Product Description

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard's own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity. With unsparing candor and nuanced insight, Broyard chronicles her evolution from sheltered WASP to a woman of mixed race ancestry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #550149 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316008068
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

From Publishers Weekly
For Broyard, who was raised as white in Connecticut, the discovery that her father, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard, wasn't exactly white raised the question of how black I was—a question that set her in search of the history of the most well-known defector from the black race in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the first section, Broyard weaves her privileged childhood together with later travels to New Orleans (her father's birthplace) and Los Angeles (where there is a determinedly white set of Broyards as well as a determinedly black set). Part two extends from the first Broyard, a Frenchman arriving in mid-18th century Louisiana territory, to six-year-old Anatole's 1927 arrival in Brooklyn. The last section is devoted to Anatole's life. Broyard's identity quest takes her on an odyssey through social, military, legal, Louisiana and general American history, as well as U.S. race relations and her family DNA, introducing innumerable relatives, classmates, friends and employers, and making for a rather overstuffed account. Fortunately, she's got an ear for dialogue, an eye for place and a storyteller's pacing. But the most compelling element is her ambivalent tenor: Was my father's choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred?... Was he a hero or a cad? Part eulogy, part apologia, the answer is indirect: But he was my dad and we loved each other. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
A decade ago in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, noted black scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote an unflattering portrait of Anatole Broyard and his "passing." Critic Art Winslow suggests that Bliss Broyard’s memoir may be "intended as a rejoinder to Gates." Author of the short story collection My Father, Dancing (2000; New York Times Notable Book), Broyard offers a passionate, lively narrative packed with hundreds of interviews with family members (both black and white), friends, lovers, and others who knew her father well. The result is not always seamless; the book’s intent is not always clear; and Jonathan Yardley finds Broyard’s "fretting about her racial identity" bothersome. Still, the author generally succeeds in offering an ambitious and personal perspective on issues relevant to her own family and anyone interested in race relations in America.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* How easy it is to keep secrets, even within a close-knit family. Bliss Broyard was 24 when she learned that her father, Anatole, for many years the daily book reviewer for the New York Times, had concealed his black heritage. With a mother of Norwegian and French descent (who carried her own burdens), Bliss and her brother never looked anything but white, yet as soon as Bliss was told about her father's lineage, all sorts of family traits suddenly made a new kind of sense. Still, the disclosure left Broyard reeling, uncertain of her identity or place in the world. At the same time, her jazz-loving, lady-killer father was dying. Determined to learn as much as possible about her heritage, Broyard embarked on an intrepid genealogical quest that yielded not only new relatives but also galvanizing insights into Creole culture, African American history, and the cold truth about "passing." Broyard's vivid, compassionate portrait of her complex father raises the question, What is the deep-down cost of living a lie? And her remarkably perceptive and well-wrought saga of blood ties denied and nurtured celebrates the grand diversity and true interconnectivity of the entire human family. Seaman, Donna

Customer Reviews

The Sins of the Father: Race, Identity and Secrets
When her mother exposed her father's secret while he was dying in 1990, Bliss Broyard accepted it but was not ready to deal with the complexities of learning her father was of Black heritage. She was not ready when an essay, "The Passing of Anatole Broyard", appeared in Henry Louis Gates' collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man in 1997. When she was finally ready, Broyard wrote a wonderful tribute that is a memoir, a family history, a discourse on race, culture, and identity that is worthy of being a classic.

What does a twenty four-year old woman, born and raised in Connecticut with all the trappings of an upper-class WASP environment do when she finds out she is an impostor of sorts? That she is not White...well not according to the one-drop rule that this country imposes. That her father kept a part of him from her, thereby withholding a part of her history? Bliss' reaction and that of her older brother, Todd, was why all the secrecy? Why was it kept from us?

Unfortunately, Bliss did not get the answers from her father, Anatole Broyard, the New York Times critic and writer. Thus, she began the journey that would lead her to the truth. That journey took her to meet relatives in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, where she met her aunt Shirley, the sister her father had avoided for most of his adult life. With the help of her newfound family, Bliss began to trace the Broyard family history. But it was the emotional and mental journey about race and identity that would prove to be the most complex.

It began with Etienne Broyard of France, Bliss' great-great-great grandfather who came to New Orleans from France in the 1700s. Succeeding generations included mixed-race women of African heritage or mixed-race and Free People of Color also known as Gens de Libre Coleur. The majority of the family had a "white looking appearance" and at different times, passed for White, most often for economic reasons. Economic reasons were the main reason Anatole's parents, Paul and Edna, passé blanc when they moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York in the 1920s when he was six years old. In order to secure employment as a carpenter, Paul became White in the daytime. When Anatole started college he slowly began his journey of subterfuge.

To understand Bliss' angst and confusion about where she fit on the color line, one must first understand the dynamics of the Creole of Color culture and the convoluted caste system of Louisiana. The three-tier racial categorization; White, Black, and Creole/mixed race was an accepted practice. But as no race or culture is a monolith, there are different feelings among Creoles about identity today. Some Creoles have assimilated either into the white culture intermarrying/mixing/bleaching until the African blood is obliterated, while others have assimilated into the African American community and identify as Black. Bliss' family fell into both categories as well as those who held themselves separate and viewed themselves as a stand-alone race and or culture. Bliss began to navigate the terrain of race and how identity is viewed in America. What did it mean that her father was of African heritage to her existence? From the New Orleans Mardi Gras balls and the Seventh Ward to the Creole neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bohemian Greenwich Village where her father lived his young adult life, Bliss used her journalistic investigative skills to find out the mystery of it all. Cloaked in myriad of emotions; anger, frustration and feelings of betrayal, she came to know the flawed man who was her beloved father and why he chose the path he did.

Broyard's left no leaf unturned in her impeccable, exhaustive research. The interviews, resources and bibliographies will keep one researching for years. There has not been such a personal undertaking on the meaning of race and identity as exhibited in this work. I commend Bliss for taking on such a delicate, monumental task. This book is highly recommended for those who study race and culture, as well as those who research genealogy and history. This is definitely one to keep in the family library.

Dera Williams
APOOO BookClub

Brilliant, unblinking, and kind -- I couldn't put it down
I read this book in three sittings -- plus two middle of the
night wakings up where I read for hours more.

Not only is it wonderfully written, but Bliss Broyard is willing to turn
over all the stones and gems she finds, and look directly at what she sees. Like A.M. Homes, and Tobias Wolff, Broyard has a clear-eyed
willingness to review the past and to experience new things while still remaining a thinking, sensitive person. She doesn't compromise or lose herself despite the demands of others. Instead she grows and lets us grow along with her.

The creole experience in New Orleans is unique in American race relations. It takes time and an open mind and heart to explore the world of the free people of color in the French colonies. Much of this history doesn't overlap with the experiences of others from the African diaspora. We learn about the horrors of the Middle Passage slave trade in school and through film, but a first introduction to the creole world, especially after learning it is your own ancestral world, can be astonishing. This book is not only a personal journey, but a wonderful introduction to the rich and ongoing history of creoles in the United States.

I cannot recommend One Drop more highly.

Personal Observations on Bliss Broyard's One Drop
Personal Observations on Bliss Broyard's
One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets
(New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007)

Let me say right off that we at Backintyme Publishing enjoyed the book and recommend it without reservation. But do not be fooled by the misleading marketing blurb (more about this later); One Drop is not a book about a White woman who suddenly discovers that she is "really" Black. It is not about Bliss Broyard's father. It is not even about her search for her father's roots among the Louisiana Creoles. The book introspects Ms. Broyard's feelings about what she found while searching for those roots.

Anatole Broyard died in 1990 after an illustrious career as literary critic for the New York Times. He was one of the intellectual beacons of the U.S. twentieth century. Six years after his death, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of Black Studies at Harvard, published an essay "outing" the late Broyard as a Black man who had lived a lie by pretending to be White all his professional life. According to Bliss, she and her older brother Todd only learned about their father's Colored Creole ancestry shortly before his death when she was twenty-four. Apparently, it then took her over a decade to assemble the facts to refute Gates's racialist ignorance.

I lay my cards on the table. I am not objective about U.S. racialism. I am of a culture that is as proud of its African ancestry as of its European and Native American roots. (By coincidence, I happen to have the same fraction of sub-Saharan genetic admixture as Bliss.) I feel as at home among Creoles, Melungeons, Redbones, and Seminoles as I do among my own Puerto Rican people. I love seeing siblings accepted as routine, whom the newspapers would breathlessly report as "one chance in a million." But, like Anatole Broyard, I am not African-American, and I will dispute anyone who ignores my culture and accuses me of betraying my "race" merely because my genome is typical of New World inhabitants, as Gates did to Broyard after his death.

The overt villain of this book is Gates and he is essential to its existence. Had Gates never accused Broyard's corpse of being a race traitor, this book about Bliss's genealogical quest could not have been published. Had Gates never advised Bliss's mother that "the best thing she could do was to help [Bliss] accept her blackness," Bliss might not have resolved to learn the truth. Had Gates not suggested that they petition Connecticut to alter Bliss's birth certificate to show "black" ancestry, he might have seemed rational. As it is, you conclude that Gates is delusional--an honest believer in the false dichotomy of the U.S. color line: if you are not White, then you must be Black, like it or not. He apparently wants to infect others with his foolishness that any African ancestry makes you INVOLUNTARILY Black.* In short, we should all be grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Without him, this excellent book would probably not exist.

The book answers two questions but leaves two others unanswered. First and most-often asked, did Anatole Broyard hide his Colored Creole ancestry? He did not. Did he cut off his children from their Creole roots? He did. Why? We shall never know. Did he deny being Black? That is a non-question with a false assumption.

The book also has a covert villain--Anatole Broyard himself. Although Bliss clearly loved her father and admires him, he comes across in this book as self-centered and demanding. Most of all, it is hard to forgive his cutting off his children from their Creole culture. Why would anyone deprive his own children of such a proud and colorful family?

The canonical answer is that he feared that they would be seen as Black and suffer prejudice. But that answer simply does not hold water. It is belied by Bliss's book. Anatole's wife, his friends, his business associates at work, his neighbors, some of Bliss's and Todd's little childhood friends, even the handymen who worked on his house, all knew of Broyard's ancestry. Judging by the book, the only two people on the planet who did not know that Anatole Broyard was of Colored Creole heritage were Bliss and Todd, and I have my doubts about Todd.

Obviously, there was a falling out with his relatives. Anatole never let his children meet their Creole relatives and, in turn, he was vindictively and explicitly excluded from his sister Lorraine's will. We shall probably never know what caused the rift. Nevertheless in the end, for whatever reason, he deprived his children of their rich cultural heritage.

The fourth question, whether he denied being African-American, is a non-question with a built-in false assumption. Why would anyone expect him to claim to be Black? He was not of the African-American ethnic community any more than are millions of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and tens of thousands of other Creoles, Lumbees, Melungeons, Redbones, etc. The world is far richer than those who preach White "racial" purity would have you believe. I would love to know how Anatole Broyard filled out census forms in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. (According to Bliss in an NPR interview, she checked three "race" boxes in census 2000.)

Despite all this, the book is not about her father. It is about Ms. Broyard's own feelings towards what she learned while searching for her father's roots.

Evidently, when she was under Gates's influence Bliss believed his racialist silliness that if you have any African ancestry, you have no choice--you are Black. The first third of her book continually presents Black/White as an either/or choice with no other alternatives. Worse, she often repeats notorious racialist stereotypes. She attributes her skill at dancing and her father's love of sensuality to her "Black" ancestry, as if such traits are carried in the mythical "one drop." At one point she even expresses surprise that the dancers at a New Orleans Creole ball are no more graceful than any other random collection of middle-class Americans.

As she became exposed to the Creoles, Bliss Broyard began to learn of the existence of cultures of mixed Afro-Euro ancestry who are not ethnically Black. To my sensibilities, the funniest moment of the book is Bliss's horror at discovering that her Colored ancestors, far from being tragic slaves kidnapped into the middle passage, were powerful slave owners who immigrated from Haiti. (Half of the Colored residents of 1839 New Orleans owned slaves.) By the end of her journey, she apparently began intellectually to grasp that the bizarre U.S. one-drop rule is, well, dumb. Unfortunately, she never seems to absorb this new knowledge at an emotional level, and continues to use "Black" and "African ancestry" as synonyms to the very end.

Any molecular anthropologist can explain that as many as 30 percent of White Americans have detectable sub-Saharan DNA markers from slave ancestors who crossed the color line. (See "Afro-European Genetic Admixture in the United States" at http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=5 .) And it is easy enough to compute that about 35,000 European-looking Americans every year switch from calling themselves "Black" to "White" when they leave high school. (See "The Rate of Black-to-White 'Passing'" at http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=8 .) The good news is that this book will educate readers at a personal family level just how this happens. The bad news is that its author inadvertently reifies Americans' false dichotomy because she is apparently still struggling with the realization that mixed Afro-Euro-Native American ancestry is the norm in this hemisphere, and that the obviously counterfactual U.S. myth of White "racial" purity is the strange pathological exception.

The biggest flaw in the book is not in the author's writing, which is entertaining and informative. Its problem is lack of truth in advertising. It is marketed as another one of those tedious books whose theme is: "Oh woe is me! I thought that I was a rich White but it turns out I am really Black. Taxis no longer stop for me! Cops have started harassing me! What will I do?" (All this written by someone who, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, is "white enough to suit Hitler and passing for colored.") In reality, this book is the story of the Louisiana Creoles who are many things, but "Black" (in the Harlem Renaissance sense) is not one of them. Nevertheless, the book is marketed thus.

Most reviewers repeat the theme: "White woman discovers that she is really Black." The NPR interviewer challenged, "so now you consider yourself `Black'?" (To which, Bliss replied, "Yes. I have mixed-race ancestry.") The first paragraph of her book-jacket bluntly affirms about her father, "he was black." Diane McWhorter's endorsement praises Ms. Broyard's "discovering that she is black."

It is not that such books lack a market. Many have been published in the past decade by Matthews, Williams, Piper, Kroeger, and others. They must be selling well, because new ones keep coming out (pun intended). The notion that a European-looking person discovers that he is "really Black" and that this suddenly makes taxi drivers ignore him (a claim actually made by an author in the online discussion group that Backintyme sponsors) seems to attract a certain kind of reader.

The problem is that, despite the book's own jacket, despite all the reviews, despite the interviews, this is not one of those books. It is not about a White woman who is "really" Black. Instead, it is a presentation of the history and culture of the Gulf Coast Creoles by someone who is one of them by ancestry, although cut off from them in childhood, and who is now desperate to learn about them and to share her discoveries with the rest of us.

And so, readers who are turned off by the false dichotomy of the color line will not even open this book. Those who consider the "I was a rich White but it turns out I am really Black" genre puerile will pass it by. Those who resent others shoehorning them involuntarily into an ethnic group will advise their friends to avoid it.

On the other hand, those who gloat over traditional passing-as-deception stories so loved by academia, and who smirk when the wicked passer gets her "just comeuppance" will read the blurb and buy the book but then be disappointed. They will claim false advertising and some will likely demand their money back.

In short, those who would enjoy this book (including millions of people of mixed ancestry) will be turned off by its marketing hype and not buy it. And those who believe its color-line-reifying blurb will buy it but be disappointed and warn their friends. This is a shame because it is an outstanding book and well worth the price. Perhaps these personal observations will help.

* * * * *

*Is it just me? Or does anyone else find it odd that the most highly respected and diligent protector of White "racial" purity today is a college Black Studies teacher?