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.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
RSS