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