One Drop
My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
In this acclaimed memoir, Bliss Broyard, daughter of the literary critic Anatole Broyard, examines her father's choice to hide his racial identity, and the impact of this revelation on her own life.
Two months before he died, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side to impart a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. Born in the French Quarter in 1920, Anatole had begun to conceal his racial identity after his family moved to Brooklyn and his parents resorted to "passing" in order to get work. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the favßade.
Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices. Seeking out unknown relatives in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, Bliss uncovers the 250-year history of her family in America and chronicles her own evolution from privilged WASP to a woman of mixed-race ancestry.
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."
