In September of 1997, a few months after I spoke to Mark Broyard, I flew out to Los Angeles. On the second morning of my trip, I headed in my rental car to a local Creole restaurant called Harold and Belle’s to meet the white and black clans of the LA Broyards. Mark had picked the place and was contacting his relatives to invite them along, and I’d relayed the plans to Vivian Carter, whom I told to bring the family members that she knew.
I was staying with the older brother of a friend from college. Earlier that morning I asked his wife to help me with directions to the restaurant, and after looking up the address on the map, she said with alarm in her voice that it was located in South-Central. I had already told this couple my father’s story, but I could see that this detail—I was heading to the land of the LA riots—made my black ancestry true to her in a way that it wasn’t before. Although she was the metro editor of a local paper, which I imagined would make her familiar, if not comfortable, with the different parts of the city, she talked about South-Central as if it were behind enemy lines. She made me promise to ask one of my relatives to lead me out of the neighborhood when we were done.
I started to feel apprehensive when I turned onto Jefferson Boulevard, where Harold and Belle’s was located, but as I passed some automart stores and a hair salon and then a gas station and a bank—all the usual features of an urban landscape—and noticed the people on the street—mostly women pushing strollers—I couldn’t see what was supposed to be so threatening about the neighborhood.
I pulled up to the restaurant a few minutes early. I was sitting in my car, putting on some lipstick, when suddenly a man’s face appeared outside my window. When I turned toward him, the man smiled and held up a bouquet of yellow tulips. I opened the car door and Mark Broyard leaned inside to hug me. “Welcome, cousin,” he said.
We sat in the car for a moment, looking through the genealogy that I’d brought, trying to figure out how we were connected. But I didn’t need old census records to tell me that this man and I shared the same blood. His compact, narrow frame reminded me of my father’s or my brother’s build, and he shared my dad’s smoky good looks—with soft brown eyes, a cleft chin, and a mustache.
Everyone else arrived at once. Thirteen of us in all gathered in the lobby of the restaurant; from the black side, ten members of Mark’s extended family, and from the white side, only Vivian and Anthony. Vivian explained that the other relatives she invited couldn’t make it on such short notice. I was trying to pick no side, as the intermediary of sorts.
If I hadn’t been told already who was living as white and who was living as black, I wouldn’t have known. In the pictures that were taken outside under the midday sun after the meal, we all appear roughly the same shade of golden brown. We also looked as if we’d been raised in the same types of neighborhoods and shopped at the same types of stores, with everyone dressed in comfortable stylish clothing, wearing tasteful jewelry and chic sunglasses. My relatives did not look like the kind of black people my host’s wife might have pictured that morning on discovering that I was meeting them in South-Central LA.
I pulled out my genealogy again, in hopes of establishing some common ground. Nobody could make much sense of the jumble of census records and obituaries, but Vivian, who seemed most familiar with the family tree, managed to explain how everyone was related.
After we were seated, the waitress came to take our orders. She looked to be a Creole, and as I watched her move around the table, chatting easily with my relatives about the specials of the day and answering their inquiries after the owner, I wondered whether she would see me as one of them. Suddenly it was my turn. I hadn’t had a chance to look at the menu and blurted out that I would have a club sandwich. Mark’s father, Emile, who was seated across from me, looked down and shook his head. He told the waitress to bring me some gumbo too.
“She just found out she’s Creole,” he explained. “She’s still learning.” He turned to me and said, “Gumbo, that’s what we are.”
Heads nodded around the table. “That’s right,” a voice chimed in.
“A little bit of everything,” Emile continued. “Black, white, French, Indian. A delicious stew.” With his big belly and knowing smile, Emile was the elder statesman at the table. A lifelong smoker, he’d been afflicted with emphysema in recent years, which turned his voice husky and thin. Everyone quieted to better hear him. “I’m curious,” he said, nodding at me. “What did you and your brother think when you heard that your father was black?”
“It must have been quite a shock,” one of the younger cousins offered.
“It wasn’t, actually,” I said. “Suddenly a lot of things made sense—like why we never saw my father’s family when we were growing up.” I explained that we’d learned about the presence of a secret a few weeks earlier, and we were relieved that it wasn’t something more troubling. I told them Todd’s joke about always knowing that he wasn’t built like the average white guy, which made everyone laugh.
Emile took an envelope out of his jacket and handed it to me across the table. Inside were photos of my dad, fifty years earlier, on a street corner wearing his army uniform; his sisters as young women; and my grandparents Nat and Edna.
“You knew my father’s family?” I asked, looking up at Emile.
He shook his head. “These were taken by some mutual friends,” he said. “But we always knew about your dad, and your family too, out in Connecticut. You just didn’t know about us.”
I imagined my family as a subject over dinner—someone mentioning that she’d spotted my father’s name in the newspaper or a magazine, a debate ensuing about the choices he’d made, difficult questions from children about why a person wouldn’t want to be black. I pictured myself at dinner with my own family, asking my father why we never saw his mother or his sisters, scolding him for his old-fashioned ideas and bigoted ways.
Vivian had some photos too. Hers were organized in a series of albums that she’d brought in a big plastic bag along with her folders of genealogy. She had the most documentation about the family of anyone there, although she had the least contact with the members themselves. She was sitting next to Emile, and as she went through her pictures, naming this person and that person, she kept mentioning how all of them went for white.
Emile looked over her shoulder and asked, “So he doesn’t own up to his color?” And then he’d pick out someone else, “She doesn’t either?”
Vivian’s photo album made its way around the table. As Mark passed it to me, he chucked me in the ribs and whispered: “Check out all these white Broyards.”
We both laughed under our breath. Most of the people in the photos looked phenotypically black. Later I wondered whether the pictures we’d taken after the meal would eventually end up in Vivian’s album, where we’d all be reclaimed as white one day too.
For the next three days, I shuttled between the different camps of the LA Broyards, learning about the various paths my relatives had taken as they negotiated the color line. First I visited Vivian.
She opened the door, hugged me hello, and immediately began complaining about the conversation during brunch.
“Black this, black that,” she said. “It was too much, didn’t you think?”
Before I had a chance to answer, she took off into the apartment to give me a tour. I followed her through the living room, past the dining alcove and galley kitchen, into one crowded bedroom, then a second that had been turned into an office, and then out onto a balcony, where we stopped. I recognized the setting from the picture Vivian had sent.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“It’s private,” she said.
Then we headed back inside, down the hallway, past a row of photographs. I paused at one of a young woman with big brown eyes and olive skin. “Who’s this?” I asked, turning to Vivian and Anthony.
“My grandmother,” Anthony said.
“She’s beautiful,” I said, surprised to see the picture of a relative who looked recognizably black hung in such a prominent location.
We sat down at the dining room table. Birth certificates belonging to various relatives covered the tabletop—some carrying the racial designation white and others with a “col” appearing after the name. Vivian invited me to inspect them more closely.
“See how the c-o-l is sometimes written faintly, the letters made up by a series of dots?” she asked. “That means that the people at the Board of Health weren’t sure what race the person was.” She told me that she’d taken my father’s own birth certificate (which I’d sent to her along with my package of genealogy) to a handwriting expert, who determined that the notation “colored” in the margin had been penned by a different hand from the rest. That was proof, Vivian said, that the record had been doctored.
I looked at Anthony for some recognition of the paranoia in his wife’s appraisal, but he was smiling and nodding along, as if he were proud of her ingenious sleuthing.
“But I got this copy from Henry Louis Gates,” I said. “I imagine that the note in the margin was made by the person who collected the genealogy for him.”
“Exactly!” Vivian said, pounding her finger on the tabletop. “That writer was trying to pin something on your dad. What right does he have to decide what your father was?”
Actually, I’d been wondering the very same thing. “But you’ll admit, won’t you, that somewhere, way back, there were some black ancestors?”
No, Vivian wouldn’t admit that. She preferred to attack the system instead. Why should she let some outdated one-drop rule held over from slavery times tell her who she could be? Besides, she didn’t feel black, she said.
“That’s right,” Anthony agreed. “It’s all about the attitude, and we don’t have the black attitude.”
“Which is what?” I asked.
“Inferior,” Anthony explained. “Lower class.”
Vivian and Anthony wanted to know what I would tell people when they asked me what I was. Before I could answer, Vivian volunteered, “When people ask me, I turn the question around and ask them why they want to know. I tell them”—her voice went coy and she smiled seductively—“I’ll be whoever you want me to be.” She leaned back in her chair, looking satisfied. Other times, Vivian said, she might tell them that she was from Louisiana, and they’d say, “Oh, so you’re one of those crazy Cajuns.” Now her smile turned cockeyed. “And I tell them, ‘That’s right!’”
“Well, I think I’ll just tell the truth,” I said, when Vivian was finished.
“The truth,” she repeated with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“That I’m mixed,” I continued. “That I’m Norwegian and Creole.” I hesitated for a moment. Why wasn’t I saying that I would tell people that I was black? Wasn’t that what I expected of Vivian and Anthony? “And I’ll explain what Creole means,” I said more firmly, “in case they don’t know. That it means French and African.”
Vivian jabbed her finger at me. “The minute you say that, people will try to pin it on you. They’ll start thinking differently about you.” She crossed her arms over her chest, scrutinizing me. “You don’t look black and you weren’t raised with the black attitude. Why say anything at all?”
I knew that no matter what else lay behind Vivian and Anthony’s pitch for whiteness, they truly believed that they had my best interests at heart. I tried to explain that it seemed easier to be honest, that I didn’t feel ashamed of my black ancestry, that times were different now.
“Oh no,” Anthony said, shaking his head. “There’s still a stigma attached to being black. There are still plenty of people who are prejudiced.”
I said that I didn’t want to hide anything. That I was afraid of being caught in a lie. “What if I have a child and it comes out dark?”
“But that won’t happen so long as you don’t marry beneath you,” Vivian said.
“Beneath me?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“She means education level,” Anthony said. “Stuff like that.”
I was tempted to tell them that I didn’t want to end up like them: lost inside the maze of my own arguments, trampling on some part of myself in the process of trying to flee it. But no matter what, they were my family, and I didn’t want to hurt them, so I told them that I’d never had any Broyard relatives growing up, and now that I was finally meeting them, I didn’t want to do anything that might estrange us again.
Vivian grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “No, you should never lose touch with your family.” She told me about a cousin who lived on the outskirts of LA who didn’t see the rest of the family. She tried to get him to come to the brunch and meet some of the relatives, but he was living as white, and he worried that if he was seen associating with blacks, it would raise suspicions.
I pointed out the unlikehood of his bumping into any white people he knew in South-Central, but Vivian just shrugged and kept talking. “It was his mother’s doing,” she explained. “She was illiterate, and she desperately wanted her children to learn to read and write. So back in New Orleans in the 1930s, she changed the family’s last name to something slightly different so she could send her kids to the white school, which, of course, was much better than the colored one.”
I nodded. I could understand this reasoning.
“I’m the only one he talks to,” Vivian went on, “and he’s petrified that I’m going to die and he won’t have any connection to the family at all.”
I wondered what he’d gained for all that he’d lost; whether it was worth it.
“He’s obsessed with genealogy,” Vivian continued, “but he’s afraid to request the records from the state archives himself because someone might connect his last name with the Broyard name. So he has me write away for them instead.” She scooped up the pile of certificates still scattered across the table. “That’s how I ended up with these.”
A sudden urgency entered Vivian’s voice: “But I never cut off ties with my family. I see everyone when I go back to New Orleans, no matter how they live. My cousin, though”—she tossed the pile of records back onto the table—“this is all he’s got.”
The next morning I met Erin, Mark’s sister, at her mother-in-law’s house, where she and her husband, Michael, were living, so we could ride together over to her dad’s place. The house was in Hancock Park, an upscale Los Angeles enclave. As Erin showed me around the Tudor-style mansion—the gardens, pool, and guesthouse out back—she told me stories about the previous owner, Nat King Cole.
Cole bought the house in 1949. He was the first black person to move into the neighborhood, and he was at the height of his fame. But the white residents didn’t want him there and even formed an association to keep him out. One day, Erin told me, Cole was invited to a local party, and he thought that he’d been accepted at last, but when he arrived at the door, he was told to go around to the back. A maid showed him to the piano. He’d been invited to play. “They could never get him to leave here, though.” Erin shook her head. “He stayed until he died, and then Michael’s parents bought it from his widow.” Tourists still stopped their cars out front from time to time to take pictures.
She explained that her husband’s family owned a chain of fried chicken restaurants called the Golden Bird that was mostly concentrated in South-Central. At one time it had been the biggest black-owned business in LA, but during the riots in 1992, seven of the ten stores were looted and vandalized, and two others were burned to the ground. Michael, the president of the Golden Bird, had appeared on Oprah and ABC News and in newspapers across the country, vowing that he’d stay in the neighborhood and rebuild. Governor Pete Wilson even honored him that year in his State of the State address, calling Michael a hero for his commitment to his community. But, Erin said, five years later, insurance and business improvement loans hadn’t covered even half of all the losses, and the majority of the population in South-Central had shifted from African Americans to Latinos, who didn’t like southern fried chicken. The family started selling off the stores one by one, and Erin and Michael had moved in with his mother until they could figure out their next step.
We were driving now in Erin’s massive SUV over to her parents’ condo. We’d quickly fallen into a comfortable rhythm with each other, which made these personal revelations come easily. I sensed that Erin was proud of her husband and his family, but I also thought that she was trying to tell me something about black success and black struggles.
“Michael seems like an impressive guy,” I said. “I couldn’t help but notice, he’s pretty cute too.”
Erin grinned. “I’m telling you, girl. There were a lot of unhappy women the day that we got married.”
I imagined that there were a lot of unhappy men too. Erin had beauty pageant good looks: everything in place and perfect—flawless skin, sweeping cheekbones, big toothy smile—with a friendly and wholesome sheen. Michael, appropriately, was all-American handsome: square jaw, sparkling eyes, and wide shoulders that whittled down to a narrow waist. At the brunch, though, I’d noticed that he was much darker than Erin was. In fact, he’d been the darkest person there by far.
“Did his color make a difference to anyone?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” she said, glancing toward me. “It definitely raised some eyebrows.”
“Even though he came from such an accomplished family?”
She shook her head. “Didn’t matter.” We were quiet for a moment, and then she spoke again. “It’s funny, though. I never saw him as being different. I really didn’t.”
Erin explained that her parents, particularly her mother, had made a point when they moved to LA to give Erin and her brothers a grounding in an African American identity, in addition to their Creole roots. In places like Jack and Jill, the nationwide organization for African American children, Erin had a chance to meet a kind of black people she hadn’t known in New Orleans: kids who went to different churches, ate different foods, and often looked different—darker, more African—than she did.
“And that was fine with me,” she said. “My mom would always say, ‘We come in all colors of the rainbow.’”
So Erin was unprepared when she traveled with Michael to New Orleans soon after they got engaged, and some of her relatives had taken her aside and said, “Oh, he’s a dark boy, but he’s nice.”
Emile told me the story behind the family’s decision to leave Louisiana. We were sitting with Mark and Erin around a patio table under a big umbrella by his condominium complex’s pool. “In 1960 integration was finally getting started in New Orleans,” Emile explained. “One day, Kippy—he’s our oldest, although he was just in kindergarten at the time—anyway, Kippy was walking to school with some other kids from the neighborhood, and these white boys drove by in a truck and threw rotten fruit and a brick at them. That was it.” He sat back in his chair and rested his hand on the oxygen tank that his wife, Beverly, had insisted he bring outside.
“We all decided to leave at once, me, Beverly, my two sisters, and their husbands,” Emile said. They sent the women and the kids ahead on the train, and then the men drove the cars loaded up with their stuff in a convoy across the country.
Erin chimed in: “It wasn’t safe back then to drive through certain parts of the country if you were black.”
“It’s still not,” Mark added.
“Lots of people were heading out to California then,” Emile said. “Many of them became a part of the Creole community here that was growing up along Jefferson Boulevard, and others...well, they disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?” I asked.
He shrugged. “They started living as white.”
I asked Emile if Vivian and Anthony were among the people who had disappeared into whiteness.
“Not entirely,” he said. “Vivian will call when they’re in the area, and they’ll ask if they can stop by. But we’re never invited back to their house.”
Erin said it was hard for her to understand Vivian’s choice when she’d also heard stories from her parents about relatives who could have passed and didn’t. “They sat in the back of the bus in New Orleans because they were proud of being black,” she said. “I respect that.”
“You have to understand Vivian’s choice and respect it too,” Emile said. He turned to me. “Just like we understood why your father kept his identity a secret. He was trying to make a better life for himself and your brother and you. But I do get tired of Vivian and Anthony dipping into our lives whenever they feel like it and we can’t be a part of theirs.”
Mark said that he felt sad for people who didn’t see the beauty of what it meant to be black in America, and the unique beauty of what it meant to be a Creole. “Why just want to be bland and boring and white? We weren’t raised to see that as any great advantage,” he said. “Our parents were successful. We were fed, clothed, had a roof over our heads, and we were happy. It didn’t seem like we were missing out on anything so wonderful by not being white.”
That night I had drinks with another set of cousins, Robert and his sister Marchele, at a trendy bar in West Hollywood. We sat perched on stools around a high table in a quiet corner. Robert’s friend Steve from grade school had joined us too. Steve was a black guy who actually looked black compared to Marchele and Robert, whose honey coloring and loose curls made them look as if they might be anything from Italian to Puerto Rican to Jewish.
“Steve,” Robert said, turning to his friend, “tell Bliss how the white kids used to come up to me in school and say, ‘Tell them, Robbie, tell them how you’re really black!’”
“That was tripping,” Steve said, shaking his head. “But, hey, at least they weren’t patting your hair all the time.”
We all cracked up, and I let that wave of laughter ride me into a secret world where I could talk about white people as if I had not been raised as one myself.
“Sometimes they think I’m trying to trick them or I’m making a joke when I tell them my father was black,” I said.
Robert and Marchele knew what I was talking about.
“Or if they do believe me, they expect me to start acting different, more black or something, which, you know, I’m still learning.” I did a mock imitation of a girl from the ’hood, rolling my head and snapping my fingers, which broke everyone up again. “But when I’m dating someone new, especially a white guy, I make it a point to tell them about my dad’s ancestry.”
“Right away?” Marchele asked.
I nodded. “Before they can say anything that might offend me. Of course they usually get offended that I think they might make some comment. But I know what white people are like, after all.”
Robert shook his head. “They don’t even realize when they’re doing it,” he said. “I have some friends, close friends, who are white, who have said stuff in front of me. It’s this very subtle attitude of superiority. But because I don’t look black, they don’t think of me that way. It’s like, ‘Oh, Robert, you’re different.’”
Marchele told me that she had gone through a period of being very militant, announcing her blackness everywhere she went. But it got exhausting after a while. “And people end up thinking that you’re the one who’s hung up about your racial identity,” I said, “because you keep bringing it up all the time.”
“Right,” Marchele said. “Exactly.”
I took a sip of my drink. The conversation had winded me. I’d never talked about this stuff before, never known other people who’d been in these same situations that I viewed as so odd and singular.
Marchele said that she worked as an agent in Hollywood now, which led people to assume that she was Jewish. “I don’t really mind,” she said, shrugging. “If it makes people feel more comfortable with me than...” But her looks and racial identity made it hard to date. She never knew when to tell men. “Some people my age still have strong feelings about interracial dating,” she said. “They’re old enough to remember when the schools were being integrated.”
Robert and Marchele described the moment when they realized that some love interest might care about their black ancestry—a joke the person made, or even a look given to somebody of color on the street, and how it was sometimes easier and less painful to just end the relationship rather than confront that person’s belief. I wondered if this worry was part of the reason that neither of the siblings had married, although they were both in their midforties.
Robert explained that when they were growing up, their father had counseled them to not tell people about their ancestry if they didn’t have to. Although their father came from an illustrious Creole family—an elementary school in New Orleans was named in honor of his father, who had been a civil rights activist and a community doctor—he couldn’t pass the “paper bag test.” When they were kids growing up in the South, Robert remembered, his father would send his mother into certain stores because he wasn’t allowed to go inside himself. And if they were with their dad, the family couldn’t sit in the nicer “whites only” section of the beach or the movie theater with their lighter-skinned relatives.
“He doesn’t really talk about it,” Robert said. “But obviously it affected him. He wanted to protect us from all of that, and so he reasoned that if someone didn’t need to know, then why bring it up.”
I wondered to myself whether their father’s tact had made things more or less confusing for them. I believe that my father had wanted to protect us too, but we were never given the choice about how to handle our ancestry.
Steve and Marchele went home, and Robert and I moved to the bar. The bartender brought over another round of martinis. Robert and I both reached for our wallets, but he insisted on buying the drinks. “You’re my cousin,” he said. “I want to treat you.”
Robert told me about the first time he realized that he was black. A few years after arriving in Los Angeles, his family moved to Altadena, up in the hills, where they were the second African American family in the neighborhood. Their new neighbors seemed to view them more as a curiosity than anything else—some in his family had light skin and blue eyes, and they all looked so different from one another. Even their dad didn’t appear typically black, with his straight hair and American Indian features.
Before long, Robert became close friends with a white boy down the street who wanted Robert to join his Boy Scout troop. “A few days later, though, he came back and told me, ‘They won’t let you join because your father’s a Negro.’” Robert paused, recalling the moment. “I remember my ears roaring at that word. It was the first time anybody had ever said that to me, and I was just shocked. What was the big deal? Why would that matter? And then it hit me that instead of me just being me, I was a Negro now too.”
Robert looked down at his drink and said, “I’ve never really felt accepted by either side. There’s a lot of prejudice on the black side too.” He glanced at me. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, maybe you’re a brother, but you’ve got the good skin, the good hair, you didn’t go through what we went through.’ I get that from my own family even,” he said, widening his eyes.
He shrugged and continued, “But this life has its benefits, I guess. Since I’m not on one side or the other, I can see all sides. I can see things from both the black and the white perspective.” He raised his glass. “Not that many people can say that, can they?”
I touched my glass against his. “They certainly can’t.”
And then I was flying home. On the approach to LaGuardia Airport, the stewardess came over the intercom to remind us to set our watches ahead three hours to the local time. As I adjusted my watch, that device in old movies to show the passage of time leaped to mind: the hands of the clock spinning wildly forward or the pages of a calendar falling away like leaves. I half expected my own watch to start spinning out of control. I’d changed and learned much more than seemed possible over the course of five short days.
Before I parted ways with the different sets of LA Broyards, they each offered a piece of advice about what they imagined my dad would have wanted me to do.
Vivian said: “The way I look at it, your father gave you the gift of whiteness, and out of respect for his memory, you should follow his example.”
Robert said: “I’m sure if your father had lived longer, he would have told you about his ancestry eventually. He probably just wanted you to have the choice to decide who you wanted to be.”
And Erin said: “I feel like your dad left this subject of race for you to tackle. In his time he couldn’t address it and still do what he wanted in his life. But you can. And that’s what you need to keep doing.”
I gazed out the airplane window, down onto the city, all lit up and twinkling, as bright and promising as a new star. I wondered about my ancestral city, New Orleans, and how one place and one family could give rise to three such different approaches to being black—or not—in the world. And I knew that before I could understand what my father’s blackness meant to him, and means to me, I would have to go back to the place where his secret history began.