To cut to the chase: writer Bliss Broyard learned on her father's deathbed that he, writer Anatole Broyard, had some amount of African ancestry. Up to that point, she had believed that she was French and Scandinavian, but essentially, she believed herself to be "white." Up to that point, she and her brother had no reason to believe otherwise. Her father had kept them apart from his own sisters and mother who still lived in the "black" community.
Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr, wrote of Anatole Broyard's "passing" as a white man in a lengthy and well-written article, "White Like Me," that ran in the New Yorker magazine in 1996. After eleven years of public silence on the issue, Bliss Broyard tells her side of the story, and she has done so in a very well-researched memoir and family history titled One Drop: My father's hiddlen life--a story of race and family secrets.
The Creole Factor
After reading Bliss Broyard's own account, I take issue with Gates' claim that Anatole Broyard was a "black" man who became "white." The Broyards had lived as free people in Louisiana since the mid-1700's. Gates calls them "free blacks," but they were, in varying degrees, mixtures of French, African and Native American people whose marriages and deaths were duly recorded in parish and government records. They were Catholic Creoles. The culture that we now refer to as "Black" culture or "African American"---an English-speaking, largely Protestant culture---came to Louisiana only with the influx of Anglo-American slaveholders and their slaves when President Jefferson purchased Louisiana from France in 1802.
Creole identity preceded "Black" culture in Louisiana by several generations. It should be no surprise that many Creoles, such as composer Jelly Roll Morton, did not consider themselves "Negro." Anatole Broyard's parents were both Creoles who worked as "white" people in New York but returned home each night to a mixed (but increasingly black)neighborhood in Brooklyn. Apparently, they had done this sometimes back in New Orleans, as did numbers of their relatives.
It seems that the darker complexion of Anatole's younger sister is the driving force that kept the family in a black community in pre-Civil Rights America. (Anatole's parents also did not speak Creole in the home, and made only one or two trips back to New Orleans, thus minimizing their children's connection to Creole culture. **) If they all had had sufficient lightness of skin to live as whites, then they would probably have made that choice for Anatole when he was still a child. Instead, Anatole Broyard made that choice himself as an adult. The question is really not why one of the Broyards chose to live as white, but why it took so long for a Broyard to make that choice.***
The Assumption of Whiteness
In my own novel Taxicab to the Stars, the protagonist, Pearl Fitzgerald, reconnects with her Mvskoke (Creek Indian) identity. She concludes that "She was white because she was assumed to be white. Was that all her whiteness amounted to, an assumption?"
I cannot answer such a question (and I didn't try to answer it for my character, either) , because no one would mistake me for white. Only someone like Bliss Broyard can answer such a question. She essentially was a white woman who learned that she might be considered "black." If whiteness is an assumption, then it is a powerful assumption, because Ms. Broyard demonstrates clearly that she assumed herself to be white from the cradle onward. Countless other whites in her situation would simply have buried the new revelation of their partly-African past and continued to live as whites, with all that might entail. But Bliss is a writer, and prone to explore her own soul along with her family history. She chooses to assume responsibility for her new knowledge.
The Ease of Passing
If you are sufficiently light-skinned, then it is relatively easy for any American to be assumed as "white." The public education systems and the mass media provide a course on white culture, middle class speech, values and the like. School, TV and popular music all familiarize immigrants with official "American" culture. At least two black women, both raised in somewhat segregated environments, have told me they learned from television how to speak "white" English, which helped them "pass" over the phone, and to mix socially with white people as adults. A white southern Appalachian actress told me that she learned to speak "Yankee" from the TV newscasters. There are many degrees of passing.
Gates and the Native American
Coming full circle, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr, features Bliss Broyard in the 2008 broadcast of African American Lives, 2. Gates "skips" completely over Broyard's own evidence of a strong Native American component in her own family and Creole people in general. I might take this as an oversight on Skip's part if not for the fact that he dismisses the Native American ancestry claims of all of his guests, and for the African American population in general. Does he have some other agenda?
Creole as an Indigenous Culture
But this brings up another point. Creole culture in Louisiana had many influences: Bambara from Africa, Haitian Creole, Catholic German, and the Muskoghean Indian languages. In fact, on the gulf coast, people of all backgrounds often communicated in Mobilian, a trade language based on Choctaw, a Muskoghean Indian language. Some Mobilian expressions survive in Louisiana Creole culture, in the songs of the black Mardi Gras Indians. (Gospel great Mahalia Jackson cited the Mardi Gras Indians as a major influence on her, and her childhood nickname "Warpee" was taken from a Native American girl who, like Mahalia herself, went about barefoot.)
Though it is frequently acknowledged, Creole cuisine, jazz, Cajun, zydeco music continue to influence Anglo- and Afro-American culture. What is not usually acknowledged is that Creole culture has strong Native American influences, that were, in the formative years, as strong as the French and African elements.
Who's Fault?
The fault lies not in Anatole Broyard because he chose to reject an identity that his family had never really accepted anyway. The fault lies in a society that rejected the right of the Creole peoples to define themselves. Many other Indigenous and First Nations people face this same obstacle today thrown down before us from high places in government and academia.
**It seems in many so-called "passing" stories, when a person of color disappears into the "white" community, there was already a sense of psychological disconnect with the community of origin. If an individual's home life has been unhappy, or if the community of origin has not been accepting (for reasons of skin color, class, or even sexual orientation), then it is easier for a person to just walk away. (Nonetheless, Anatole Broyard's rejection of his sister Shirley, along with her black-identified husband and children, strikes me as the most cold-hearted of choices, and in its own way, his adoption of the very racism he believed stifled his individual freedom.)
The reverse is also true. Even in times of intense racism, phenotypically white people have willingly assimilated into families of color that were more loving and accepting than their families of origin.
***Bliss Broyard provides photographs of her father's parents and sisters. Except for the younger sister, Shirley, who these days could easily be taken as a dark-complected Latina, the other Broyards don't look at all like "light-skinned blacks." If you saw their photos outside of this book, you might take them for white, Mexican or Native American. Yet Anatole Broyard had certain mannerisms that blacks easily recognized, which leads me to wonder how much of African-American culture is , like Creole culture, a synthesis of white, black, and Native American elements. Current scholarship, though, seems intent on portraying African American culture as a purely African product, despite even the testimony of many blacks about their own Native (and other non-African) ancestry.
