One Drop

of what I couldn't exactly say. This is Bliss Broyard, reading from her two eight memoir One Drop, My Father's Hidden Life, a story of race and family secrets. When you were a kid, did you snoop through your parents stuff? I know I did. Most kids snoop go looking through their parents things, trying to solve the mystery of these adults who are so central to us and yet are also so fundamentally unknowable. We kind of sense that our parents have private lives outside of being just mom and dad,

and we want to find out about those lives. But in families where there are secrets, I mean, big secrets, this snooping is not so innocent. It kind of borders on obsessive. I should know. When I was a kid, whenever my parents would leave the house I would get to work. I searched through my mother's drawers, my father's nightstand, their cupboards and medicine cabinets. Like Bliss Broyard, if I had been asked what I was looking for, I couldn't have told you a clue. I guess a reason why

the pieces to my family just didn't add up. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that are kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and secrets we keep from ourselves. Bliss was raised in Southport, Connecticut, a small town on the coast of the Long Island Sound, with her mom, dad, and older brother Todd. I've been to Southport a few times. It's a place that reeks of money, so old it doesn't need to show off worn oriental rugs and great great Grandma's silver service kind

of money. Southport is a place that feels orderly and elegant, every detail perfection, as if dreamt up by Martha Stewart, who, come to think of it, lived in the next town over. So I'd love to start with you describing the landscape of your childhood. A bit sure, um well I grew up. I often described it as as kind of wasp. In Connecticut, um it was a wealthy so the wealthiest sect Lee County in America at the time that I was growing up in there in the nineteen seventies, Fairfeld County, and

it was virtually all white. I think I once looked at the census and there was like four or five people of color African Americans, but nobody in tam when I asked the library, knew who those people were. So they were if they were there at all, they were not known kind of respective members of the community. There were Jews and Catholics there, but there was an overriding kind of wasp culture that everyone seemed to aspire to belong to. My family, included the Broyard's, had a charmed life,

at least on the outside. When Bliss was growing up, her father, Anatole, had become famous as a literary critic. If that description sounds like an oxymoron, famous literary critic, well, once upon a time, it was a real thing, and Anatole Broyard was it. My father was an older dad. He was forty when he married my mother. My mother says that she know how old he was because he looked very young. It's kind of secretive about his age.

So they met in Grand Village, and I think they both really identified with the Grantch village of the nineteen fifties or nine sixties, and the first got married and we living there. They succumb self described bohemians. My father was a writer. Um. He published a few things at that points, particularly a story about the death of his own father that had gotten a lot of attention and had earned him a book deal for a novel that he was forever working on trying to complete. My mother

was a modern dancer. She was also an orphaned. She'd been orphaned tragically her father and then her mother died about nine months later in a car accident where my mother had been driving, and so she was pretty alone in the world and traumatized really from what happened. Um found met my father on a subway after dance class in Manhattan, and she asked him out and where he asked her out about there. Um, So they when they got married and they had my brother, they moved out

to Connecticut. You know. My mother says it's because she didn't really know how to raise a family in New York City. She herself had grown up in Westchester, and I think for both of my parents there was the sense that their marriage and kind of domestic life through that they sort of saved one another. My mother saved

my father bachelorhood, he would always say. And my father kind of saved my mother from this sort of orphaned world that she had found herself in when she was twenty and they had bought a series of old antique farmhouses in Connecticut and decorated them beautifully. My mother make homemade mayonnaise and fresh bread and planted beautiful gardens. And there was a lot about that childhood that was really

idyllic um. But there was also a lot where they were living kind of beyond their means and living on the edge and hiring to a life and they couldn't quite afford and it created a lot of stress, certainly in our household um and confusion, why do we live in this beautiful, kind of impressive house but they trouble paying for lunching to me like basic necessities sometimes And

were you aware of that as a child. I mean, some families are or some parents are pretty good at call it what you will, but you know, shielding or hiding from their kids, that sense of financial instability or

things not being as they appear. I think I was aware of it because I mean there would be fights about money, certainly that I overheard, but also my parents kept moving and they kept buying new homes, and I think that I had the impression that, you know, if we could get into a new house that was more beautiful and it was a fresh start and decorated, you know, in some other slightly different style, than they could be happier. It's kind of this chasing after the new settings with

the hope of of making things calmer and happier. So there seems to be like a kind of discontent always with with that life was. I mean, at the same time, we did have, you know, we had a lot of coziness. My father was a real fu family man, and he worked at tom like most men of that generation. So Nfol Briard is a bit of a legend. He's the chief book critic for the New York Times. He dictates his reviews over the phone from home. Around Southport, everyone

knows who he is. Blizz describes him this way in her memoir, My father was famous, at least among the people I knew, not only for being a public intellectual with a regular byline and the paper of record, but for being successful at life, at parties at our house. I'd watch the way he moved through people, laying his hand on a shoulder, firmly gripping someone's arm, and how

they turned to him. Your face is lit and expectant, as if he held a fistful of fairy dust over their heads, And he'd offer a word or two, nothing much, but with a subtext that declared, all right, we fantastic you and me. Isn't this world great? So he was also a really charismatic figure. He was very handsome and very graceful, a great athlete, of great dancer, and kind of a lot of fun um and a really quite a dear, generous friend. He was a friend of his

describing I think this was really true. He was a kind of master at impression management when he really worked hard to make people like him. But it didn't kind of come off as a manipulative or inauthentic, at least to my eyes or to his friendsise Um. You know, maybe from the far somebody would have seen it differently. But he was very likable in many ways, and he had a lot of friends, a lot of people who were quite loyal to him. But beneath all this, something

else is going on. Even within all the literary fame and country coziness, the Broyards are kind of on their own. There's no extended family around. Sandy is an orphan and anatole. Well, he has family, but they seem to have been excommunicated. He has a mother and two sisters living in New York City, just a short train ride away, but they never come to visit. Bliss and Todd grow up not knowing them. We're going to pause for a moment for a word from our sponsor. One night, anatole's temper flares

over a bologna sandwich. You heard that right. I'll let Bliss tell it. It was Mother's Day, and um, he had gotten my mother these lovely Tiffany earrings. But the moment that he was trying to present them, she was

cooking dinner and kind of didn't turn around quickly. And after he lost his temper abruptly, and then the night was a ruined and um, I went to bed, and she woke me up in the middle of the night alarmed because he couldn't find his blowny for his sandwich that he ate nightly, and then when I went downstairs, he had ripped all of the condiments and the shelves off the door of the fridge, so our whole kitchen floor was scattered with bottles and Nanna's um And he

was really shocking and seemed quite out of character. I've never seen my father really lose control like that. And that's when I learned my mother. I said, what happened? You know, what's wrong with him? And she said, well, you know, his mother died, and I think he feels guilty. And this was the first I'd heard that my grandmother had died, who had only met once in my life, you know, when I was six when she died, and

she had died back in September. She's been dead for nine months, but it was never even mentioned or discussed, or if there was a service, I wasn't concluded. And so that really hit me hard because I just felt that not only was my I thought, you know, my father had lost his mother and was presumably grieving over that, but I was also so excluded from the whole experience, and I didn't have a right to his family in any way. They didn't belong to me. They only belonged

to him, which was felt very hurtful. Yeah. Yeah, And it also speaks to that unknowability, like how is it possible for you, know, you're a kid and your your father has lost his mother and you don't know that, you know, it makes you wonder if you just aren't sensitive or paying attention or self absorbed. I mean I was twelve or something, so I'm sure I was self absorbed, But you know, I thought of myself as close with my father. He was very affectionate, and he was he

waited a long time to have children. He really loved kids, and so he seemed really very interested in my life and my brother's life and our life when our friends came around, and he was a very engaged father by today's stand words are back then, and so the fact that I hadn't noticed that he had lost his own parents and that had perhaps been grieving over that made you feel that I m didn't know my dad or

we weren't as close as I thought. If blisses, aunts, or grandmother were a part of her imagination at all when she was a kid, they were shadowy, mysterious figures covering on the periphery. I mean, my one aunt would call the house sometimes and she didn't feel as cut

off limits to me as my other aunt did. But I after my father died, I found a note from my grandmother to my father that was really heart wrenching because something like, you know, I'm turning seventy two and I'm not a young woman anymore, and I just want to meet my grandchildren for once in my life. And

then when I looked at the dates. The following week, my father brought my my grandmother, his mother, out to Connecticut and brought her to lunch the country club, like just as is to say, like I'm not keeping you apart, and there's nothing wrong going on here, and you're welcome to come. But she, of course, she once she came, she calm. That was it. She never came back. It was the only time they ever met her. Listen Todd

attend great private schools. The family spends summers on Martha's Vineyard. They play tennis, hang out at the yacht club. They're close, and yet Anatole's pensiont for control continues to exert itself in all sorts of ways. Because here's the thing, you can't control life. You can try. You can eat the same bologna sandwich every night, you can perfect your back hand, you can keep your family at bay. But ultimately, no matter how masterful you are at it, life will have

its way. Life always does. And let's not forget that Anatole Broyard is first and foremost a writer. He's been trying to write a novel forever and he can't. He just can't. A friend told me very poignant story. They went and had like a little self created writing retreat together and after the first morning they have shared their work over lunch, and this friend said, that's great, Anatole,

keep going. And then my dad came down the next day and it was basically the same couple of paragraphs but with a comma changed here and there, and you know, and he said, okay, yeah, I keep going. And it just went on like that for the week. And finally, at the end of his life, I think when you you know, when he realized his life actually had a deadline.

He was surliberated to create both a memoir that I became a book called When Kraftco Was the Rage, and also he was writing about illness um and he found a way to kind of write about himself honestly. When Bliss is in her early twenties, Anatole is diagnosed with prostate cancer, and just before her twenty four birthday, it's clear that he has very little time left. One afternoon, Sandy tells Bliss and Todd in front of Anatole that their father has a secret, and she begs him to

tell it. So what happened is my father had gone to couples therapy with my mother when he was it was clear that like western medicine had done what it could for his illness, and she was trying to get them to do some alternative treatments and they were kind of he was reposisting, and so they went to couple of therapy and it turned into more conversation about how he wanted to finish up his life, and this secret came up, and the therapist had suggested that it would

be a kind of unburdening to tell his children finally, something that my mother had been really after for him to tell us for years. I think in the back of my mother's mind too, she was going to include his two sisters in his memorial service, and so we were going to meet them, and I was going to meet my cousins, and wouldn't it be better if my father told us first. So she sort of sprung it on him to tell us, and he wasn't ready, and

he was having a hard day. Um, he was in a lot of pain from his prostate cancer, which had advanced at that point to his bones. And he said that he wanted to get his vulnerabilities and orders. They didn't get magnified during the discussion. Very kind of controlled thing for him to say, very kind of typical way. Imagine how amazing it would be to get your vulnerabilities in order to line them up like good little soldiers, to wait until they're all perfectly aligned, and then and

only then. Oh wait, right, that's not how vulnerabilities work. Okay, So Bliss and Todd can't imagine what the secret might be. Their father isn't talking, he's ordering his vulnerabilities. He's frail and in ever worsening shape. Finally, when it seems the end might be near, Sandy decides to tell her children

her self. He planted it back in the hospital to the medical emergency, and he had to have an emergency surgery that looked like he was going to die and he was going to make it through the surgery, and so my mom brought us outside Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and said, look, I'm going to tell you what the secret is. Your father's are black. And my brother and I laughed, you know, we just know that's it, that's the big secret, because we had been talking, you know,

the last couple of weeks. What do you think, what do you think it is like somebody get murdered, just rape. You know, we just thought incest. We knew there was something had to do with this family, but we really went down what we seemed like much darker channels. So this seems like not a very big deal and kind of a relief, and we remember we joked about it. But over time, after Anatole's death, the magnitude of the secret and what it really means for Bliss starts to

slowly reveal itself. But I think then a few months later at the memorial service and I met my aunt Shirley, who I had never met before, and her son Frank, and UM saw my other aunt Loraine for the first time, and you know, twenty years or something, the secret started to take on more import and I started to really have a lot of questions. Why was it a secret? What did it mean to him? What does it mean

to me? And I told my best friend from growing up from Martha's Vineyard, I pointed out my yes, and I said, you know those are my aunts, the big secrets that my father was black, and I didn't know. She said, you didn't know. I knew? He said, why, like you knew all of these years? She said, yeah. I mean I thought like everybody knew of my parents knew, and their friends. I just thought that you've heard not

to talk about it. That was very odd because I had been sort of made complicit in the secret that I wasn't even really aware of. This is something I think a lot about in any number of the conversations I've had for this podcast. The notion that not me it was a secret kept, but then in fact that secret was hiding in plain sight. Well, that keeps on coming up again and again, especially when it relates to

paternity or ethnic or racial background. I mean, this was definitely true for me when I first wrote something on Facebook about my discovery about my dad, kind of announcing the subject of my new book, The wife of my ninth grade English teacher posted a comment hashtag always wondered. She said, really always wondered? Had everybody always wondered? Except

for me? In your book you talk about dancing, right, and you're a really good dancer, and you come home one night and you say to your father, Um, it was like the ultimate compliment somebody said to you know, like you you dance like a black girl, you know, like and I mean he doesn't really register it, and you don't really register it. Um. I think he took it as a compliment too, you know, right, like that

he wanted that bro right. Yeah. I think for me too, I felt very exposed, um, with this idea of this knowledge that a lot of people knew something about me that I didn't know myself. You know, it makes you feel like you have a sign on your back or something. Um. And I made me feel sort of stupid and uh. And I even had some you know, strangers when I was giving readings like how could you not know? Um,

didn't you look at your father and wonder? And I talked to people whose parents have come out or UM later in life, And I think that a partly, I think it's the self absorption of the child, Like, yes, we're trying to figure out our parents, but we're more focused probably in figuring out ourselves, and we don't quite see the connection, you know. Um, But also I just didn't. I wasn't suspicious that my parents, you know, we're keeping

a secret. You've sort of been involved with them in a way so intimately, like it seemed um hard to It just wasn't one of the things that I wondered about. You know. Well, it's there's almost a kind of implicit pact or you know, something unspoken between parents and children, which is the parents are not going to lie to

their children or withhold significant aspects of their identity. But I think it's just about impossible for a child to bring forth any kind of conscious knowledge in that situation. We're going to pause for a moment. Secrets have other impacts, other effects. They form the inner lives of the people

who live and breathe the atmosphere of that secret. In Bliss, his father's case, keeping his blackness a secret by keeping his family of origin at bay, had the unintended consequence of making his daughter feel like she could be rejected too, for reasons she didn't understand there was always a kind of fragility in a way to our family, and I was like wary of things where somebody might be cast out.

I think probably because I knew that my father had rejected his family of origin, so that unconditional bonds that was supposed to exist in families did not seem certain for me. And there was a kind of, you know, an active role on my part to keep my father engaged, because he could go off and forgot about us like

he had forgotten about his, his parents and his sisters. Um. So for me, even though I felt quite loved and secure, on one hand, I also understood that we were together because we wanted to be together, not out of kind of obligation or duty. That family was kind construction, um and I felt that they need to sort of continually keep us together no way. And another consequence, when a secret does get pushed out into the open, it leaves the inheritors of that secret with a lot of catching

up to do. List goes to the library, actually goes to the library, if you can imagine such a thing, and skulks around shamefully trying to look up information about passing, as if she were trying to, I don't know, check out some porn. I didn't know anything about the phenomenon of racial passing when I discovered it happening in my own life and family. UM, So I did go to the library. Back then there was no internet, so I

couldn't look it up online. UM. And I did feel I did feel very kind of secretive myself and like a little ashamed to be, partly because it seems strange to go to a library to look up something that was so intimately involved with your family and your own identity. You know. I was going into these outside sources. They had a card catalog system, and I started looking up passing, which was what my mother had described my father was doing,

which is a term I wasn't familiar with. And uh, then it led me down a path to sort of trying to figure out how people's racial identity was even determined. Um, was there like a law about it? Where did that law reside? And I came upon the term misgenation, which is the marriage or the union between a black person and a white person, which was contained in the statutes of many states, um, and their marriage laws. You know, no black person or white person could be married together. Um,

that was misggenation. And you know, these terms seemed I'm shameful for to me, although that's what had happened in my own family. I mean, my father is very light skinned. Clearly it wasn't all black count of percent. There's a lot of racial mixines passed from sagenation, So I think it was. I mean, that was part of why I felt like I was conducting the search kind of in secret, because there was a whole shameful quality to it that

he had passed. You know, there had bunessgenation, and then there was also all these terms, these racial terms like oct roon that somebody who's one eighth black mulatto's half um Steets was one sixteenth. And I wondered, you know, which is these definitions applied to my father and applied to be And it was just odd to encounter this whole vocabulary that had little to do with how he had been raised in fear phil Connecticut. Um, you know that now I was applying so directly to my own life.

There were many reasons that Anatole Broyard chose to spend his adult life passing as a white man. Once he moved his family to one of the whitest towns in America. One of those reasons was literally very ambition. At the time, even if he had written a masterpiece, he would have been known as a black writer, and the novel a

great black novel. Ralph Ellison, who Broyard knew and admired, had published Invisible Man, which was hailed in the pages of The New York Times, anatole's newspaper, as the greatest Negro novel of its time. Another reason, however, misguided, seems to have been his love for his children. He had suffered as a light skinned black child by not quite belonging anywhere, so he made sure that his children belonged at the yacht club, in their private schools on the

tennis courts of Southport. He did his damnedest to inoculate them with the potent combination of his charisma, his literary fame, and the myth of their whiteness. I think my read anyway of your father was that it was coming very much out of a desire to protect you and your brother from what he had felt himself. Absolutely, I mean, I think he thought, what's the best life I can

give my children? You know? It's to be white and Fairfield, Connecticut and this kind of waspy um rural idyllic community, you know, um. And I think he believed that in the sense. Do you think that if your mother had not intervened, and if he had not become you know, sort of prematurely, very ill, mortally ill, do you think he ever would have told you? You know, I think he would have her It would have probably come out, certainly.

I think it's harder now to keep a family secret than it used to be because of the interconnectness of people through social media and ancestry dot com, and so I think it would have come out probably. I think that with secrets, what often happens is that originally somebody keeps a secret to protect people in their lives, as you said, and maybe the the original impulses love protection.

But then there's the embarrassment of having kept a secret for so long, and it kind of infuses that secret and you know, elevates it was so much meaning and significance that maybe more significance you know, the person originally gave it. UM. So I think that there would it would have been hard for him to kind of overcome how large it had grown just through the fact of it being kept a secret for so long to talk about it. But I suspect you would have found way.

Um And certainly I don't know with Obama being elected and race relations changing in my own interest. I mean, although you know, I sort of thank god in a way that I didn't find out, because I would think that I'd be on the same path anyway. But certainly it's changed my own traject story of who how I

think of myself. And I had not learned really about American history and African American history and any kind of objective or balanced way in my prep school in Connecticut growing up, and so I had to actively really search out another narrative of history that feels more accurate to me and fair. And I know, I think I would have gotten there on my own, but probably not as quickly. So that in a way that answers my last question

to you, which is are you glad you know? Yeah? Definitely, um, it answered it answered a lot of questions I think a lot of times. And there's a secret in the family. There's just a great relief in knowing that you're not crazy, that you're not imagining things when you feel that this sort of sense that something is being withheld from you.

I think just that knowledge was a relief for me, and I think that the path that I was on didn't feel authentic for me, and this knowledge has put me on a different path that feels like, really that the right groove for my life. I'm interested in social justice to do a lot of work on integration and racial and economic justice, and that that feels like the path that I was I was supposed to be on, the one that's more true to my kind of my father's story away. I'd like to thank my guest, Bliss

Broyard for sharing her story with us. Her book is One Drop, a true story of family, race and secrets. Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at

Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's FAM Secrets Pot. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com