February 14, 2019 • 31 mins
Imagine living in one of the whitest enclaves in America, so white that just four people of color were recorded by the census bureau. Now imagine that your father "slipped over the color line" to be there. Bliss Broyard discusses her family secret and how it formed her life, past and present.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Two
months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned
about a secret, But I've always said that there was
something about my family, or even many things that I
didn't know. As a child, when I was left to
(00:21):
love in the house, I would search through another's file,
cabinets and my father's study for elaboration, clarification, some proof
of what I couldn't exactly say. This is Bliss Broyard,
reading from her two eight memoir One Drop, My Father's
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:55):
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
(02:19):
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.
(02:43):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:25):
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,
(03:48):
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
(04:11):
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
(04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:17):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:25):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
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.
(07:52):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:38):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:22):
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
(09:45):
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,
(10:07):
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?
(10:30):
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,
(10:53):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:41):
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,
(13:03):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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,
(14:10):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:54):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(16:00):
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.
(16:22):
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.
(16:46):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:14):
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,
(18:34):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:18):
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,
(19:42):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:43):
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,
(21:06):
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,
(21:34):
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,
(21:56):
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
(22:17):
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.
(22:38):
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
(23:02):
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,
(23:25):
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
(23:46):
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,
(24:07):
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
(24:31):
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
(24:52):
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,
(25:13):
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
(25:33):
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
(25:54):
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
(26:17):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:01):
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,
(27:22):
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.
(27:44):
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
(28:07):
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
(28:28):
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,
(28:50):
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
(29:11):
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,
(29:31):
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,
(29:52):
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,
(30:14):
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.
(30:37):
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
(31:01):
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
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Two
months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned
about a secret, But I've always said that there was
something about my family, or even many things that I
didn't know. As a child, when I was left to
(00:21):
love in the house, I would search through another's file,
cabinets and my father's study for elaboration, clarification, some proof
of what I couldn't exactly say. This is Bliss Broyard,
reading from her two eight memoir One Drop, My Father's
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:55):
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
(02:19):
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.
(02:43):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:25):
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,
(03:48):
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
(04:11):
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
(04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:17):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:25):
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
(06:47):
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
(07:11):
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
(07:31):
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.
(07:52):
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
(08:16):
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
(08:38):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:22):
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
(09:45):
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,
(10:07):
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?
(10:30):
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,
(10:53):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:41):
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,
(13:03):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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,
(14:10):
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
(14:32):
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,
(14:54):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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
(16:00):
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.
(16:22):
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.
(16:46):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:14):
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,
(18:34):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:18):
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,
(19:42):
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
(20:02):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:43):
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,
(21:06):
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,
(21:34):
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,
(21:56):
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
(22:17):
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.
(22:38):
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
(23:02):
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,
(23:25):
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
(23:46):
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,
(24:07):
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
(24:31):
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
(24:52):
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,
(25:13):
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
(25:33):
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
(25:54):
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
(26:17):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:01):
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,
(27:22):
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.
(27:44):
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
(28:07):
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
(28:28):
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,
(28:50):
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
(29:11):
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,
(29:31):
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,
(29:52):
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,
(30:14):
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.
(30:37):
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
(31:01):
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
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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