Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Two
Speaker 1: months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned
Speaker 1: about a secret, But I've always said that there was
Speaker 1: something about my family, or even many things that I
Speaker 1: didn't know. As a child, when I was left to
Speaker 1: love in the house, I would search through another's file,
Speaker 1: cabinets and my father's study for elaboration, clarification, some proof
Speaker 1: of what I couldn't exactly say. This is Bliss Broyard,
Speaker 1: reading from her two eight memoir One Drop, My Father's
Speaker 1: Hidden Life, a story of race and family secrets. When
Speaker 1: you were a kid, did you snoop through your parents stuff?
Speaker 1: I know I did. Most kids snoop go looking through
Speaker 1: their parents things, trying to solve the mystery of these
Speaker 1: adults who are so central to us and yet are
Speaker 1: also so fundamentally unknowable. We kind of sense that our
Speaker 1: parents have private lives outside of being just mom and dad,
Speaker 1: and we want to find out about those lives. But
Speaker 1: in families where there are secrets, I mean, big secrets,
Speaker 1: this snooping is not so innocent. It kind of borders
Speaker 1: on obsessive. I should know. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: whenever my parents would leave the house I would get
Speaker 1: to work. I searched through my mother's drawers, my father's nightstand,
Speaker 1: their cupboards and medicine cabinets. Like Bliss Broyard, if I
Speaker 1: had been asked what I was looking for, I couldn't
Speaker 1: have told you a clue. I guess a reason why
Speaker 1: the pieces to my family just didn't add up. I'm
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that are
Speaker 1: kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and secrets
Speaker 1: we keep from ourselves. Bliss was raised in Southport, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: a small town on the coast of the Long Island Sound,
Speaker 1: with her mom, dad, and older brother Todd. I've been
Speaker 1: to Southport a few times. It's a place that reeks
Speaker 1: of money, so old it doesn't need to show off
Speaker 1: worn oriental rugs and great great Grandma's silver service kind
Speaker 1: of money. Southport is a place that feels orderly and elegant,
Speaker 1: every detail perfection, as if dreamt up by Martha Stewart, who,
Speaker 1: come to think of it, lived in the next town over.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to start with you describing the landscape
Speaker 1: of your childhood. A bit sure, um well I grew up.
Speaker 1: I often described it as as kind of wasp. In Connecticut,
Speaker 1: um it was a wealthy so the wealthiest sect Lee
Speaker 1: County in America at the time that I was growing
Speaker 1: up in there in the nineteen seventies, Fairfeld County, and
Speaker 1: it was virtually all white. I think I once looked
Speaker 1: at the census and there was like four or five
Speaker 1: people of color African Americans, but nobody in tam when
Speaker 1: I asked the library, knew who those people were. So
Speaker 1: they were if they were there at all, they were
Speaker 1: not known kind of respective members of the community. There
Speaker 1: were Jews and Catholics there, but there was an overriding
Speaker 1: kind of wasp culture that everyone seemed to aspire to
Speaker 1: belong to. My family, included the Broyard's, had a charmed life,
Speaker 1: at least on the outside. When Bliss was growing up,
Speaker 1: her father, Anatole, had become famous as a literary critic.
Speaker 1: If that description sounds like an oxymoron, famous literary critic, well,
Speaker 1: once upon a time, it was a real thing, and
Speaker 1: Anatole Broyard was it. My father was an older dad.
Speaker 1: He was forty when he married my mother. My mother
Speaker 1: says that she know how old he was because he
Speaker 1: looked very young. It's kind of secretive about his age.
Speaker 1: So they met in Grand Village, and I think they
Speaker 1: both really identified with the Grantch village of the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties or nine sixties, and the first got married and
Speaker 1: we living there. They succumb self described bohemians. My father
Speaker 1: was a writer. Um. He published a few things at
Speaker 1: that points, particularly a story about the death of his
Speaker 1: own father that had gotten a lot of attention and
Speaker 1: had earned him a book deal for a novel that
Speaker 1: he was forever working on trying to complete. My mother
Speaker 1: was a modern dancer. She was also an orphaned. She'd
Speaker 1: been orphaned tragically her father and then her mother died
Speaker 1: about nine months later in a car accident where my
Speaker 1: mother had been driving, and so she was pretty alone
Speaker 1: in the world and traumatized really from what happened. Um
Speaker 1: found met my father on a subway after dance class
Speaker 1: in Manhattan, and she asked him out and where he
Speaker 1: asked her out about there. Um, So they when they
Speaker 1: got married and they had my brother, they moved out
Speaker 1: to Connecticut. You know. My mother says it's because she
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to raise a family in New
Speaker 1: York City. She herself had grown up in Westchester, and
Speaker 1: I think for both of my parents there was the
Speaker 1: sense that their marriage and kind of domestic life through
Speaker 1: that they sort of saved one another. My mother saved
Speaker 1: my father bachelorhood, he would always say. And my father
Speaker 1: kind of saved my mother from this sort of orphaned
Speaker 1: world that she had found herself in when she was
Speaker 1: twenty and they had bought a series of old antique
Speaker 1: farmhouses in Connecticut and decorated them beautifully. My mother make
Speaker 1: homemade mayonnaise and fresh bread and planted beautiful gardens. And
Speaker 1: there was a lot about that childhood that was really
Speaker 1: idyllic um. But there was also a lot where they
Speaker 1: were living kind of beyond their means and living on
Speaker 1: the edge and hiring to a life and they couldn't
Speaker 1: quite afford and it created a lot of stress, certainly
Speaker 1: in our household um and confusion, why do we live
Speaker 1: in this beautiful, kind of impressive house but they trouble
Speaker 1: paying for lunching to me like basic necessities sometimes And
Speaker 1: were you aware of that as a child. I mean,
Speaker 1: some families are or some parents are pretty good at
Speaker 1: call it what you will, but you know, shielding or
Speaker 1: hiding from their kids, that sense of financial instability or
Speaker 1: things not being as they appear. I think I was
Speaker 1: aware of it because I mean there would be fights
Speaker 1: about money, certainly that I overheard, but also my parents
Speaker 1: kept moving and they kept buying new homes, and I
Speaker 1: think that I had the impression that, you know, if
Speaker 1: we could get into a new house that was more
Speaker 1: beautiful and it was a fresh start and decorated, you know,
Speaker 1: in some other slightly different style, than they could be happier.
Speaker 1: It's kind of this chasing after the new settings with
Speaker 1: the hope of of making things calmer and happier. So
Speaker 1: there seems to be like a kind of discontent always
Speaker 1: with with that life was. I mean, at the same time,
Speaker 1: we did have, you know, we had a lot of coziness.
Speaker 1: My father was a real fu family man, and he
Speaker 1: worked at tom like most men of that generation. So
Speaker 1: Nfol Briard is a bit of a legend. He's the
Speaker 1: chief book critic for the New York Times. He dictates
Speaker 1: his reviews over the phone from home. Around Southport, everyone
Speaker 1: knows who he is. Blizz describes him this way in
Speaker 1: her memoir, My father was famous, at least among the
Speaker 1: people I knew, not only for being a public intellectual
Speaker 1: with a regular byline and the paper of record, but
Speaker 1: for being successful at life, at parties at our house.
Speaker 1: I'd watch the way he moved through people, laying his
Speaker 1: hand on a shoulder, firmly gripping someone's arm, and how
Speaker 1: they turned to him. Your face is lit and expectant,
Speaker 1: as if he held a fistful of fairy dust over
Speaker 1: their heads, And he'd offer a word or two, nothing much,
Speaker 1: but with a subtext that declared, all right, we fantastic
Speaker 1: you and me. Isn't this world great? So he was
Speaker 1: also a really charismatic figure. He was very handsome and
Speaker 1: very graceful, a great athlete, of great dancer, and kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of fun um and a really quite
Speaker 1: a dear, generous friend. He was a friend of his
Speaker 1: describing I think this was really true. He was a
Speaker 1: kind of master at impression management when he really worked
Speaker 1: hard to make people like him. But it didn't kind
Speaker 1: of come off as a manipulative or inauthentic, at least
Speaker 1: to my eyes or to his friendsise Um. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe from the far somebody would have seen it differently.
Speaker 1: But he was very likable in many ways, and he
Speaker 1: had a lot of friends, a lot of people who
Speaker 1: were quite loyal to him. But beneath all this, something
Speaker 1: else is going on. Even within all the literary fame
Speaker 1: and country coziness, the Broyards are kind of on their own.
Speaker 1: There's no extended family around. Sandy is an orphan and anatole. Well,
Speaker 1: he has family, but they seem to have been excommunicated.
Speaker 1: He has a mother and two sisters living in New
Speaker 1: York City, just a short train ride away, but they
Speaker 1: never come to visit. Bliss and Todd grow up not
Speaker 1: knowing them. We're going to pause for a moment for
Speaker 1: a word from our sponsor. One night, anatole's temper flares
Speaker 1: over a bologna sandwich. You heard that right. I'll let
Speaker 1: Bliss tell it. It was Mother's Day, and um, he
Speaker 1: had gotten my mother these lovely Tiffany earrings. But the
Speaker 1: moment that he was trying to present them, she was
Speaker 1: cooking dinner and kind of didn't turn around quickly. And
Speaker 1: after he lost his temper abruptly, and then the night
Speaker 1: was a ruined and um, I went to bed, and
Speaker 1: she woke me up in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: alarmed because he couldn't find his blowny for his sandwich
Speaker 1: that he ate nightly, and then when I went downstairs,
Speaker 1: he had ripped all of the condiments and the shelves
Speaker 1: off the door of the fridge, so our whole kitchen
Speaker 1: floor was scattered with bottles and Nanna's um And he
Speaker 1: was really shocking and seemed quite out of character. I've
Speaker 1: never seen my father really lose control like that. And
Speaker 1: that's when I learned my mother. I said, what happened?
Speaker 1: You know, what's wrong with him? And she said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, his mother died, and I think he feels guilty.
Speaker 1: And this was the first I'd heard that my grandmother
Speaker 1: had died, who had only met once in my life,
Speaker 1: you know, when I was six when she died, and
Speaker 1: she had died back in September. She's been dead for
Speaker 1: nine months, but it was never even mentioned or discussed,
Speaker 1: or if there was a service, I wasn't concluded. And
Speaker 1: so that really hit me hard because I just felt
Speaker 1: that not only was my I thought, you know, my
Speaker 1: father had lost his mother and was presumably grieving over that,
Speaker 1: but I was also so excluded from the whole experience,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have a right to his family in
Speaker 1: any way. They didn't belong to me. They only belonged
Speaker 1: to him, which was felt very hurtful. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it also speaks to that unknowability, like how is it
Speaker 1: possible for you, know, you're a kid and your your
Speaker 1: father has lost his mother and you don't know that,
Speaker 1: you know, it makes you wonder if you just aren't
Speaker 1: sensitive or paying attention or self absorbed. I mean I
Speaker 1: was twelve or something, so I'm sure I was self absorbed,
Speaker 1: But you know, I thought of myself as close with
Speaker 1: my father. He was very affectionate, and he was he
Speaker 1: waited a long time to have children. He really loved kids,
Speaker 1: and so he seemed really very interested in my life
Speaker 1: and my brother's life and our life when our friends
Speaker 1: came around, and he was a very engaged father by
Speaker 1: today's stand words are back then, and so the fact
Speaker 1: that I hadn't noticed that he had lost his own
Speaker 1: parents and that had perhaps been grieving over that made
Speaker 1: you feel that I m didn't know my dad or
Speaker 1: we weren't as close as I thought. If blisses, aunts,
Speaker 1: or grandmother were a part of her imagination at all
Speaker 1: when she was a kid, they were shadowy, mysterious figures
Speaker 1: covering on the periphery. I mean, my one aunt would
Speaker 1: call the house sometimes and she didn't feel as cut
Speaker 1: off limits to me as my other aunt did. But
Speaker 1: I after my father died, I found a note from
Speaker 1: my grandmother to my father that was really heart wrenching
Speaker 1: because something like, you know, I'm turning seventy two and
Speaker 1: I'm not a young woman anymore, and I just want
Speaker 1: to meet my grandchildren for once in my life. And
Speaker 1: then when I looked at the dates. The following week,
Speaker 1: my father brought my my grandmother, his mother, out to
Speaker 1: Connecticut and brought her to lunch the country club, like
Speaker 1: just as is to say, like I'm not keeping you apart,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing wrong going on here, and you're welcome
Speaker 1: to come. But she, of course, she once she came,
Speaker 1: she calm. That was it. She never came back. It
Speaker 1: was the only time they ever met her. Listen Todd
Speaker 1: attend great private schools. The family spends summers on Martha's Vineyard.
Speaker 1: They play tennis, hang out at the yacht club. They're close,
Speaker 1: and yet Anatole's pensiont for control continues to exert itself
Speaker 1: in all sorts of ways. Because here's the thing, you
Speaker 1: can't control life. You can try. You can eat the
Speaker 1: same bologna sandwich every night, you can perfect your back hand,
Speaker 1: you can keep your family at bay. But ultimately, no
Speaker 1: matter how masterful you are at it, life will have
Speaker 1: its way. Life always does. And let's not forget that
Speaker 1: Anatole Broyard is first and foremost a writer. He's been
Speaker 1: trying to write a novel forever and he can't. He
Speaker 1: just can't. A friend told me very poignant story. They
Speaker 1: went and had like a little self created writing retreat
Speaker 1: together and after the first morning they have shared their
Speaker 1: work over lunch, and this friend said, that's great, Anatole,
Speaker 1: keep going. And then my dad came down the next
Speaker 1: day and it was basically the same couple of paragraphs
Speaker 1: but with a comma changed here and there, and you know,
Speaker 1: and he said, okay, yeah, I keep going. And it
Speaker 1: just went on like that for the week. And finally,
Speaker 1: at the end of his life, I think when you
Speaker 1: you know, when he realized his life actually had a deadline.
Speaker 1: He was surliberated to create both a memoir that I
Speaker 1: became a book called When Kraftco Was the Rage, and
Speaker 1: also he was writing about illness um and he found
Speaker 1: a way to kind of write about himself honestly. When
Speaker 1: Bliss is in her early twenties, Anatole is diagnosed with
Speaker 1: prostate cancer, and just before her twenty four birthday, it's
Speaker 1: clear that he has very little time left. One afternoon,
Speaker 1: Sandy tells Bliss and Todd in front of Anatole that
Speaker 1: their father has a secret, and she begs him to
Speaker 1: tell it. So what happened is my father had gone
Speaker 1: to couples therapy with my mother when he was it
Speaker 1: was clear that like western medicine had done what it
Speaker 1: could for his illness, and she was trying to get
Speaker 1: them to do some alternative treatments and they were kind
Speaker 1: of he was reposisting, and so they went to couple
Speaker 1: of therapy and it turned into more conversation about how
Speaker 1: he wanted to finish up his life, and this secret
Speaker 1: came up, and the therapist had suggested that it would
Speaker 1: be a kind of unburdening to tell his children finally,
Speaker 1: something that my mother had been really after for him
Speaker 1: to tell us for years. I think in the back
Speaker 1: of my mother's mind too, she was going to include
Speaker 1: his two sisters in his memorial service, and so we
Speaker 1: were going to meet them, and I was going to
Speaker 1: meet my cousins, and wouldn't it be better if my
Speaker 1: father told us first. So she sort of sprung it
Speaker 1: on him to tell us, and he wasn't ready, and
Speaker 1: he was having a hard day. Um, he was in
Speaker 1: a lot of pain from his prostate cancer, which had
Speaker 1: advanced at that point to his bones. And he said
Speaker 1: that he wanted to get his vulnerabilities and orders. They
Speaker 1: didn't get magnified during the discussion. Very kind of controlled
Speaker 1: thing for him to say, very kind of typical way.
Speaker 1: Imagine how amazing it would be to get your vulnerabilities
Speaker 1: in order to line them up like good little soldiers,
Speaker 1: to wait until they're all perfectly aligned, and then and
Speaker 1: only then. Oh wait, right, that's not how vulnerabilities work. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Bliss and Todd can't imagine what the secret might be.
Speaker 1: Their father isn't talking, he's ordering his vulnerabilities. He's frail
Speaker 1: and in ever worsening shape. Finally, when it seems the
Speaker 1: end might be near, Sandy decides to tell her children
Speaker 1: her self. He planted it back in the hospital to
Speaker 1: the medical emergency, and he had to have an emergency
Speaker 1: surgery that looked like he was going to die and
Speaker 1: he was going to make it through the surgery, and
Speaker 1: so my mom brought us outside Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Speaker 1: in Boston and said, look, I'm going to tell you
Speaker 1: what the secret is. Your father's are black. And my
Speaker 1: brother and I laughed, you know, we just know that's it,
Speaker 1: that's the big secret, because we had been talking, you know,
Speaker 1: the last couple of weeks. What do you think, what
Speaker 1: do you think it is like somebody get murdered, just rape.
Speaker 1: You know, we just thought incest. We knew there was
Speaker 1: something had to do with this family, but we really
Speaker 1: went down what we seemed like much darker channels. So
Speaker 1: this seems like not a very big deal and kind
Speaker 1: of a relief, and we remember we joked about it.
Speaker 1: But over time, after Anatole's death, the magnitude of the
Speaker 1: secret and what it really means for Bliss starts to
Speaker 1: slowly reveal itself. But I think then a few months
Speaker 1: later at the memorial service and I met my aunt Shirley,
Speaker 1: who I had never met before, and her son Frank,
Speaker 1: and UM saw my other aunt Loraine for the first time,
Speaker 1: and you know, twenty years or something, the secret started
Speaker 1: to take on more import and I started to really
Speaker 1: have a lot of questions. Why was it a secret?
Speaker 1: What did it mean to him? What does it mean
Speaker 1: to me? And I told my best friend from growing
Speaker 1: up from Martha's Vineyard, I pointed out my yes, and
Speaker 1: I said, you know those are my aunts, the big
Speaker 1: secrets that my father was black, and I didn't know.
Speaker 1: She said, you didn't know. I knew? He said, why,
Speaker 1: like you knew all of these years? She said, yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I thought like everybody knew of my parents knew,
Speaker 1: and their friends. I just thought that you've heard not
Speaker 1: to talk about it. That was very odd because I
Speaker 1: had been sort of made complicit in the secret that
Speaker 1: I wasn't even really aware of. This is something I
Speaker 1: think a lot about in any number of the conversations
Speaker 1: I've had for this podcast. The notion that not me
Speaker 1: it was a secret kept, but then in fact that
Speaker 1: secret was hiding in plain sight. Well, that keeps on
Speaker 1: coming up again and again, especially when it relates to
Speaker 1: paternity or ethnic or racial background. I mean, this was
Speaker 1: definitely true for me when I first wrote something on
Speaker 1: Facebook about my discovery about my dad, kind of announcing
Speaker 1: the subject of my new book, The wife of my
Speaker 1: ninth grade English teacher posted a comment hashtag always wondered.
Speaker 1: She said, really always wondered? Had everybody always wondered? Except
Speaker 1: for me? In your book you talk about dancing, right,
Speaker 1: and you're a really good dancer, and you come home
Speaker 1: one night and you say to your father, Um, it
Speaker 1: was like the ultimate compliment somebody said to you know,
Speaker 1: like you you dance like a black girl, you know,
Speaker 1: like and I mean he doesn't really register it, and
Speaker 1: you don't really register it. Um. I think he took
Speaker 1: it as a compliment too, you know, right, like that
Speaker 1: he wanted that bro right. Yeah. I think for me too,
Speaker 1: I felt very exposed, um, with this idea of this
Speaker 1: knowledge that a lot of people knew something about me
Speaker 1: that I didn't know myself. You know, it makes you
Speaker 1: feel like you have a sign on your back or something. Um.
Speaker 1: And I made me feel sort of stupid and uh.
Speaker 1: And I even had some you know, strangers when I
Speaker 1: was giving readings like how could you not know? Um,
Speaker 1: didn't you look at your father and wonder? And I
Speaker 1: talked to people whose parents have come out or UM
Speaker 1: later in life, And I think that a partly, I
Speaker 1: think it's the self absorption of the child, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: we're trying to figure out our parents, but we're more
Speaker 1: focused probably in figuring out ourselves, and we don't quite
Speaker 1: see the connection, you know. Um, But also I just didn't.
Speaker 1: I wasn't suspicious that my parents, you know, we're keeping
Speaker 1: a secret. You've sort of been involved with them in
Speaker 1: a way so intimately, like it seemed um hard to
Speaker 1: It just wasn't one of the things that I wondered about.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, it's there's almost a kind of implicit
Speaker 1: pact or you know, something unspoken between parents and children,
Speaker 1: which is the parents are not going to lie to
Speaker 1: their children or withhold significant aspects of their identity. But
Speaker 1: I think it's just about impossible for a child to
Speaker 1: bring forth any kind of conscious knowledge in that situation.
Speaker 1: We're going to pause for a moment. Secrets have other impacts,
Speaker 1: other effects. They form the inner lives of the people
Speaker 1: who live and breathe the atmosphere of that secret. In Bliss,
Speaker 1: his father's case, keeping his blackness a secret by keeping
Speaker 1: his family of origin at bay, had the unintended consequence
Speaker 1: of making his daughter feel like she could be rejected too,
Speaker 1: for reasons she didn't understand there was always a kind
Speaker 1: of fragility in a way to our family, and I
Speaker 1: was like wary of things where somebody might be cast out.
Speaker 1: I think probably because I knew that my father had
Speaker 1: rejected his family of origin, so that unconditional bonds that
Speaker 1: was supposed to exist in families did not seem certain
Speaker 1: for me. And there was a kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: an active role on my part to keep my father engaged,
Speaker 1: because he could go off and forgot about us like
Speaker 1: he had forgotten about his, his parents and his sisters. Um.
Speaker 1: So for me, even though I felt quite loved and secure,
Speaker 1: on one hand, I also understood that we were together
Speaker 1: because we wanted to be together, not out of kind
Speaker 1: of obligation or duty. That family was kind construction, um
Speaker 1: and I felt that they need to sort of continually
Speaker 1: keep us together no way. And another consequence, when a
Speaker 1: secret does get pushed out into the open, it leaves
Speaker 1: the inheritors of that secret with a lot of catching
Speaker 1: up to do. List goes to the library, actually goes
Speaker 1: to the library, if you can imagine such a thing,
Speaker 1: and skulks around shamefully trying to look up information about passing,
Speaker 1: as if she were trying to, I don't know, check
Speaker 1: out some porn. I didn't know anything about the phenomenon
Speaker 1: of racial passing when I discovered it happening in my
Speaker 1: own life and family. UM, So I did go to
Speaker 1: the library. Back then there was no internet, so I
Speaker 1: couldn't look it up online. UM. And I did feel
Speaker 1: I did feel very kind of secretive myself and like
Speaker 1: a little ashamed to be, partly because it seems strange
Speaker 1: to go to a library to look up something that
Speaker 1: was so intimately involved with your family and your own identity.
Speaker 1: You know. I was going into these outside sources. They
Speaker 1: had a card catalog system, and I started looking up passing,
Speaker 1: which was what my mother had described my father was doing,
Speaker 1: which is a term I wasn't familiar with. And uh,
Speaker 1: then it led me down a path to sort of
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how people's racial identity was even determined. Um,
Speaker 1: was there like a law about it? Where did that
Speaker 1: law reside? And I came upon the term misgenation, which
Speaker 1: is the marriage or the union between a black person
Speaker 1: and a white person, which was contained in the statutes
Speaker 1: of many states, um, and their marriage laws. You know,
Speaker 1: no black person or white person could be married together. Um,
Speaker 1: that was misggenation. And you know, these terms seemed I'm
Speaker 1: shameful for to me, although that's what had happened in
Speaker 1: my own family. I mean, my father is very light skinned.
Speaker 1: Clearly it wasn't all black count of percent. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of racial mixines passed from sagenation, So I think
Speaker 1: it was. I mean, that was part of why I
Speaker 1: felt like I was conducting the search kind of in secret,
Speaker 1: because there was a whole shameful quality to it that
Speaker 1: he had passed. You know, there had bunessgenation, and then
Speaker 1: there was also all these terms, these racial terms like
Speaker 1: oct roon that somebody who's one eighth black mulatto's half
Speaker 1: um Steets was one sixteenth. And I wondered, you know,
Speaker 1: which is these definitions applied to my father and applied
Speaker 1: to be And it was just odd to encounter this
Speaker 1: whole vocabulary that had little to do with how he
Speaker 1: had been raised in fear phil Connecticut. Um, you know
Speaker 1: that now I was applying so directly to my own life.
Speaker 1: There were many reasons that Anatole Broyard chose to spend
Speaker 1: his adult life passing as a white man. Once he
Speaker 1: moved his family to one of the whitest towns in America.
Speaker 1: One of those reasons was literally very ambition. At the time,
Speaker 1: even if he had written a masterpiece, he would have
Speaker 1: been known as a black writer, and the novel a
Speaker 1: great black novel. Ralph Ellison, who Broyard knew and admired,
Speaker 1: had published Invisible Man, which was hailed in the pages
Speaker 1: of The New York Times, anatole's newspaper, as the greatest
Speaker 1: Negro novel of its time. Another reason, however, misguided, seems
Speaker 1: to have been his love for his children. He had
Speaker 1: suffered as a light skinned black child by not quite
Speaker 1: belonging anywhere, so he made sure that his children belonged
Speaker 1: at the yacht club, in their private schools on the
Speaker 1: tennis courts of Southport. He did his damnedest to inoculate
Speaker 1: them with the potent combination of his charisma, his literary fame,
Speaker 1: and the myth of their whiteness. I think my read
Speaker 1: anyway of your father was that it was coming very
Speaker 1: much out of a desire to protect you and your
Speaker 1: brother from what he had felt himself. Absolutely, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think he thought, what's the best life I can
Speaker 1: give my children? You know? It's to be white and Fairfield,
Speaker 1: Connecticut and this kind of waspy um rural idyllic community,
Speaker 1: you know, um. And I think he believed that in
Speaker 1: the sense. Do you think that if your mother had
Speaker 1: not intervened, and if he had not become you know,
Speaker 1: sort of prematurely, very ill, mortally ill, do you think
Speaker 1: he ever would have told you? You know, I think
Speaker 1: he would have her It would have probably come out, certainly.
Speaker 1: I think it's harder now to keep a family secret
Speaker 1: than it used to be because of the interconnectness of
Speaker 1: people through social media and ancestry dot com, and so
Speaker 1: I think it would have come out probably. I think
Speaker 1: that with secrets, what often happens is that originally somebody
Speaker 1: keeps a secret to protect people in their lives, as
Speaker 1: you said, and maybe the the original impulses love protection.
Speaker 1: But then there's the embarrassment of having kept a secret
Speaker 1: for so long, and it kind of infuses that secret
Speaker 1: and you know, elevates it was so much meaning and
Speaker 1: significance that maybe more significance you know, the person originally
Speaker 1: gave it. UM. So I think that there would it
Speaker 1: would have been hard for him to kind of overcome
Speaker 1: how large it had grown just through the fact of
Speaker 1: it being kept a secret for so long to talk
Speaker 1: about it. But I suspect you would have found way.
Speaker 1: Um And certainly I don't know with Obama being elected
Speaker 1: and race relations changing in my own interest. I mean,
Speaker 1: although you know, I sort of thank god in a
Speaker 1: way that I didn't find out, because I would think
Speaker 1: that I'd be on the same path anyway. But certainly
Speaker 1: it's changed my own traject story of who how I
Speaker 1: think of myself. And I had not learned really about
Speaker 1: American history and African American history and any kind of
Speaker 1: objective or balanced way in my prep school in Connecticut
Speaker 1: growing up, and so I had to actively really search
Speaker 1: out another narrative of history that feels more accurate to
Speaker 1: me and fair. And I know, I think I would
Speaker 1: have gotten there on my own, but probably not as quickly.
Speaker 1: So that in a way that answers my last question
Speaker 1: to you, which is are you glad you know? Yeah? Definitely, um,
Speaker 1: it answered it answered a lot of questions I think
Speaker 1: a lot of times. And there's a secret in the family.
Speaker 1: There's just a great relief in knowing that you're not crazy,
Speaker 1: that you're not imagining things when you feel that this
Speaker 1: sort of sense that something is being withheld from you.
Speaker 1: I think just that knowledge was a relief for me,
Speaker 1: and I think that the path that I was on
Speaker 1: didn't feel authentic for me, and this knowledge has put
Speaker 1: me on a different path that feels like, really that
Speaker 1: the right groove for my life. I'm interested in social
Speaker 1: justice to do a lot of work on integration and
Speaker 1: racial and economic justice, and that that feels like the
Speaker 1: path that I was I was supposed to be on,
Speaker 1: the one that's more true to my kind of my
Speaker 1: father's story away. I'd like to thank my guest, Bliss
Speaker 1: Broyard for sharing her story with us. Her book is
Speaker 1: One Drop, a true story of family, race and secrets.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is a supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are
Speaker 1: the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with us at listener mail
Speaker 1: at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at
Speaker 1: Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's
Speaker 1: FAM Secrets Pot. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro dot com