For 23 years, without second thought, Bliss Broyard checked off boxes that would best describe her to herself as well as to the world: Upper middle class. Connecticut born. Prep school educated. White.
She was part of a handsome, well-respected WASP family: sister to a towheaded blue-eyed brother, Todd; the daughter of a dancer mother, Sandy, with "Nordic good looks"; and her father was the famously prickly, politically conservative book critic for the New York Times, Anatole Broyard, of French extraction, the family thought.
But that changed at 24.
Not all of it. Just one check mark in one box, a single modification. But for Bliss Broyard it altered everything. That year she learned a secret whose revelation would become legend in literary circles, then gradually radiate outward, finally inspiring her to write a just-published memoir, "One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets." In 1990, just weeks before his death from cancer, Broyard's mother (after long prodding her husband to do so himself) gathered her children to tell them that their father -- despite what boxes he checked, despite how he had presented himself to the world -- was of "mixed blood," of Louisiana Creole descent, "part black" -- passing for white.
The idea that she and her brother were, by extension, "part black too" was exciting, Broyard recalls thinking. It made her feel like she "mattered in a way I hadn't before." But there was something unseemly hovering behind the necessity of the secret -- the scope, depth and weight of it. Ultimately her father slipped out of the world stamped and registered as a "white" man, and without discussing the details of his passing with his children. For Bliss Broyard, it was a curious question to consider: Late in the 20th century, what did it mean for her father to have "crossed over" and to have remained there? To have hidden it from his own children, to have cut himself off from extended family scattered throughout the country, as far as Los Angeles -- and in essence from himself?
In "One Drop," Broyard, now 41, grapples frankly with the pact her father made with himself. She doesn't seek to "unmask" him but to expose the circumstances that led to such a drastic choice, one with indelibly painful reverberations.
