During my twenties I went through a phase of giving away my father’s clothes to various boyfriends. One of these men, Jack, happened to share my dad’s shoe size. At the time, I was living in my mother’s house in Cambridge. One Saturday night when Jack was over, we went through the jumble of shoes that my mom had gotten as far as moving out of her bedroom and into the closet in my dad’s study.
My father liked fashion and high-quality brands. Among the pairs Jack chose were some Paul Stuart loafers, some low-top city boots from Barneys, and a pair of hardly worn Timberland hiking shoes. Jack was a writer and lived frugally. He was more than happy to put these shoes to use.
We packed them up in a duffel bag. Since Jack had to get up early the next morning for an extra job he’d taken overseeing the delivery of the Sunday papers, I placed the bag by the front door where he wouldn’t forget it. He left out some beat-up Buster Brown–type boots—good for work, he’d said—to wear the next day, and we went to bed.
At 4:30 a.m. Jack slipped out without waking me—until he opened the front door, tripping the burglar alarm. I bolted upright in bed, Shit! Shit! Shit!—I’d forgotten to tell my mother not to arm the alarm—and went racing downstairs to turn it off. But my mom was already at the panel, punching in the code, and then the phone rang with the call from the alarm company, and she beat me again. I stood in the kitchen, naked except for the towel I’d grabbed, and smiled sheepishly while my mother relayed the password to the caller that indicated everything was all right. She hung up, shot me an annoyed glance, and disappeared back up the stairs without a word. This wasn’t the first time I’d caused a false alarm.
On the phone that night, Jack described his version of the events—the earsplitting wail pulsing from the house and the flashing lights that illuminated the sidewalk as he scurried down the street to his truck, his feet clad in his girlfriend’s dead father’s shoes and a bag full of half a dozen more banging at his side. The incident became a funny story he’d tell to friends. Everyone would laugh and roll their eyes at the obviousness of the metaphors—trying to fill my father’s shoes; stealing away, a thief in the night, from his house. I would laugh too, but the story exposed the conflicted place my father occupied for me a little too baldly for comfort. That Jack was fifteen years older, a nurturing fatherly type, and also a writer didn’t help matters.
Yet I persisted in my strange practice. The next boyfriend, a musician named Al, got some of my dad’s colorful sweaters and a jacket or two. Al was good-looking and a little cocky. He’d put on these jazzy sweaters and strut around. But the boyfriend after that, Bill, who accompanied me to New Orleans, was taller and broader than my father. He also flatly refused to be dressed up in his clothes (although he did end up with my mother’s dead brother’s tuxedo), and the habit was finally broken.
The obvious explanation is that I was looking for a man like my father, but the more I learned about my dad, the more I became determined to avoid men like him. Rather, I didn’t know how to rid myself of him, nor did I exactly want to. I missed my father even as my vision of him became more and more obscured, perhaps particularly as it became obscured. It felt like missing a ghost. If I placed his clothes on some form, maybe he’d reappear, the way the invisible man does at the end of the movie—slowly materializing to fill the empty suit.
At graduate school, in the stories that I was trying to write, fathers were appearing: charming, slightly bullying, sexy, artistic types not unlike my own dad. My classmates generally applauded them for their swaggering ways. I didn’t think of them as my father exactly, but I would borrow aspects of his character and then exaggerate them to explore some dynamic between fathers and daughters that I’d become fixated on.
After I’d been in Charlottesville for a few months, I received a letter from an editor at a New York publishing house. She’d come across the one story I had published so far, which described a daughter attending her dying father, and she wondered if I had more stories to show her. I didn’t, but I wrote back suggesting that after I finished graduate school maybe we could get in touch again.
A few months earlier, I’d heard from an editor at another New York publishing house, who invited me to lunch. When we got together, I learned that this woman wasn’t particularly interested in my fiction. She’d heard about my father’s racial identity from a mutual friend. The story had never been told publicly, and she thought that I was the person to do it.
I’d always imagined that I would eventually write about my father’s secret. A book would give me the courage and impetus to forge ahead in the rocky terrain of race and family rifts. Also, since this information about my identity had not been made public to me as I was growing up, the act of my making it public always felt like my right. Yet although I was becoming more comfortable and familiar with questions of race, I wasn’t ready to embark on this project. I put the editor off by explaining that I wanted to first work on a book of fiction so that I could try to find an audience on my own merit.
When classes ended in June 1995, I headed to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer to wait tables and clean houses to earn money for the following school year. One day I got a phone call at home from Rick Grand-Jean, a neighbor of ours and a close family friend. My mother and I often had dinner with Rick and his wife, Christine, during which we would sometimes talk about my father’s racial identity and my plans to write about it.
Rick was calling to report that at a cocktail party the night before, he’d met Henry Louis Gates Jr. “He’s the head of the Afro-American department at Harvard,” he said.
“I know who he is,” I said, slightly annoyed. Even if I weren’t reading and thinking about race all the time, it would be hard not to be familiar with Gates’s name. He was everywhere: on political talk shows, in the table of contents of the New Yorker, listed in some capacity (author, editor, foreword by, writer of a blurb) on the cover of almost every book on the black history table in my local Barnes & Noble.
Rick explained that my family’s name had come up in conversation, and Skip, as most people called him, had expressed interest in my father’s story. He’d known about my dad’s black ancestry from Shirley Broyard’s husband, Frank Williams, whom he’d met while at Yale. When Rick mentioned that I intended to write a book about my dad, Skip passed along his number to give to me.
I wondered out loud why the top African American academic in the country would want to talk to a twenty-eight-year-old short-story writer with one publication to her name.
“Maybe he wants to help you,” Rick suggested. “He seems like a nice guy.”
Five minutes later I was talking to the man himself. I’d called from the phone in the kitchen, an old-fashioned wall model with a rotary dial and a stretched-out cord that was always getting tangled. I started out the conversation pacing back and forth in front of the counter—I was anxious about sounding stupid or ill-informed—but his easygoing manner and a conversational style peppered with words like “dig,” “brother,” and “crazy motherfucker” soon relaxed me, and before long I was perched on the kitchen stool, my elbows propped on the counter, relaying my story with my own saucy language: So then my mother says, Your father is part black, and I’m like, That’s the secret? Big fucking deal!
Skip asked me question after question: about my father’s family and whether we ever saw them when I was growing up, about the manner in which I’d learned the secret, about my dad’s attitudes toward African Americans.
“He was totally prejudiced,” I said bitterly, feeling a small prick of betrayal. “You should have heard the things he said.”
Skip didn’t sound surprised. “That was probably the blackest thing about him,” he said.
I confided my confusion about what to call myself, and Skip told me a story about a student of his who’d discovered her black ancestry over one summer and returned to college with her hair in dreadlocks. I waited for him to add a coda: As if being black were as simple as changing one’s hairstyle. But he didn’t, which prompted me to wonder if I was making my identity quest too complicated.
Skip explained that his interest in my father’s story began back in the midseventies, while he was teaching at Yale. In 1971 my dad had gotten the job as the new daily book critic for the New York Times. No major daily newspaper in the United States, aside from Negro newspapers (as they were then called), had ever had a black critic on staff, and African American intellectuals around the country had been buzzing with the news ever since. Skip was occasionally contributing book reviews to the Times himself. One day he took the train down from New Haven to have lunch with a senior editor there. As he and the editor were chatting, Skip made a comment—a mischievous one—about being pleased to see a black critic on staff. The editor looked confused and asked him who he was talking about. “Why, Anatole Broyard,” Skip said. The older man pushed back his chair from the table and said—Skip put on a scolding patrician voice here—That sort of scandalous talk will not be tolerated if you hope to keep writing for the New York Times. Because he did want to keep writing for the paper, Skip muttered something about how he must have been mistaken. The conversation resumed, but a few minutes later the editor circled back to the topic: Well, he might be one thirty-second black—a great-grandmother or something somewhere—but no more than that.
“No more than that,” I repeated sarcastically. “Thank God.”
After talking for almost an hour, Skip promised to put together a reading list for me and get back in touch. I stood in the kitchen for a minute after we hung up, staring out the big picture window onto the jungle of my mother’s garden. The head of Harvard’s Afro-American department had told me emphatically that I had to write about my father’s racial identity, that it would make a wonderful and important story. The notion of my life having a grand purpose swelled my chest, and for the next few days, as I cleaned the houses of the Vineyard elite, I imagined them saying, years from now, To think that the author of that book used to mop our floors!
The next time I heard from Skip, I was back in Charlottesville. He called to say that he was going to be in town for a memorial service for the director of the university’s black studies institute, and he wondered if I was available to have lunch.
“Uh, sure,” I said, a little hesitantly. I couldn’t imagine why he was being so generous with his time. “You can give me the titles of those books that you mentioned I should read.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I’ve got to put that together.”
I wondered briefly if his interest was romantic. I’d run across such men before: older intellectual types who fancied themselves Don Juans. They’d develop a fascination with my father, and in his absence, settle on having me as the next best thing.
A day or two before our lunch date, Skip called again to say that he had to cancel. “I was really looking forward to meeting you,” he said. “But I’ve got to go to Washington because they’re giving me this award.” He hoped that I understood.
“Well, of course,” I said, more confused than ever. “Wow, congratulations.”
“Yeah,” he answered modestly. “But listen, I’ve got some good news. You know that I’m under contract to write these profiles for the New Yorker. Well, I talked to the editor, Tina Brown, and she’s interested in a piece about Anatole.”
I hadn’t known about the contract. I swelled up again, this time with my own naïveté, which threatened to rise in my throat and choke me. Besides being an academic, Skip was a writer too. Of course his interest in my father’s story would involve telling it.
“Isn’t that great?” Skip asked.
No, I told him. It wasn’t great. Not at all. I was planning on writing about my father. “As you know,” I added pointedly.
“Well, why haven’t you, then?” he asked, a new sharp tone in his voice. “You’ve known for over five years now.”
I couldn’t believe this. “I’m not going to fight with you over my own father like he’s some sort of commodity,” I said.
“I’m not trying to scoop you, Bliss,” Skip said, sounding insulted.
My voice rose. I didn’t care who the hell he was. But I couldn’t make the Harvard professor understand how important it was to me to be the one to publicly identify my father as black for the first time.
“You’re worried about the stigma. That’s it. Isn’t it?” he said. “You’re afraid of being identified as black.”
Now it was my turn to sound insulted. I told Gates that I felt I’d been done an injustice by having my father’s ancestry kept from me, and that it was unfair for him to wrest away control over my identity once again. But of course my personal battle was not his concern. My dad was the most well known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century, and Gates was determined to tell his story.
We hung up at a crossroads. As he continued to call throughout the fall, trying to win my cooperation—and by extension, my family’s—my trash-talking buddy Skip rapidly disappeared. Messages from Henry Louis Gates, Professor Gates, Dr. Gates, and then finally Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. piled up on my answering machine.
We argued back and forth. He later told my mother that except for Louis Farrakhan, nobody had ever been as angry with him. He kept insisting that his article wouldn’t get in the way of my own writing project; in fact it might generate more interest. He even offered to ask Tina Brown if she’d run a thousand-word essay from me about my dad in an upcoming “black issue” of the magazine.
“I told you, I’m not ready yet,” I said petulantly.
Eventually Skip realized that he was barking up the wrong tree. Someone introduced him to my mother, whom he managed to persuade to participate with the argument that of all the black writers who were lining up to take on the subject of Anatole Broyard, he would be the most sympathetic.
The article appeared the following June; I flew up to Boston the day the issue was released. A row of New Yorkers lined the glass window of a Logan Airport newsstand. The white wrapper advertising highlights from the magazine read in big black letters: WHITE LIKE ME. THE PASSING OF ANATOLE BROYARD. I had a wild impulse to charge inside the store and rip all the magazines down. I wasn’t ready yet.
I headed to the house of my dad’s old pal Mike Miller, where family friends were gathering. The party had been planned the way politicians plan events for election night, allowing room for positive and negative contingencies, with lots of booze and food on hand. I’d managed to get an advance copy of the issue, and I’d spent the last twenty-four hours poring over the twenty pages recounting my father’s life, and my own, underlining passages and taking notes.
I read about my grandparents Nat and Edna, and my father’s childhood. I read about what people had thought and said about my dad—his racial identity and romantic career—behind his back. I read about my father’s desire to write fiction and the theory that he was unable to do so because he was living a lie. I read about that day at the hospital when I was told the secret, and how my aunt Shirley thought that I was handling the news rather well. I read about this man, my dad, who was a “virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation” and “a connoisseur of the liminal—of crossing over and...getting over.” And I read about my own need to now reformulate who it was that I understood my father—and myself—to be.
Years later 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, who had known and lived with him for most of twenty-four years; that I’d be shut out of the conversation by their shared language of blackness. And so, most of all, I read for the ways that Gates had gotten my father wrong.
“It’s not so bad,” people at the party said. “It could have been worse.”
And they were right: the piece was not unsympathetic, despite its summation of my father’s life as a kind of Faustian bargain. But my family and I stood stiff with anger, blinded under the glare of this sudden spotlight. The characterization of my father as an obsessive seducer of women particularly upset my mother. My brother, who was sensitive to any slight of our dad, talked about wanting to punch the professor’s lights out. I took issue with Gates’s claim that my father wanted to be someone other than Anatole Broyard. “The exact opposite is true,” I said to anyone who would listen. “He just wanted to be himself, without all the restrictions and stereotypes of being black.”
For their part, my father’s friends disputed the extent to which my father’s racial identity was described as a secret—most everyone in his life knew. And they especially took objection to Gates’s portrayal of my dad as evasive or a trickster. My father’s charm, unlike that of some charismatic people, didn’t rest in his mysteriousness but in how genuinely he connected to others. My father’s friends were smart, observant, sensitive people; they couldn’t have been fooled so easily.
But, someone pointed out, there was no denying that earning a long profile in the favored magazine of the country’s intelligentsia represented a certain level of achievement in a person’s life. Then the conversation moved on. Anatole had been dead for nearly six years now, and these various friends from the different walks of his life welcomed the chance to catch up.
The next day I returned to Charlottesville, where I had decided to spend the summer. I’d just graduated from the writing program, and I busied myself trying to figure out how to assemble the life of a writer. One morning I received a thick envelope in the mailbox. It was from Gates’s research assistant, and it contained all the genealogy that had been collected to prove my father’s race. I could barely make out the various names on the census records, obituaries, and marriage licenses, which appeared to have been photocopied many times. But there was a copy of my father’s birth certificate, which I hadn’t looked at since my trip to New Orleans three years earlier. Someone had penned the word “colored” in the margin in case the “(col)” following my father’s name wasn’t clear. On my own birth certificate, my father’s race was listed as white.
Gates had advised my mother when they were discussing my objections to his article that the best thing she could do was to help me accept my blackness. He suggested that I could even petition the court in Connecticut to change my father’s race to “black” on the record of my own birth. As I filed away these papers with the rest of my genealogical data, I wondered how a man whose lifework was dedicated to the notion that a person’s race was the most signifying element about him could propose that switching sides was as easy as changing a word on a piece of paper, as simple as restyling one’s hair.
In September a friend from high school called to let me know that another friend of ours, Eric, had died. He’d been sick with a brain tumor for a few months, and I’d missed my chance to visit him in the hospital when his wife, Amy, who also went to our high school and had been a good friend of mine, was still allowing people to come. Everyone from our class and the class above us was flying in from around the country for the memorial service, and I promised that I’d be there too.
I’d lost touch with many of these people since my parents had left Connecticut seven years earlier, but I was reminded over the course of the visit how intimately these friends had known me and my family and how they were among the shrinking population in my life who had known my dad. Yet the specter of the New Yorker profile, which described my father’s acceptance by the Connecticut gentry as the ultimate test of his reinvented self, made me feel awkward and self-conscious. Over the years I’d told a few of my closer friends about my dad’s secret, and since I’d arrived, one or two people had mentioned quietly that they’d seen the article, but for the most part the subject wasn’t openly addressed.
On Sunday morning before the service, we were hanging out at the home of two other high school friends who’d ended up marrying each other. They lived in the kind of eighteenth-century farmhouse that my own parents would have coveted: low-beamed ceilings, oversized fireplace, and wide pine floorboards. A group of people were gathered on the couch, leafing through old photo albums, when my friend Nick, on seeing a picture of one of the two black guys in our upper school, made a joke about never being able to tell the men apart. A few people laughed, and I noticed Chris, the same guy who’d gone after Bob that day in the lunchroom, glance at me. Now I was the one unseen at the far end of the table. I got up and left the room.
Compared to the jokes that I’d made in the lunchroom, Nick’s was pretty benign. Part of what made everyone laugh was the fact that Nick had been particularly close with Ed, the other black guy at our school. Of course he would recognize him. But as I walked down the hallway toward the bathroom, I was shaking. A little while later, I pulled Nick aside and told him about my father’s ancestry. He grinned and said, “So you’re telling me you’re a sister?” And then I told him how his comment had made me feel.
“But you know me, Bliss,” he said. “You know I’m not a racist. That’s just my obnoxious sense of humor.”
The problem was, I had lost my sense of humor, at least on this score. I could no longer locate myself in the world I was raised in. I didn’t have a perspective on the landscape anymore; I couldn’t gauge how big anything was, or how small. It was as if my own life in Connecticut had existed only in my father’s fantasies, and now that they’d been laid bare, I’d ceased to exist there at all. One night over the weekend, I kept my friend Holly awake for hours, questioning her about who I’d been back then and what role I’d played among our gang. I honestly couldn’t remember.
I knew that these old friends looked to me to set the tone about my father’s blackness. If I didn’t make a big deal out of it, then neither would they. They’d look past it, just as we had looked past that time when we’d seen another friend’s mother run screaming across their front lawn as her husband chased her and the friend’s little brother hopped up on his father’s back, crying and yelling for him to stop. It was clear that we’d seen something we shouldn’t have, and so we gathered our things together and stood to go.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to pretend that everything was still the same, even if I could. The world and manner in which we’d been brought up were implicated by the revelation about my father. I was coming to realize that, like the old Groucho Marx joke, one of the attractions this particular club held for my dad was the fact that it wouldn’t have accepted him as a member.
My friends had liked, or even loved, my father, especially the boys, whom my dad had talked to like men, over beers and cheese and crackers (which I was dispatched to the kitchen to fetch for them) after games of touch football or swims in our pool. He showed these young men that literature and the emotions it invoked could be sexy and cool. He told them stories about women and war and running a bookstore in Greenwich Village. But mostly he asked them about themselves, and as they formulated their answers, he taught them that they actually had something to say.
Nevertheless, over the weekend, I’d heard that in Eric’s hospital room, back in June when the New Yorker article came out, the word “nigger” had been tossed around in conversation. I wasn’t told whether the term was used in connection with my dad or not, and I didn’t ask. But I decided then and there that I would no longer put myself in the position of finding out what these people thought about my father—and me. I would never give them the opportunity to shut me out.
I left town shortly after the memorial service and didn’t return for years. When people asked me where I was from, I started to answer that although I’d been raised in Connecticut, that fact didn’t say anything about me. I began to joke that I didn’t even like driving through the state.
Before I left, though, at the church that Sunday afternoon, as I was waiting for Eric’s service to start, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I turned around and saw Dawn, the girl who’d made the comment about being one of the few chips in the cookie.
“Is that Bliss Broyard?” she said. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years.
I nodded and said hello.
“Well, bless you,” she said, smiling broadly.
Perhaps Dawn was just happy to see me, but I imagined as I watched her walk away down the aisle that actually she’d seen the article about my dad, and her blessing was a welcoming home of a different sort.
I took advantage of being up north to visit my mother on Martha’s Vineyard, where she was in the process of taking up residence full-time. I’d been there for a few days when I answered a phone call from someone asking for Sandy Broyard.
“Anatole’s wife,” the woman said in an accent that I couldn’t place.
“Can I tell her who’s calling?” I asked.
“Bliss?” the woman said. “Is that her daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hello,” the woman said, her voice suddenly excited. “This is Vivian Carter, your cousin from California.” She went on to explain that she and my father were second cousins, which made Vivian and me second cousins once removed. She said something about six brothers and started rattling off a list of names: Emile, Octave, Anthony, Henry, Gilbert, and Paul, my great-grandfather, whom she had known when she was a child in New Orleans.
“I read about your dad in that magazine,” she said. “And I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you ever since. The article was full of lies. Your father was white.”
I sat down on my mother’s bed. “What do you mean?”
“There was this woman at the Board of Health in New Orleans who used to change people’s birth certificates,” Vivian said. “It was written up in all the newspapers.” She told me that the Broyards were French, that they’d always been French, that she’d been researching the family for years.
I fantasized briefly about proving Gates wrong, forcing the New Yorker to print a retraction explaining that all of this had turned out to be a colossal mistake.
“Why would this woman want to change someone’s birth certificate?” I asked.
“Because she was trying to pin something on them.”
“But I’ve also seen Broyards listed as mulatto in the census.”
“They could have had Indian blood. The Indians were listed as mulattoes too.”
“Is it a problem,” I asked, “if we are part black?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re not,” Vivian said breezily. “We’re all white. And there are other Broyards out here in LA, and they’re white too.”
She urged me to come out to California and see for myself. I said that I would try. In the meantime I offered to send her the genealogy I’d collected so far. I hung up the phone, unsure what to make of this news.
That night I called up Todd, and we joked that next we’d learn that we were really Jewish or that we were descended from English royalty. For my mother’s part, she felt vindicated by the phone call. After living with my father for thirty years, she didn’t think of him as black, insofar as she thought of him as any race at all. I understood her reasoning: My father had never played by the rules; why should we have expected him to follow the one-drop definition of blackness? Such arbitrary boundaries were no match for his outsized personality, and it was incomprehensible to imagine anyone but him arbitrating over his identity. But it had never occurred to me that other branches of the family had followed the same course.
A few weeks later, I received a card from Vivian saying how glad she was that we had connected. She wrote that the article had really done a number on her. She included a picture of herself and her husband, Anthony, posed on a balcony outside of what looked to be a condominium complex. The month and year, September 1996, were recorded on the back. Vivian had told me on the phone that her husband was a photographer, and I imagined her waking up one morning to the bright blue sky in the photo’s background and asking him to set up his tripod outside to take a picture for her newfound cousin back east. I imagined Vivian thinking to herself, and perhaps even saying to her husband too, I want to show her how white we are.
The couple looked much younger than their age of midsixties. Her husband was tall with thick gray hair, brown eyes, and square, handsome features. She wore her straight dark hair in a side part and had black eyes and thin lips, which were accented with bright pink lipstick. They looked happy, and they looked almost entirely white except for their skin, which glowed with a warm yellow undertone, as if it had absorbed some of the sun’s light and was now reflecting it back.
I believed that most white people accepted the couple as white. Black people, on the other hand, would recognize their roots in an instant.
I began to look for other Broyards in Los Angeles to see on what side of the color line they fell. I came across a review in an LA paper of a play called Inside the Creole Mafia, coauthored by someone named Mark Broyard. The review, titled “Skin Test,” described the play’s spoofing of the Creole community’s obsession with color: the intrigue of who was passing and who was not and the tests once used to gain entry to dances—was the person lighter than a paper bag? could he pass a fine-tooth comb through his hair? I thought to myself that this guy and I had to be related.
I telephoned Mark and told him who I was.
“I think we might be cousins,” I said.
“I’m sure we are,” Mark said. “I’m in the middle of reading your father’s memoir right now.”
My dad’s account of life in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, Kafka Was the Rage, which my mother published after his death, had just come out in paperback. Mark told me that as a musician and an artist, he related to my father’s story about art and music (and women) beyond the family connection.
“Man, your dad could write!” he said.
I was so excited to find a relative who spoke the language of books and making art that I forgot for a moment about the purpose of my call.
“Oh yeah. So Mark. What’s the deal? Are the LA Broyards white or black?”
“Well, I’m a Broyard,” he said, sounding annoyed by the question. “And I live in Los Angeles, and I’m black. I know other Broyards out here, and they’re black too.”
I told him about my conversation with Vivian Carter.
Now Mark sounded sad. “Yeah, I’ve heard about her. I think my father talks to her once in a while. Well,” he said. “I guess you’re just going to have to come out here and check us out for yourself.”