouldn’t know or dare to write about with such authority.
I sought out the people who knew my father to find out what race they thought he considered himself. To his friends from his youth, he was just another one of the guys in their happy tight-knit gang of middle-class Negroes growing up during the 1920s and 1930s in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. They knew him by his childhood nickname Bud, and remembered him as handsome, a good dancer, a big tease, and popular with the young ladies. My mother, on the other hand, maintained that my father wasn’t “really black,” a position that backed up his right to define himself and distinguished him from the kinds of black people—poor, criminal, angry—that she encountered on the news. Yet the late writer Harold Brodkey recalled that my father himself, during a discussion about his racial identity in the early 1980s, had insisted that he was “really black.” Brodkey’s subtle grasp of the complexities of human nature, as displayed in his many short stories appearing in the New Yorker, made him not only one of my father’s favorite contemporary writers but also an insightful confidant. Harold had told my father that he didn’t believe he was black, or at least he didn’t believe that my father knew anything about the sort of lives that most African Americans lived.
My father’s own record on the question of his race didn’t clear up the confusion. When he was seventeen, he completed an application for a social security number on which he had to identify his race for the first time. Marks appear next to both WHITE and NEGRO, and there’s a mysterious C in the space following OTHER, leaving me to guess at the circumstances that produced such a muddled response.
Even the degree of secrecy that my father maintained about his background was unclear. My father’s best friend in his later years, the noted psychologist Michael Vincent Miller, who authored Intimate Terrorism, about the crisis in contemporary love, and has lectured widely on the topic of disappointment, would certainly have been a sympathetic audience, but the two men never discussed the subject. Although Mike had heard the gossip, he assumed that my father didn’t want to talk about it and therefore respected his wishes. Yet another writer, Michael Mewshaw, who hardly knew my dad, recalled being at a cocktail party together at the home of his editor in Westport, Connecticut, in the 1970s, where he heard my father reveal to a group of writers and publishing folk that he was a colored man according to his birth certificate.
My aunt Shirley takes the most definitive view: my father was raised black and became white. When she talks to me about her and my father’s childhood, she doesn’t refer to him as Bud or Anatole or the more distant “your father,” but “my brother.” As Shirley repeats “my brother” over and over—as if she must remind herself of their connection—she reclaims him and the truth about her family’s identity. As the only survivor, she has earned this right. Also, after forty-five years of marriage to a civil rights lawyer and a lifetime of thinking about race issues, Shirley had no question about what she was, and she seemed unable—or unwilling—to imagine herself or her family members as ever feeling otherwise.
To reveal the young colored boy that my father had been, I had to carefully strip away the father that I had known. It was like uncovering a pentimento, the part of a painting that is hidden beneath the surface of the paint, the artist’s first try. My father’s portrait contained hints of this earlier picture: in some places, the underlying image matched up perfectly with my sense of my dad; elsewhere it had been obscured completely. And then every once in a while, both portraits came into focus simultaneously, and I could see how each version of my father had informed the other.
I found him after all, although he was different from the person I remembered: more vulnerable to others’ opinions and less self-assured about the choices he’d made. He seemed both needier and more selfish, less heroic and more human. I imagined him impatient with my eagerness to figure him out. It would bruise his ego to think that a problem he wrestled with all his life could be resolved. I imagined him defending himself, and I imagined him wanting to be forgiven.