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

Summary (from the publisher): A father's stunning secret sparks a life-transforming journey in this very personal story about race and a daughter's relationship with her father. When Anatole Broyard reveals on his deathbed that he is actually black, it sets his daughter Bliss on a search through New York and New Orleans for the family she never knew.

 

Review: This work of non-fiction follows the author's journey to uncover and come to terms with the revelation of her father's hidden identity shortly before his death - that he is actually black. The author's father, Anatole Broyard, was a renowned literary critic whose two children were raised in a WASPy Connecticut setting. But unknown to Bliss and her blonde brother Todd, her father's family were Creoles from New Orleans, who relocated to New York and initially passed to find employment. After college, Antaole began passing as white fulltime and eventually rejected his family of origins, seemingly as a means to cover up his racial identity and to enjoy the privileges a white life offered him and his children. In this book, written well after her father's death, Bliss Broyard attempts to unpack what this revelation means to her and to her family, seeks to connect with her family history, and understand the parts of her father's life that were hidden from her.

 

In many ways, this work reminded me of a non-fiction version of The Human Stain by Phillip Roth or Passing by Nella Larson. It seems that Anatole's secret was not a particularly well kept one. Indeed, most of those who knew him had some idea of his racial background, with his children being notable exceptions. I found the section of the book that detailed the Broyard family history the most fascinating. Broyard discovers that the first person to pass in her family was her white great-great-grandfather who passed as black in order to marry a free woman of colors in the 1800s. This is the first instance of the family passing in order to circumvent the legal system that prevented intermarriage and kept blacks out of many occupations. The author's grandfather, Nat Broyard,  "joined the carpenters' union when he first arrived in New York by passing as white" (327) in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, Nat's wife was hired to work at a commercial laundry, silently allowing the owners to assume she was white in order to get the job. Therefore, the early passing of the light skinned Broyards was out of necessity - to feed their children, to keep a roof of their heads - and was done by simply not correcting whites who assumed that the Broyards were also white.

 

It's little wonder that the author's father Anatole, having seen his parents forced to pass as white in order to avoid debilitating racial prejudice, also began passing in school and later in his career to get ahead. Yet in the early years, it seems Anatole didn't hide his family, rather, he simply didn't correct those who assumed he was white. It was only later that he avoided seeing his darker skinned younger sister and began to describe himself as white.

 

In some ways, Bliss's account is unfortunately hampered by the inability to interview her father or hear his own thoughts or insights on what living with such a secret might have been like. It seems clear from the book that it was not an easy one, as noted by Broyard's complicated racial identity as a child, his refusal to discuss or openly confirm his past, and his rupture from his mother and siblings. After a lifetime of believing herself to be white, Bliss does not have the same turmoil or history of racial prejudice and heartache to the table as her father, although learning her father's secret certainly prompts a questioning of her own identity and that of her father and her father's family. Yet more than anything, Bliss seems wounded by the fact that she is largely permanently ostracized by her father's family, as a direct result of his rejection of them.

 

I was disappointed that the author's definition of her own and her father's blackness largely seemed predicated on racial stereotypes. Throughout the narrative, Bliss frequently refers to her father's gait and dance skills as 'proof' of his black origins, and cites her own dance skills as proof of her own racial inheritance. Additionally, the book seems meandering and long winded at times and I found it difficult to keep up with the author's tracing of the Broyard family tree. Broyard also occasionally comes across as self pitying when she describes her hurt feelings at being rejected by her black relatives, instead of being able to recognize what pain they must have felt to be rejected for decades by her father because of the color of their skin. In the end, I would have enjoyed this book if it had been less a memoir of Bliss's experiences and more a focus on a daughter's attempt to understand the struggles her father and his family had to endure. In highlighting her own struggles, which pale in light of the social prejudice and personal heartache her relatives faced, it makes the author come across as self absorbed and almost like a spoiled rich girl who was formerly given to racial slurs and now is seeking sympathy for her 'struggles' as a 'woman of color.'

 

Stars: 3