Bliss Broyard - A Tale of Two Dinners 

 

 

So, I'm at this dinner party in Charlottesville, Virginia. I've just moved to town and I don't know anybody, except for the second cousin of my ex-boyfriend, this woman named Whitney, who invited me to the party. All I really know about her, is that she's like a huge WASP, [audience laughter] which is fine, because I'm a WASP, too. I was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, which is like the land of WASPs. So, I felt like I knew the drill. They were going to have two black Labrador retrievers, a house full of 18th century furniture. And then, these WASPs always have these really threadbare linen napkins. I know it's a weird thing. they just can't throw them away. 

 

So, we're at dinner, and Whitney turns to me and she says, “Oh, if you're free next weekend, you've got to come with us fox hunting.” [audience laughter] And so, “All right.” Which is it's really fun. We hunt all day, and then at night we have dinner and then we go dancing at the club. Okay. When her husband says, “Oh, just make sure you watch out for Chuck.” Yeah, Chuck, he's a little annoying. Sometimes he attaches himself to single women. So, yeah, you should avoid him. At this point, the hostess breaks in, and she's “Who attaches himself to single women? I'm single and nobody ever talks to me.” She's “Who's this Chuck guy? You know Chuck? You know who he is?” He's got really curly hair. He's got full features. 

 

She goes on describing what he was wearing and what happened at the last party. And still the hostess has no idea who she's talking about. So, then John says, she's “Oh, just say it.” Chuck was the black guy. So, this whole cry goes up around the table. Chuck's black. He's black. I didn't know he was black. Well, you wouldn't exactly call him black. He's more like a high yellow. So, the hostess still has no idea who they're talking about. She's “Wait a minute. I have photographs from that party.” And so, she jumps up and then comes back with this photo album, looking through. “Oh, him. Yeah, Chuck. Okay. God, he's black. It's so hard to tell.” 

 

So, then she starts passing the photo album around the dinner table. “Oh yeah, yeah, look at his hair. It is kind of kinky. Yeah, I hadn't really noticed. Look at his lips. Yeah, they are full. I guess his nose is sort of wide.” And then, the photo album gets to me. So, I stand up and I say, “Sometimes it's really hard to tell. [chuckles] What would you say about my hair? it's curly, but would you say it's kinky? And what about my lips? the bottom one's full. Yeah. But the top one actually is really thin. How about my nose? You think my nose is wide? If you saw me on the dance floor, you know I've got natural rhythm. But I'm not very good on the basketball court, because I can't jump.” 

 

And then, I said, “What about my skin? What would you say about my skin? Would you call my skin a high yellow?” Actually, when this photo album came to me, I passed it to the next person, I didn't say anything. And then, about five minutes later, I said I was sick. I felt sick, [audience laughter] which I did. And I laughed, because four years before that, when my father was dying of prostate cancer, I found out that he had a secret. And then, one night, a tumor broke through the wall of his bladder, and he had to go in for emergency surgery. It looked like he wasn't going to live till morning. My mother sat my brother and I down, and she said, “Look, kids, I got to tell you what the secret is. Your father's black.” 

 

Now, I'd always known that he was a Creole from New Orleans. I thought it meant that he was French and he spoke patois and they ate jambalaya. [audience laughter] What I didn't know, is that it also meant that he was black. But that night in the hospital, we were “Oh, that's the secret. Dad's black. Well, cool. Hey, that means that we're black, too. Multicultural. Yeah.” [audience laughter] And honestly, with my father in the next room about to go into this life and death surgery, it really didn't seem like a big deal. And so, he made it through the surgery, but he was never lucid again, and then he died a month later, so I never got a chance to talk to him about it. And pretty quickly, the secret started seeming like a big deal. 

 

First of all, why was it a secret in the first place? That was one thing I had some trouble understanding. His whole identity crisis is another long story. So, since I have only eight minutes for mine, I think [audience laughter] I better move on. [laughs] But I thought, well, I didn't really know how to identify myself anymore. For the first 23 years of my life, I was like a white girl from Connecticut. I didn't really feel white anymore, but I didn't really feel black either. Partly, I don't look black. I thought, well, maybe I should just dread my hair and then that'll solve it. [audience laughter] But I thought, no. [audience laughter] So, I had this question about I needed to figure out-- I didn't really know anything about being black either, anything about black culture. At this point, I didn't know anybody who was black. 

 

Well, I guess I should start with my own family. I looked up my father's family, who I had met for the first time at his memorial service. This is an interesting side note. Out of 400 people at the service, there were four black faces there, and three of them were in the front row next to me and my mom and my brother. I thought that was pretty cool. [audience laughter] So, it turns out that my father's sister, my aunt Shirley, her husband was this amazing civil rights leader. He'd been the head of the NAACP for the whole western part of the country in the 1950s, and then he started the first civil rights division for the state of California, and then he was the second African-American person ever appointed to the UN and then he was the ambassador of Ghana. He was this amazing guy. I never even got to meet him, because he died a couple months before my father.

 

So, I said to my Aunt Shirley, “I don't really know what to do with this information. I don't know how to identify myself.” I used to say I'm French and Norwegian, and now I would say, “Well, I'm Norwegian and black and people look at me ‘Oh, ooh, really?’” [audience laughter] I say, “Well, I'm Norwegian in Creole, which means French and black. But I didn't know about the black part until a couple years ago, and so that's why I don't see more black.” [audience laughter] And they're “Well, sorry, I asked.” [audience laughter] I'd just be going on and on. And I'm “Why am I telling them all this?” 

 

And so, my aunt said, “Well, you know who you are. You're Bliss. That's who you are.” And she said, “You have a whole life in front of you to figure out what that means.” She said, “Look, the minute you let other people start to define you, you were just giving away your power, so don't worry about it.” So, I was like, “All right, well, I'll try and figure out who Bliss is. That seems like a pretty good question.” So, I started to read. I went to the library, and I looked up words like passing, mulatto, mestizo, and miscegenation, words I'd never even heard of before. [chuckles] I looked about the one drop rule. If you have one drop of black blood, it makes you black. 

 

I started reading all these books that we didn't really cover in my prep school in Connecticut, [audience laughter] and reading Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. I was learning all about this rich, interesting, and painful culture. I went down to New Orleans, I tried to trace my roots, I was “Well, so, how did we get here anyway? Did we come from Africa?” I didn't know. I didn't know how we got there. And then, one night at dinner, I was having dinner with my aunt, and I asked her this question that was really weighing on me. We were having dinner up in the upper west side, this cafe. I remember the tables were really small together. 

 

So, I lean forward and I say in a whisper, I said, “So, Shirley, is it possible that some of our ancestors had been slaves?” She gave me this look, and she sat back in her chair, and she said, “Well, not too many black people came here as immigrants back in the 1700s. [audience laughter] So, probably they were.” So, I still had many, many more questions. And so, a family member put me in touch with the head of the African-American department at Harvard. So, I call him up. He was pretty interested in my story, because my father, when he was live, had been a well-known writer. 

 

And so, we talked, and he gave me some more books to read, and he promised that he would put together a bibliography, and put it in the mail. And then, the next time I hear from him, he calls up and he says, “Hey, I pitched the story of your father to the New Yorker, and I'm going to be doing a profile on him.” I was upset about that. [audience laughter] I'd always wanted to be in the New Yorker, but this really wasn't the way I'd imagined it would happen. [audience laughter] So, he writes this article. And in it, he says that he never even told his kids-- His kids didn't know until his daughter was 23. And so, I figured, well, I really need to work out this question of what my identity is, because now everybody's reading about it. 

 

So, then I get this phone call from this woman. She says, “Hi, I'm your cousin Claire Cooper from Los Angeles. I grew up down the street from your father in New Orleans, and I want to tell you that, that article is full of lies. Your father is not black. The Broyard’s are white.” And I said, “Are you sure? Because, I went down to New Orleans, I looked at some records, and it said colored on the birth certificate.” “No, no, no, that's a lie. Those are people that are just trying to pin something on us.” And then, I said, “Well, you know, would it be all right if were?” And she said, “Well, it doesn't matter, because we're not.” She said, [audience laughter] “There's all these Broyard out here in California, and we're all white.” I'm like, “All right.” 

 

I was prepared to believe anything. I'd been told so many things. I called my brother up and I was like, “Hey, guess what? We're not black.” [audience laughter] But then, I find this guy on the Internet, a writer, named Mark Broyard, and he lives out in Los Angeles, too, and he wrote this play called Inside the Creole Mafia. It's all about the politics of skin color and who's passing and who's not. And so, I call him up. I think maybe we're cousins. And he said, “Yeah, I bet we are.” I said, “So, what's the deal? Are the Broyard's black or not?” And he said, “Well, I'm a Broyard and I'm black, and all the Broyard’s I know out here are black, too.” I was like, “All right, well.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, I headed out to California. I was like, “I got to see this for myself.” So, we all get together at a Creole restaurant called Harold & Bell's on Jefferson Avenue in South Central. I got Claire Cooper there with her husband representing the white side of the family, [audience laughter] and then I have Mark Broyard and his family from the black side. We're all having brunch. So, once again, I'm around this dinner table and once again, I'm with this group of people that I don't even really know, and lo and behold, once again, there's a photo album coming my way. [chuckles] 

 

This one belongs to Claire Cooper, and it's filled with pictures of my relatives, this whole family I didn't even know I had, and all these ancestors going back to the 1800s, these five brothers that came over-- She said, “They're from Morocco.” So, Mark is sitting next to me, and he passes me the photo album, and he goes like this, and he's like, “Hey, check out all those white Broyards.” So, we looked at them both started laughing, because all these people looked black. [audience laughter] And we were like, “Claire, whatever, if you need to be white, all right, yeah, you know, whatever.” [audience laughter] So, I'm sitting there and the silliness of so much of this situation hit me and I thought, well, here I am, I'm a WASP from Connecticut having brunch with her black family in South Central. [audience laughter] But the real truth of the matter is, is that I felt totally at home. Thanks.