[Genealib] [Fwd: [LAORLEAN] LAORLEAN Digest One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets]

[Sharon Centanne]

Hi Folks,

This sounds like an interesting book.

Sharon Centanne

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[LAORLEAN] LAORLEAN Digest One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - 
A Story of Race and Family Secrets
Date: 	Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:05:55 EDT
From: 	Smileson at aol.com
Reply-To: 	laorlean at rootsweb.com
To: 	laorlean at rootsweb.com



 Book Review: Genealogy shows race isn't a black-and-white issue A 
half-hidden family history prompted Bliss Broyard to examine her father's mixed racial 
lineage, which left a legacy of confusion and an interesting story
 By JANET MASLIN
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Sep 30, 2007, Page 19

One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets
 By Bliss Broyard

After the literary critic Anatole Broyard died in 1990, his family arranged a 
memorial reception at a suburban Connecticut yacht club. It was a club that 
claimed to have no black members until, after Broyard's death, his mixed racial 
lineage was made known. After that, the club cited him as evidence of 
integration.
 What was it like for Broyard to keep his secret in such surroundings? For a 
self-made man who had come so far in life, reading so many books in the 
process, did the clubhouse's view of Long Island Sound bring to mind the grand 
illusions of "The Great Gatsby?"
 Not likely, says his smart, tough-minded daughter, Bliss Broyard, in One 
Drop, an investigative memoir about her father's life. As this fascinating, 
insightful book makes clear, Broyard left a legacy of racial confusion and great 
autobiographical material, not necessarily in that order.
 Broyard shares her father's bracingly unsentimental spirit, to the point 
where she knows that he had none of Jay Gatsby's self-congratulatory outlook or 
sense of American tragedy. More to the point, she says, "It never seemed to 
occur to him that someone might want to keep him out."
 When a guest at the memorial service noticed three light-skinned black 
people sitting with the Broyards, he was surprised that the family had so much 
help. But those weren't the servants; they were black Broyards who had been kept 
at arm's length by Anatole, whose birth certificate listed him as white. By the 
time he got to Connecticut, after early years in New Orleans, a Brooklyn 
boyhood and time spent in the army and Greenwich Village, he no longer talked 
about his lineage. Black friends assumed he was black. White people didn't ask 
what they thought of as rude questions. It was a rare moment in the Broyard 
household - say, when dinner guests realized that Bliss and her brother, Todd, knew 
nothing about their black heritage - when race seemed to make any difference 
at all.
 Only after her father died did Broyard begin to realize how little she 
understood. And so she began, in ways that elevate One Drop far above the usual 
family-revisionist memoir, to make up for lost time. She knew no Broyards in New 
York, but found plenty in Los Angeles, even bringing them together for a 
family reunion as an early step in her process of discovery. What made this 
gathering tricky is that some Broyards regarded themselves as white and others as 
black, drawing vehemently different conclusions from similar sets of facts.
 Broyard knew that her father's heritage was an open secret when she found a 
close confidant in Henry Louis Gates Jr, the renowned scholar. She got to know 
Gates by his nickname, Skip; she marveled at how generous he was with his 
time and interest. Then she learned that he planned to write the Broyard story 
for The New Yorker, and she was infuriated at having been so manipulatively 
treated. "Years later," she writes astutely, "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." But she sharply excoriates Gates for his tactics, his 
glibness and the harm that she feels his article inflicted on her family.
 When she published her first book, a story collection called My Father, 
Dancing in 2000, Broyard had not written about race. Yet her book was included in 
the African-American Book Expo in Chicago and on the Black History Month 
agenda. An investigation into her own past and her family's was clearly something 
she could not avoid.
 A half-hidden family history is no guarantee of an interesting one, however. 
And for all its prodigious research, One Drop deals more engrossingly with 
the stories of Broyard and her closest relatives than it does with the 
18th-century origins of the Broyards in the US.
 Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that genealogical Web sites are almost 
as popular as pornographic ones, Broyard zealously assembled an account of 
her roots. Among the first things she discovers about a large, Creole, New 
Orleans-based family like hers is that racial delineations and stereotypes make no 
sense at all.
 And slavery, which she regards as a defining issue in matters of black 
identity, holds its own share of surprises. "In a few short hours, I'd gone from 
believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she'd 
grown up in a family of black slave owners," she writes after one fact-finding 
trip. "These weren't the noble tragic figures I'd been expecting to 
encounter."
 Though its scope is large, the heart of One Drop lies with the author's 
father. She must try - as Philip Roth did in The Human Stain, a book that was 
seemingly prompted by the Broyard story but goes unmentioned here - to understand 
the choices he made, whether by action or omission. In a speculative account 
of what happened when her father applied for a Social Security card, Broyard 
guesses at how he might have been flummoxed by the decision of what racial 
identity to choose yet unaware of how important this choice would be. "I doubt that 
my father walked away feeling that he'd redirected the course of his life," 
she writes.
 Drawing on both her father's autobiographical account and some of what Gates 
had to say, One Drop culminates in a cultural and intellectual history of 
Broyard's life and times. His Greenwich Village days (described in his book Kafka 
Was the Rage) were full of ambition and contention, not to mention consummate 
lady-killing. (Broyard was "New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic," 
according to the hot-blooded diarist Anais Nin.) And some of his most assertive 
early essays about race and hip-ness made his bona fides clear.
 Broyard proudly kept a 1950 issue of Commentary near the family's dinner 
table. But the author's identifying note had been neatly cut out of the 
contributor's page. Now his daughter knows what it said: that Anatole Broyard was "an 
anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world." And she wonders, with 
lucid and sharp introspection, how her own life would have changed if she had 
known that sooner.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2007/09/30/2003381137




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