One Drop
a review, in passing, of the story of anatole broyard
2007-11-09
By Eric Easter

One Drop
Bliss Broyard
(Little Brown, 2007)

By now most have heard part of the story of Anatole Broyard, the renowned New York Times book reviewer who passed for white and gained a berth in the upper echelon of the literary and publishing world. In One Drop, Bliss Broyard, the subject’s daughter seeks to put context around the decisions her father made as well as resolve the many questions that surfaced after finding out her father’s "secret."

If you take away the hot button of race, Anatole Broyard’s racial passing was not unlike the kind of passing that all people do when they seek to reinvent. The newly thin hide "before" photos and avoid still-fat friends. The aspiring cool don black clothing and hang out with bohemians in bohemian places. Newly brilliant college students suffer through conversations with less educated family members and abandon companions from the past.

But, of course, it is race that makes Anatole Broyard’s life intriguing. In his case of reinvention, Broyard made the (incorrect) assumption that his intelligence, interests and sophistication were excusive to him. In doing so, he made the mistake that many whites make, concluding that the totality of black experience was limited to his personal experience with blacks and blackness. As a result, he chose to abandon family and race to chase ambition.

One Drop, however, is less about Bliss Broyard’s father than a tracing of her own attempt to find connection after his death, and seek a side of herself that was previously unknown. The journey takes her on an Alex Haley style trip through New Orleans, her father’s birthplace and America’s ground zero of racial confusion.

Broyard is at her most compelling when exploring the conflicting opinions about race and identity still present within her own newly found extended family, the network of first and distant cousins who have, for various reasons, chosen to fall on opposing sides of the color line.

Broyard also deftly manages to weave in relevant historical passages that put those family members’ views into a more multidimensional context. In doing so, she provides a deep glimpse into the psychology of the Creole, the very light and the mixed, and the insidious impact of color consciousness on the black community in general.

That the book is about passing seems odd by book’s end. As we learn more about Anatole Broyard’s life, particularly his formative years as a Greenwich village hipster, it becomes obvious that Broyard was passing only in his own mind. His white colleagues and associates seemed to be duplicitous in collectively embracing him in the "I never thought of you as Black"/not like other blacks/not dark enough to be offensive category, but without letting him in on the joke.

That becomes abundantly clear when Broyard’s dalliances with blondes lead perilously close to marriage and his closest white "friends" seek to "out" him to the future bride. Apparently, there are lines even the acceptably racially ambiguous are not allowed to cross.

Throughout her search, Bliss Broyard’s refreshingly honest questioning about her own identity allows her to approach the subject with the objectivity of an outsider, making astute observations without definitive judgment.

Judgment seems to be the overarching theme of the book. Specifically, whether or not Anatole Broyard’s attempts to escape the confines he perceived to surround his blackness should in fact be judged as self-survival, self-hate, or in the minds of many of the Creoles interviewed for the book, perhaps even heroic for making the decision to advance his family (as opposed to his race) by any means necessary.

Bliss Broyard would likely say that only her father’s family has a right to judge him on that level. She may be correct, but that doesn’t stop the reader from coming to one’s own conclusions.

Anatole Broyard died in 1990, meaning that the last 20 years of his life he saw his assumptions about the limitations of Blackness crushed in the face of the most dramatic shift in education, wealth and access for African Americans in history. As black culture became more global in the early 80s, and prominent blacks rode their blackness to untold riches, it could even be said that he lived to see being Blacks as, in fact, an advantage.

Perhaps it was that observation and being proved ultimately wrong, that led him to confess his identity on his death bed. Or else it was, as evidenced by his daughter’s seven year search for roots, a gift to his children of a new, more colorful (no pun intended) dimension to their lives.

In her endnotes and subsequent interviews, Bliss Broyard chooses to embrace the many sides of her history but ultimately not to identify as Black, seeing authentic Blackness as a state of mind and upbringing. Taking after her father, she makes a decision only someone not obviously Black has the option to make.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing. He writes about politics, culture and technology for ebonyjet.com

Read an interview with author Bliss Broyard.