“Well, I mean, you wouldn’t exactly call him black. He’s more like a high yella.”
The hostess says, “Wait a minute, I have photographs from that party.”
She jumps up and then comes back with this photo album and is looking through it.
“Oh, him. Yeah, Chuck. Okay. God, he’s black? It’s so hard to tell.”
Then she starts passing the photo album around the dinner table.
And people are like, “Oh, yeah, look at his hair. It is kind of kinky. I hadn’t really noticed. Look at his lips. Yeah, they are kind of full. And I guess his nose is sort of wide.”
And then the photo album gets to me.
I stand up, and I say, “You know, sometimes it is really hard to tell. Like, what would you say about my hair? It’s curly, but would you say it’s kinky? And what about my lips? I mean, the bottom one’s kind of full, but the top one actually is really thin. How about my nose? You think my nose is wide? If you saw me on the dance floor, you’d know I’ve got natural rhythm, but I’m not very good on the basketball court, because I can’t jump. What would you say about my skin? Would you call my skin a high yella?”
Actually, when this photo album came to me, I passed it to the next person. I didn’t say anything.
And then about five minutes later, I said I felt sick—which I did—and I left.
Because four years before that, when my father was dying of prostate cancer, I found out that he had a secret. He said he would tell us what it was, but when we all gathered to talk to him about it, he couldn’t bring himself to reveal it just then. One night a tumor broke through the wall of his bladder, and he had to go in for emergency surgery, and it looked like he wasn’t going to live until morning.
My mother sat my brother and me down, and she said, “Look, kids, I’ve got to tell you what the secret is. Your father’s black.”
Now, I’d always known that he was a Creole from New Orleans, and I thought it meant that he was French and he spoke patois and ate jambalaya. What I didn’t know is that it also meant he was black.
That night in the hospital, we were like, “Oh, that’s the secret? Dad’s black? Well, cool. Hey, that means that we’re black, too, you know?”
My first question was, “How black is he?”
That’s always everyone’s first question to me, because he didn’t look black.
And my mom said, “Well both of his parents were black, too. They were very light-skinned. In fact, they could pass for white, and when they moved up to Brooklyn, to Bed-Stuy, when they left New Orleans, they had to pass for white to get work in the thirties.”
His grandparents had been black, too, she said, and they had also been light-skinned.
I had known that my dad’s father had died a long time before I was born and that my grandmother had died when I was twelve. But we never saw her or my father’s two sisters, although they lived in New York City, which was just an hour away from where we were living in Connecticut.
When I would ask my dad why not—why don’t we see your family?—he would say, “Well, they don’t interest me.”
Which of course then put a lot of pressure on me to be interesting.
But honestly, with my father in the next room, about to go into this life-and-death surgery, it really didn’t seem like a big deal.
He made it through the surgery, but he was never lucid again, and then he died a month later. So I never got a chance to talk to him about it. And pretty quickly the secret started seeming like a big deal.
First of all, why was it a secret in the first place? That was one thing I had trouble understanding.
My mom said that as a kid my dad had been picked on by black kids because he looked white, and had been ostracized by white kids because they knew his family was black. He would come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn’t ask him what happened. He didn’t want his own children to go through the same pain and confusion that he did.
But as many questions as it answered, it raised a lot more. Like, for one, what did this make me? For the first twenty-three years of my life, I was a white girl from Connecticut. And you know, I didn’t really feel white anymore, but I didn’t feel black either.
I mean, I don’t look black. I didn’t really know anything about being black either, or anything about black culture. At that point I didn’t know anybody who was black. So I figured, well, I guess I should start with my own family.
I looked up my father’s family, who I had met for the first time at his memorial service. And just as an interesting side note, out of four hundred people at the service, they were the only black people, except for one of my dad’s colleagues from the New York Times.
I was so excited to meet them. I was twenty-four, I had just lost my father who I really loved, and it was starting to kind of feel like I had lost him twice. He had died, but also, I was learning all these things about him that I didn’t know. And I realized in meeting them that they’re not just my dad’s family, they’re my family, too.
So it turns out that my father’s sister, my Aunt Shirley—her husband was this amazing civil-rights leader. He’d been the head of the NAACP for the whole western part of the country in the fifties. He’d started the first civil-rights division for the state of California. He was the second African-American person ever appointed to the UN, and then he was the US ambassador to Ghana.
He was this amazing guy, and I never even got to meet him, because he’d died a couple of months before my father.
I said to my Aunt Shirley, “You know, I don’t really know what to do with this information. I don’t know how to identify myself.
“I used to say, ‘I’m French and Norwegian.’ And now I would say, ‘Well, I’m Norwegian and black,’ but then people kind of look at me like, Oh, hmmm. Really?
“So then I say, ‘Well, I’m Norwegian and Creole, which means French and black, but I didn’t know about the black part until a couple years ago, and so that’s why I don’t seem more black.’ I’ll be going on and on, and they’re like, ‘Well, sorry I asked.’ ”
My aunt said, “Well, you know who you are. You’re Bliss. That’s who you are. And you have a whole life in front of you to figure out what that means. Look, the minute you let other people start to define you, you are just giving away your power.”
So I thought, All right, I’ll try and figure out who Bliss is. That seems like a pretty good question.
I started to read. I went to the library, and I looked up words like passing and mulatto and mestizo and miscegenation—words I’d never even heard of before. I learned about the “one drop” rule: if you have one drop of black blood, it makes you black.
I started reading all these books that we didn’t really cover in my prep school in Connecticut. I was reading Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, and I was learning all about this rich, interesting, and painful culture.
I went down to New Orleans. I tried to trace my roots. I was like, “So how did we get here anyway? Did we come from Africa?”
Then one night I was having dinner with my aunt, and I asked her this question that was really weighing on me. We were on the Upper West Side in this café. I remember the tables were really small and close together.
So I leaned forward, and in a whisper I said, “So, Shirley, is it possible that some of our ancestors had been slaves?”
And she kind of gave me a look, and she sat back in her chair, and she said, “Well, not too many black people came here as immigrants back in the 1700s, so they probably were.”
I still had many, many more questions. So a family member put me in touch with the head of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard. I called him up, and he was interested in my story, because my father had been a well-known writer. And so we talked, and he gave me some more books to read, and he promised that he would put together a bibliography and put it in the mail.
The next time I heard from him, he called up and said, “Hey, I pitched the
story of your father to the New Yorker, and I’m going to be doing a profile on him.”
I was kind of upset about that. I mean, I’d always wanted to be in the New Yorker, but this really wasn’t the way I’d imagined it would happen.
But he writes this article, and in it he says that my father never even told his kids—that his daughter didn’t know until she was twenty-three. So I figured, well, I really need to work out this question of what my identity is, because now everybody’s reading about it.
Then I got a phone call from a woman who said, “Hi, I’m your cousin, Claire Cooper, from Los Angeles, and I grew up down the street from your father in New Orleans, and I want to tell you that that article was full of lies. Your father is not black. The Broyards are white.”
I said, “Are you sure? Because I went down to New Orleans, and I looked at some records, and it said ‘colored’ on the birth certificate.”
“No, no, no. That’s a lie. Those are people that are just trying to pin something on us.”
I said, “Well, you know, would it be all right if we were?”
And she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re not. There’s all these Broyards out here in California, and we’re all white.”
I’m like, “All right.”
I was prepared to believe anything. I’d been told so many things.
But then I found this guy on the Internet, a writer named Mark Broyard, and he lived out in Los Angeles, too. He wrote this play called Inside the Creole Mafia. It’s all about the politics of skin color, and who’s passing and who’s not.
So I called him up and said, “I think maybe we’re cousins.”
And he said, “Yeah, I bet we are.”
I said, “So what’s the deal? Are the Broyards black or not?”
He said, “Well, I’m a Broyard, and I’m black, and all the Broyards I know out here are black, too.”
So I headed out to California. I thought, I’ve got to see this for myself.
So we all get together at a Creole restaurant called Harold & Belle’s on Jefferson Boulevard in South Central. I’ve got Claire Cooper there, with her husband, representing the “white” side of the family, and then I have Mark Broyard and his family from the black side.
We’re all having brunch. So once again I’m around this dinner table, and once again I’m with this group of people that I don’t even really know, and lo and behold, once again there’s a photo album coming my way.
This one belongs to Claire Cooper, and it’s filled with pictures of my relatives, this whole family I didn’t even know I had. All these ancestors, going back to the 1800s, these five brothers that came over from Morocco, somebody said.
Mark is sitting next to me, and he passes me the photo album, and he’s like, “Hey, check out all these white Broyards.”
I look at him. We both start laughing, because all these people looked black!
And we’re like, “Claire, if you need to be white, all right, yeah, you know, whatever.”
So I’m sitting there, and the silliness of so much of this situation hit me.
I thought, Well, here I am, a WASP from Connecticut, having brunch with her black family in South Central.
But the real truth of the matter is that I felt totally at home.
BLISS BROYARD is the author of the bestselling story collection My Father, Dancing, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the award-winning memoir One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, which was named a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune. Her stories and essays have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The Art of the Essay, among others, and she has written for many publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker website, and Elle. She is at work on a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard, called Happy House, and blogged about a yearlong trip with her husband and two kids around the world at 4intransit.com.
This story was told on April 19, 1999, at Lansky Lounge in New York City. The theme of the evening was Who Do You Think You Are? An Evening of Stories on Getting and Keeping Your Identity. Director: Joey Xanders.
I went to Russia in 1994, and it had just become Russia again. It was the Soviet Union until really that year, but then everything started to crash down.
At the time I was a writer for the Conan O’Brien show. I had written there for two years, and I was burnt out, and I didn’t want to do it anymore.
So I went to the head writer, and I said, “I have to quit, because I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”
He said, “Take two weeks off, and we’ll pay you for the two weeks.”
I said, “Okay. I’ll do that.”
I was in my twenties—I had no wife, nothing. I had no girlfriend, even. I was just this guy, and I had money from a TV job.
So I had nowhere to go, and I thought, I’m going to go to Russia. Because when I was a kid, I used to read Russian novels, and I loved them. I would open all the windows so I would be cold. I wanted to be cold like they were.
Also, somebody told me that the wall had just come down, and that Russia was a really crazy place at the time.
So I said, “I’m gonna go there.”
I went to Russia in the middle of December, alone.
I speak no Russian. I can’t even look at the alphabet and understand what I’m looking at. There was no place more foreign to me than Russia.
I went to Moscow, and when you land in Moscow, it’s just forest all around, and then suddenly there’s this city in the middle of a big forest. It’s terrifying.
As the plane goes down you’re like, No, no, no, no. I didn’t want to really do this!
It was a country that was just broken in pieces. And the weirdest things happened to me there.
Like, I was in a restaurant one day, and a waiter came up to me—not my waiter—and he said, “Coca-Cola?”
I said, “Huh?”
He said, “Coca-Cola.”
And I said, “Sure.” I don’t drink Coca-Cola, but I had learned by that point to just do what they’re asking you to do. Sure.
So he went to the kitchen, and he got a Coke in a can, and he handed it to me, and he said, “Five dollars,” because only dollars were worth anything there.
I said, “Okay, on my bill.”
He said, “No. Five dollars, me. Now.”
So I gave him five dollars, and he put on his coat, and he left. He sold me a Coke on the side, and then quit his job. Those are the kinds of confusing moments I was having there.
I couldn’t talk to anybody, and I was so lonely. It was difficult. I’d just sit in my room. I tried to watch television, but the TV was all American shows like Dynasty.
The way they translated was, they lowered the sound a little, and there was one man saying all of the dialogue in Russian over the whole show. I was there for two weeks, and it just was crushing. I made no contact with anyone.
Then one day I went into the subway. Now, if you’ve never been to Moscow, the streets there were made wider during the Cold War, so that they could have missiles go down the middle of the street for the parades.
If you go behind the big buildings, you’ll find out that they actually tore the buildings off of their foundations and dragged them back. A lot of the bigger buildings in Moscow, in the back, they’re being held up by bricks. It’s really unnerving how unsafe the whole city is.
So the streets are very wide, and you can’t cross the street on a green light—you’ll never make it. So they made tunnels so you can go under, and those are connected to the subway.
The subway in Moscow, you go down an escalator, and it just keeps going. You keep going until you think, This is so deep. This is really upsetting.
But everyone hangs out in these tunnels. And I’m standing in the subway, and I’m watching a violin player.
One thing about Russia, even still today, I think, is that no one has any money. So when you see a guy playing the violin in the subway, he’s like
the first-chair violin for the Russian Symphony Orchestra, because that doesn’t pay shit, and at least he can get a few kopecks in the subway.
So I’m watching him, and there are other people sitting on the floor listening, and everybody’s crying. Everybody. People are just watching, wiping away tears.
And there’s a young fellow sitting there, and he looked my age. I was twenty-five at the time. He looked about twenty-five, too, and he was tattered and just watching this violin player.
Then this group of kids walked by, about eight children, ranging from five to ten years old. Their faces were dirty, like in Oliver Twist—like they were in a play and they had rubbed dirt on their faces.
They’re all wearing men’s coats, from the neck hanging down to the floor. None of them have their hands in their sleeves, so their sleeves are just flopping. They were street urchins, and the coats—you kind of knew all the men who owned those coats were dead, and at least one of these kids killed those guys. Like, I swear I looked at an eight-year-old’s face and thought, He has murdered. That’s what they looked like, just tough little kids. I had seen them before in Moscow. They work in groups.
The guy sitting below me that I identified with calls out to the head kid in the front. He’s appealing to him. He needs something.
And the kid, with his hands in his sleeves, looked at him suspiciously and said, [mimics Russian], like, What the fuck? Why? What do you want from me?
The guy showed the kid that his shoe had come apart. His shoe was like a flap.
The kid shrugged and said, [mimics Russian], like, Okay.
The kid’s hand appeared from out of the sleeve, and there was a tube of shoe glue in his hand. He didn’t rummage for it—it was already there.
He handed it to the guy, and the guy fixed his shoe with the glue and gave it back to him. Then the kid—his other hand had a paper bag in it, and he put the glue in, and he huffed it. His eyes rolled back, and he got high.
Then the group kept going, but I couldn’t believe what I just saw. That the misery in this country at that time was so palpable and so predictable, that this guy thought, My shoe’s broken. Oh, there’s a child. He’s sure to have some glue in his hand, because the state of our nation is so wretched.
The Moth Presents All These Wonders Page 8
