Wherever quotes from primary sources appear, the sources have been indicated in the text, unless their inclusion would intrude too awkwardly on the narrative, in which case they can be found in the notes below. Sources of quotes from my father’s work have not been listed in every instance.
For the historical accounts of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Brooklyn, I am indebted to the scholarship of many historians and academics. The secondary sources upon which I relied most heavily are listed in shortened form by chapter in the notes section. Full references of works cited can be found in the bibliography.
The hundreds of genealogical sources I consulted have not been cited, except in cases where their mention is relevant. To complete my family history, I drew on records found in New Orleans at the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, the New Orleans Notarial Archives, the New Orleans Archdiocesan Archives, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana and Special Collections Department of the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans, the Xavier University Archives and Special Collections, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, and the Jackson Barracks Military Library; in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana State Archives and the Louisiana State University Libraries Special Collections in Hill Memorial Library; in Covington, Louisiana, at the conveyance office and the Historic Archives Department of the St. Tammany Parish Clerk of Court; in Washington, DC, at the National Archives’ Compiled Service Records for the War of 1812 and the Civil War; and in Brooklyn, New York, at the Brooklyn Collection of the Brooklyn Public Library.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
My father’s writings about the experience of being ill have been collected into Intoxicated by My Illness. That volume also contains his review of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which initially appeared in the New York Times in 1974.
I am grateful to the writer Leslie Garis for sharing with me notes she made during a visit to my father at the Dana-Farber Cancer Hospital.
Chapter 3
The chairwoman of the Southport Historical Committee, Margaret Zeller, provided information about the building guidelines in the historic village of Southport.
The details about the application process to the Pequot Yacht Club for my parents and Phil Donahue were based on the recollections of my mother, Sandy Broyard, and Edwin Gaynor, a former commodore for the Pequot Yacht Club.
Chapter 6
For more on the definition of Creole, see Kein’s introductory essay in her anthology Creole as well as Domínguez’s Definition and Hall’s Africans.
Since I first visited the Boston Public Library in the early 1990s, the number of volumes concerning “passing” has increased dramatically. In addition to the reissued novel Passing by Larsen, the nonfiction works Passing, by Kroeger, and Individualism, by Pfeiffer, were particularly helpful.
Chapter 7
The quotes from my father about his father’s character appear in an essay called “Growing Up Irrational” in Men, Women, and Other Climaxes.
For more about Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s slave database, see Firestone’s “Identity Restored.”
I am grateful to Major Jackson and Kathryn Friedman for directing me to the statistics about diversity at the University of Vermont in the late 1980s.
Ralph Ellison’s observation about how African Americans are perceived comes from the opening passage of Invisible Man.
Chapter 8
Wayne Dawkins, author of Black Journalists: The NABJ Story, about the history of the National Association of Black Journalists, confirmed that my father is believed to be the first black staff member critic of a major U.S. newspaper.
The real names of Vivian Carter and her husband, Anthony, have been changed to protect their privacy.
Chapter 9
The scenes with my cousins Marchele, Robert, Erin, and Mark include some conversations that took place in an interview setting at a different time. These scenes have been condensed for narrative purposes.
PART TWO
Chapter 10
T. S. Eliot’s reference to the Mississippi River as the “strong brown God” appears in “The Dry Salvages” section of Four Quartets.
Antonio Gramsci’s quote about the “infinity of traces” comes from Prison Notebooks.
Chapter 12
Information about La Rochelle in the eighteenth century came from Clark’s La Rochelle.
I am indebted to Hall’s Africans for my account of life in French colonial Louisiana. The story of Louis Congo, the African native who received freedom after becoming the local executioner, and details about the slave revolt in Pointe Coupée both came from her book.
For more about the attitudes of French authorities toward race-mixing in French colonial Louisiana, see Johnson’s “Colonial New Orleans” in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans.
For the description of Spanish colonial Louisiana, I drew mainly upon Hanger’s Bounded Lives. Hanger’s book was also useful in understanding the slave revolt in St. Domingue and its ramifications in Louisiana, as were Hall’s Social Control and James’s Jacobins.
I am grateful to my cousin Barbara Trevigne for her information on the history of the tignon.
Chapter 13
I am grateful to the Creole historian and genealogist Mary White for her assistance regarding street conditions and shoe styles in New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The account of the 1803 transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States was based on Memoirs by Pierre-Clément de Laussat, the French colonial prefect for Louisiana.
The details about New Orleans’s infrastructure problems during the early nineteenth century came from Fossier’s New Orleans.
Bell’s Revolution was crucial to my understanding of the political activism of Creoles of color during the American period, beginning with the agitation by the colored black troops on the question of citizenship.
The quotes from the letter to Claiborne describing the taunts of the black Haitians “eating human flesh” appeared in the Debien and Le Gardeur essay in Brasseaux et al., Road to Louisiana.
For more about General Andrew Jackson and the battalion of free men of color during the Battle of New Orleans, see Fleming’s “Old Hickory’s” in Quarterly Journal of Military History.
The petition of the Pointe Coupée property owners, including Etienne Broyard, requesting troops to control their slaves appears in Carter’s The Territorial Papers of the United States.
The quote from Colonel Savary about the willingness of his colored troops to risk their lives for their country appears in Bell’s Revolution.
See Johnson’s Soul for more on the New Orleans slave market.
Tregle’s essay “Creoles and Americans” in Hirsch and Logsdon’s Creole New Orleans was very helpful in understanding Creole and American relations in New Orleans during the antebellum period.
See Domínguez’s Definition for the historical application of the term “Creole” and its changing racial connotations.
I am grateful to Diane Williams, a PhD candidate in Harvard’s American Studies program, for sharing her research on the term plaçage, namely that it also referred to relationships of unmarried white men with white women. Williams points out that the infamy of plaçage as solely an interracial institution seems to be mostly the product of accounts from visitors to the city rather than its natives.
The quote from the Englishman about mixed-race women appears in J. S. Buckingham’s The Slave States of America (1842), as cited in Rankin’s “Forgotten People.”
The statistics about the imbalance between marriageable white men and white women appear in Paul LaChance’s essay in Revista/Review Interamericana.
I drew upon Latrobe’s Southern Travels, published by the Historic New Orleans Collection, for many of the details of New Orleans in the antebellum period, particularly the quadroon balls. Also, Mary White graciously shared her knowledge about plaçage relationships to counterbalance the many mythologies surrounding them.
Charles Gayarré’s quote about the scene in the home of a white husband who kept a mulatto mistress comes from Rankin’s “Forgotten People.”
I am indebted to Sollors’s Neither for its analysis of the history of understanding about racial difference, particularly the Curse of Ham and the theory of “mulatto sterility.”
Chapter 14
I am grateful to Gregory Osborne, a former research assistant in the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, for sharing his recollections of the range of reactions among white patrons on discovering evidence of black ancestry.
For more information on the Mardi Gras Indians, see Medley’s “Mardi Gras Mambo” and “From Sire to Son” in the New Orleans Tribune.
Chapter 15
Reinders, End of an Era, provided details about the cotton industry in New Orleans and the continuing infrastructural problems.
I am indebted to Bell’s Revolution for my account of the reaction in New Orleans to France’s 1848 revolution. All of the quotes during the celebration at the St. Louis Exchange can be found in her book.
For more about the accomplishments of and restrictions on the free people of color during the antebellum period, see Desdunes’s Our People, Rankin’s “Forgotten People,” Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s essay “People of Color in Louisiana” in Kein’s Creole, Gehman’s Free People, and Bell’s Revolution. Logsdon and Bell’s essay “Americanization” in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans, was also helpful in understanding the relations between free blacks and slaves.
The poem “A New Impression” originally appeared in L’album littéraire and was excerpted in Bell’s Revolution. See Rankin’s “Forgotten People” for more on the shift toward marriage among free people of color.
The proceedings of the Pandelly legal case during February 1854 were covered in most of the New Orleans newspapers.
Both Desdunes’s Our People and Houzeau and Rankin’s My Passage discuss L’Union editor Paul Trévigne.
See Nelson’s “Free Negro” for more about the attitudes toward the free people of color by the New Orleans press. Louisiana governor Robert C. Wickliffe’s appeal to the state legislature about removal of free blacks from Louisiana appears in Gayarré’s History.
Schafer’s Becoming Free was helpful in understanding the laws regarding free people of color prior to the Civil War, as was the chapter “Free People of Color of New Orleans” in the Christian manuscript at UNO.
For more about free blacks volunteering for the Confederate army, see Dunbar-Nelson’s essay “People of Color in Louisiana” in Kein’s Creole. My account of the New Orleans Creoles of color’s participation in the Civil War draws mainly from Ochs, Black Patriot, and Hollandsworth, Native Guards. I am particularly grateful to Mr. Ochs for sharing his research about the racial makeup of my great-great-grandfather’s company, Company C. McPherson’s Negro’s Civil War was also helpful.
The quote about the solidarity among black and brown Union soldiers comes from the Logsdon and Bell essay in Creole New Orleans.
Blassingame, in Black New Orleans, describes the doubt among whites and the white press about the fitness of black men as soldiers.
Chapter 16
I am grateful to Daniel Robert Samuels for sharing his thesis “Remembering North Claiborne: Community and Place in Downtown New Orleans” to help me understand the effect of the construction of interstate highway 10 on the Tremé neighborhood.
For more about the effect on crime of closing housing projects, see Young’s “N.O.’s Murder Rate” in the Times-Picayune.
The murder of Durelli Watts and her daughter Ina Gex were covered extensively in the Times-Picayune during the summer of 2004.
The scene with my older cousin Rose condenses numerous conversations and an interview at her home. The information about Jeanne’s home was obtained during a phone interview. Both Jeanne and Rose prefer to use only their first names for privacy.
For more on redlining and its effect on wealth accumulation for African Americans, see Adelman’s documentary film Race: The Power of an Illusion and Conley’s Being Black.
Chapter 17
Most of the quoted passages come from Ochs’s Black Patriot and Hollands-worth’s Native Guards, as do details about conditions in New Orleans during the Union occupation and movements of the Louisiana Native Guard throughout the Civil War. Blassingame’s Black New Orleans also provided information about the privations in New Orleans, as well as the account of Paul Trévigne’s false arrest. Finally, Marcus Christian’s “The Negro as a Soldier” helped to fill in the blanks.
Details about L’Union—including quoted material—and the Creole of color activists come from Bell’s Revolution and her essay with Logsdon in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans. I also drew from Thompson’s and Rankin’s dissertations.
In addition to Ochs’s and Hollandsworth’s books, my account of the Battle of Port Hudson was aided by Hewitt’s Confederate Bastion.
Chapter 18
During numerous interviews, both formal and informal, my brother, Todd, helped to confirm many details of my father’s life, particularly his military service. Todd also readily supplied his own reactions to our family background throughout the course of my working on this project.
I am grateful to Michelle Olinger, Steve Lanusse-Siegel, Pat Schexnayder, and Kara Chenevert for sharing with me the stories of discovering their family histories.
The scene with Julie Hilla drew from my interview with her in New Orleans several years before she died. I am indebted to Mary Gehman for her help in confirming the chronology of Hilla’s story.
An October 5, 1999, article in Slate magazine by Brent Staples drew my attention to Robert Stuckert’s study. For more about Dr. Mark Shriver and his contribution to genetic testing for “ancestral admixture,” see Gates’s documentary series African American Lives (2006).
Chapter 19
See Donald’s Lincoln for President Lincoln’s aims and actions toward reconstructing the United States.
For Reconstruction in Louisiana and the Mechanics’ Institute Riot, I am especially indebted to Hollandsworth’s Massacre. Also helpful were Tunnell’s Crucible, Bell’s Revolution, Rankin’s “Forgotten People,” and Roussève’s Negro.
For more on the Tribune newspaper, see Thompson’s “Passing,” the essay by Bell and Logsdon in Hirsch and Logsdon’s Creole New Orleans, Rankin’s essay “Black Leadership,” and Houzeau’s memoir, My Passage.
Lincoln’s Reconstruction speech, the last speech he ever made, can be found in Basler’s Collected Works.
For the reaction around the country to the Mechanics’ Institute massacre and its effect on the congressional elections and the subsequent Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, see also Foner’s Reconstruction.
Chapter 20
Baker’s Second Battle, Klarman’s Jim Crow, Harlan’s “Desegregation,” and Fischer’s “Ascendancy” provided the background for the school integration fight in New Orleans during Reconstruction.
For more on George Washington Cable, see Turner’s Cable.
The figures concerning the number of murdered Republicans in Louisiana during Reconstruction come from Chaillé’s Intimidation, found in the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Thompson’s dissertation was helpful in understanding the relations between Creoles of color and American blacks during Reconstruction, as were Bell and Logsdon’s essay in Hirsch and Logsdon’s Creole New Orleans, Rankin’s “Forgotten People,” and Bell’s Revolution.
See Warmoth’s Reconstruction for more on his political positions. Tunnell’s Crucible, Foner’s Reconstruction, and Woodward’s Reunion provided background on Reconstruction in Louisiana.
Lieutenant Governor Dunn’s quote about not seeking political equality comes from the Tureaud Collection at Amistad Research Center. Pinchback’s quote about wholesale falsehood appeared in Bell’s Revolution.
Chapter 21
I am grateful to my cousin Bernie Cousins for sharing with me the family history he completed about the Cousin family.
More on the history of the shifting definition of blackness in Louisiana can be found in Domínguez’s Definition, Davis’s Who Is Black?, and Diamond and Cottrol’s “Codifying Caste.”
Chapter 22
D’Antoni’s Chahta-Ima provided some details about the Cousin family and the conditions in St. Tammany Parish during the Civil War.
Walton’s Black Republicans and the dissertations by Webb and Uzee were particularly helpful regarding the black vote and the activities of black Republicans during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods.
The letter to Rutherford Hayes detailing the murders of black Republicans was written by Alfred Fairfax and appears in Webb’s dissertation.
Pinchback’s quote about looking “at things as they are” originally appeared in The Louisianian newspaper, and is cited in Bell and Logsdon’s essay in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans.
Chapter 23
Reports of political meetings in the Times-Picayune and the Crusader aided my analysis of state and local political activity during the 1890s, including my great-grandfather’s participation. Most quoted materials came from these accounts.
Details about Paul Broyard’s building career and New Orleans architecture in general were drawn from the works by Friends of the Cabildo, Hankins’s Raised, and Louisiana Locals for 1894.
Jackson’s Gilded Age and her essay “Bosses” were helpful in providing information on the Louisiana state elections during the 1880s. For more on the 1896 gubernatorial election, see Howard’s essay “Populist-Republican Fusion.”
For more on Rodolphe Desdunes and the Citizens Committee involvement in the Plessy legal case, see the Bell and Logsdon essay in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans, and Medley’s Freemen. Medley’s book provided the quoted correspondence between Louis Martinet and Albion Tourgée.
Chapter 24
The story in which my father described his father dancing in his wheelchair is called “Anecdotes from the Hospital” and was published in the September 1982 Atlantic Monthly.
Chapter 25
Anthony’s “Negro Creole” was very helpful for understanding the response of Creoles of color, including my family, to Jim Crow.
I drew biographical details about Paul Broyard and his family from interviews with his grandson Jimmy Broyard, granddaughter Rose, and great-nephew Irving Trevigne. My aunt Shirley Broyard Williams also provided background information about her parents’ lives in New Orleans.
For more on the efforts to combat segregation by black leaders around the country, see Fairclough’s Better Day.
PART THREE
Chapter 27
I am indebted to Wilder’s Covenant for my account of the history of blacks in Brooklyn and the development of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Quimby’s chapter on Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, USA, Connolly’s Ghetto Grows, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle morgue at the Brooklyn Public Library were also helpful.
My father’s recollections about his childhood are drawn from Kafka, the essay collection Men, Women, and his unpublished journals. In numerous interviews my aunt Shirley Broyard Williams also provided many details about her family’s life in Brooklyn. In addition, Jimmy Broyard and my father’s childhood friends Robbie King, Dr. Marjorie Costa, Lois Latte, and Elsner Horne all provided biographical data. For more about the Horne family, see Buckley’s The Hornes.
I am grateful to Harold Chenven and Albert Gambale for sharing with me their recollections of my father during their years at Boys High School.
I’m grateful to the poet Michael Harper for drawing my attention to the memoir I’m Katherine, by his father, W. Warren Harper. I am also indebted to Sydney deLeon for sharing her memoir of growing up in 1930s Harlem, which helped to illuminate the experience of passing from a child’s perspective.
Chapter 28
Quotes taken from Milton Klonsky’s writing appear in his collected essays, A Discourse on Hip.
Vincent Livelli has been an invaluable source of information about my father’s time at Brooklyn College and in Greenwich Village.
I am grateful to Gerald Gross for facilitating my interview with his late wife, Flora Finkelstein Gross.
Gale’s Contemporary Authors provided the biographical details for Alfred Duckett’s life.
Chapter 29
My father wrote about his recurrent dream for an essay called “Intoxicated by My Illness,” which appears in his book by the same name.
For more on legal definitions of blackness and whiteness in the United States, see Davis’s Who Is Black?, the Braman essay in the UCLA Law Review, and Lopez’s “Social Construction.”
I am particularly grateful to Daniel Sharfstein for sharing with me his essay “The Secret History of Race in the United States” and for his assistance in deciphering the decisions for the Sunseri v. Cassagne trials. The details of the case, Sunseri v. Cassagne, 196 So. 7 (1940), come from decisions published in Southern Reporter and from the trial transcript available at the Louisiana Supreme Court archives in New Orleans.
For more on Louisiana’s racial laws and the career of Naomi Drake, see Domínguez’s Definition, Trillin’s “Black or White” from the New Yorker, and O’Byrne’s “Many Feared” in the Times-Picayune.
Chapter 30
Klonsky’s observation about the Greenwich Village streets appears in his Discourse.
For more on African American troops in World War II, including the quoted letters from white officers about commanding black troops, see Lee’s Employment.
I am grateful to Edward Howard and Ellis Derry for sharing with me their recollections of the 167th Port Company. My father’s military record and the historical record for the 167th also provided details about his service.
Enid Gort graciously shared her research and reflections on my uncle Franklin H. Williams, from which I gleaned many details of his life.
Chapter 31
Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams provided background on Greenwich Village of the 1940s and the quoted description of the San Remo bar.
Irving Howe’s observations about the Partisan Review and political thought during the 1940s appear in his book Margin.
I am indebted to David Leeming’s biographies of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney for my account of their experiences in Greenwich Village.
W. F. Lucas’s comment about my father’s racial change during his subway ride into Manhattan appeared in Gates’s article “White Like Me,” as does the reference to my father in the correspondence between Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes.
Details about the publication of Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness were drawn from correspondence found in the Laughlin Collection at Harvard, along with interviews with Anne Bernays, Tim Horan, and Vincent Livelli.
For more on the segregation of labor unions, see Hill’s “Labor Unions.”
The biographical details of Van den Haag’s life come from the finding aid for the Ernest van den Haag Papers at the University of Albany. For more about his efforts to oppose integration, see Khan’s Separated.
Chapter 32
I am grateful to my mother for sharing the correspondence between her and my father during their engagement. My numerous interviews and discussions with her also contributed greatly to my account of my father’s life.
My father’s essays on family life have been collected into Men, Women.
Chapter 33
For more on the effect of Katrina on New Orleans’s black middle class, see Cass’s article “Notable Mardi Gras Absences.” Keith Medley is quoted on black Mardi Gras balls in Texeira’s “Black Social Networks.”
New Orleans East’s uncertain future is discussed in greater detail by Howell and Vinturella in their New York Times piece and by Donze and Krupa in “Nagin Upbeat” in the Times-Picayune.
Afterword
For more on the significance of the findings by the Human Genome Project, see “Reading the Book of Life,” a White House news conference on the decoding of the genome.
Wade’s “The Human Family Tree” and Anger’s “Do Races Differ?” were helpful in providing background about tracing ancestral origins in human genes, as was Cavalli-Sforza’s Genes, Peoples, and Languages.
More information about DNAPrint’s testing services can be found at their Web site, DNAPrint.com.