Blood (28 page)

THERE ARE COUNTLESS STORIES
about racial passing in North America. Anatole Broyard, the celebrated
New York Times
literary critic who died in 1990, was born of African-American parents in New Orleans and raised mostly in Brooklyn. He aspired to write but did not want to be defined by his blackness, so he took advantage of his light skin colour (both of his African-American parents were Louisiana Creoles) and passed for white. The journalist Brent Staples wrote in the
New York Times
in 2003 that Broyard wanted to be a writer — and not just a “Negro writer,” consigned to the back of the literary bus. Writing for
the
New Yorker
, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates noted that Broyard “did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy.” And so Broyard constructed a white identity for himself. He did not inform his own children that he was black. His daughter, Bliss Broyard, wrote in her memoir,
One Drop,
about how Broyard — even when he had advanced prostate cancer and his body was wracked with pain — resisted telling her brother Todd and her about his secret ancestry.
One Drop
opens with a story from two months before Broyard died, when he met with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, Bliss and Todd, in their home in Martha’s Vineyard. When Alexandra asked if there was anything that the ailing Anatole would like to tell his children, Anatole prevaricated. When his wife persisted by announcing that Anatole had lived with a secret for a long time, Anatole tried to shut her up by saying, “Goddamn it, Sandy.”

A man who spent his life spinning words on the page, and became one of the most highly respected literary critics in the United States, could not, even with death at the door, say the three words “I am black.” When both children pressed him to tell the secret to which their mother alluded, Broyard said he would tell them, but not that day. “I need to think about how to present things,” he said. “I want to order my vulnerabilities so they don’t get magnified during the discussion.” But he never did answer their questions.

The distance between ancestral and constructed identities haunted Broyard beyond the grave. Much earlier in life, he had married a black Puerto Rican woman named Aida Sanchez. Together they had a daughter named Gala. The couple divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II. Subsequently, Broyard married Alexandra Nelson, a white American woman of Norwegian heritage. They raised their children as white. The day after Broyard died, in 1990, an obituary ran in the
New York Times
— the same newspaper for which he had worked as book critic, essayist, and editor. The obituary contained 811 words, but it did not include a single mention of his first wife, of his first and eldest daughter, of their African ancestry, or of his. And, as Bliss Broyard informs readers in
One Drop
, Broyard’s death certificate lists him as white.

Gates, the Harvard historian, argues that in shelving his true identity in order to inhabit one that he purposefully constructed, Broyard failed to live up to his greatest potential as a writer. He lost touch with himself, Gates argues, and thus he lost the ability to write profoundly. He had shown great promise as a creative writer, but ultimately settled into the life of reviewing books by other people.

Even by his own children, Broyard was taken to be white. For them, he lived and died as white. Did that make him white? Being of Creole ancestry, he had white ancestry as well as black. So who is to say that moving into one part of his identity — a part that would not normally be recognized, but that cannot factually be denied either — was fraudulent or wrong? The problem is that one could not be both black and white in America. Being in any way black made you black. For Broyard to become white, he could no longer acknowledge any blackness.

Philip Roth writes in his novel
The Human Stain
about the character Coleman Silk, a white man (from all appearances) who is hounded from his job as a university professor after inadvertently uttering a racial epithet in his classroom. It is an absurd situation, because Silk refers to some students who have never shown up in class as “spooks,” by which he means ghosts. But as it turns out the missing students are black, and his unfortunate word choice is taken as a racial epithet. Over the course of the novel, we learn that Silk is an African-American who has passed as a white, Jewish man in order to decide his own fate in the world, rather than having others do that for him. Silk married a white woman but never told her or their four children about his racial background.

Some people have speculated publicly — including on
Wikipedia
— that the novelist Philip Roth may have drawn upon the life of Anatole Broyard to write
The Human Stain
. Roth had met Broyard at least twice. Once, the two men met unexpectedly in a men’s clothing store on Madison Avenue in New York City. Roth spontaneously bought him a pair of shoes as a playful mock ploy to curry the literary critic’s favour. In an article published in 2012 in the
New Yorker
, Roth acknowledged that he had heard many years earlier that Broyard was secretly “an octoroon.” (This term is meant to describe a person considered to have one-eighth black blood, although in reality Broyard’s parents were both blacks.) However, the novelist vehemently refuted the suggestion that Broyard’s life had inspired the creation of Coleman Silk.

Regardless of whether Roth’s imagination was tinged by having known a fragment of the literary critic’s personal background, the real Broyard and the fictional Silk certainly paid their dues for having passed. Neither man appears to have been truly in touch with himself. In the case of the real man, Broyard had every right to choose his path. He got the job with the
New York Times
, which he would have been unlikely to snag had the paper’s editors known he was black. But he paid a price. He deprived himself of an open, intimate, publicly acknowledged connection to his own family heritage. In so doing, he robbed his children of the same opportunity, at least while he was alive and they were young and still shielded from the truth. Still more people lost out. He denied Americans of all races and backgrounds the chance to know his gifts and genius, in all their rich complexity. He buried a beautiful truth that might have galvanized dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of people — but we will never know for sure, because Anatole Broyard died with his secret largely intact.

A famously unusual case of passing is found in the story of the Texan journalist and photographer John Howard Griffin, who decided in 1959 to attempt to document the real meaning of being black in America. Griffin, who was white, consulted a physician and underwent a series of treatments by means of drugs, sun lamps, and skin creams to make his skin look brown. He shaved his head so that his straight hair would not give him away. And he bused and hitchhiked into some of the most racist zones of the United States, such as New Orleans, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia, to write about his experiences. His 1961 book,
Black Like Me
, became a bestseller and is still remembered a half-century later. Oddly, a white man passed for black to tell a primarily white audience what it truly meant to be black. Did John Howard Griffin truly become a black man? He was certainly considered one by the people he met in the course of his journalistic quest.

Most observers today would probably agree that Griffin was not black, but only posing as black. But what if, instead of choosing to undergo treatments to make his skin look brown as an adult, Griffin had been exposed to such treatments as an infant? What if his parents had found doctors willing to experiment on him? And what if he had then been orphaned and adopted as a black child, and his appearance had remained unchanged for the rest of his life? If he had lived out the entirety of his life as a black man, would he then have been legitimately black? I would have to say yes. He would have been legitimately black because the world would have seen him so. This has nothing to do with blood or biology, and everything to do with social interaction and the negotiation of one’s identity in public and private spheres.

Although some may now consider Griffin’s approach offensive, it can also be seen as a testament to the arbitrary nature of race, and to the insanity of imagining that racial identity is rooted in the nature of one’s blood. John Howard Griffin had to hide his own white identity to investigate and later expose what it meant to be black in America.

Another reversal of racial identity took place in 1930 in Oakville, Ontario, when a young World War I veteran named Ira Johnson became engaged to a white woman named Isabella Jones. Johnson had grown up as black in Oakville and was widely considered black by the black community in town. His mother had been a midwife serving black mothers, and his family had attended a black church. However, when the Ku Klux Klan came into town burning crosses and threatening Johnson’s life, he was naturally afraid. He invited the
Toronto Star
into his home and declared that he was not black, but of Cherokee descent. The
Toronto Star
bought it, entirely. On the front page of its March 5, 1930, edition, the
Star
ran an article with the headline “Is of Indian Descent Ira Johnson Insists: Oakville Man, Separated from His Sweetheart, Traces His Ancestry.”

The article began with this lead paragraph: “Ira Junius Johnson, separated from his sweetheart, Alice Jones by Ku Klux Klansmen here last Friday, is of Indian descent and has not a drop of negro blood in his veins, he told the
Star
yesterday at the home of his mother, who is a refined and intelligent woman.”

My own interviews in the 1990s with Alvin Duncan, a black resident of Oakville who was a teenager at the time of the
KKK
raid, confirmed that at the very least, the members of Oakville’s black community had always assumed that Johnson was black. Perhaps he tried to establish a new, Cherokee identity to avoid the wrath of the
KKK
. He certainly would have had good reason to fear the group, which was well known for the lynching of blacks in the United States. On the other hand, there is the possibility that Johnson did have Aboriginal ancestry. Perhaps we will never know for sure, but the incident provides yet another example of the negotiation of racial identity and the lengths to which people will go to keep their blood ancestry secret because of persecution and pressure from the outside world. Tomorrow, perhaps, things will change. But today, race has nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with what people will believe.

FOR CENTURIES, RACE HAS
COME
to be equated with blood. But will modern science displace that notion? Over recent years, as the science of genetics has evolved, increasing numbers of people, hungry for details about their ancestral history, have begun having their
DNA
tested to unearth clues about their past. Science now holds out certain promises that seemed hitherto impossible.

DNA
tests have shattered a myth that persevered despite all common knowledge to the contrary: that blacks were black and whites were white, and that a person could absolutely not be both. To have admitted such a thing, historically, would have been to do much more than to admit the awful truth that white slave masters took black slave women into their beds. It would have reduced to rubble the foundations of an economy and society based on the subjugation of one people by another. For how could one subjugate the other if they were truly the same?

One of the most famous examples, which has altered the way many historians have framed U.S. history, is that of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Hemings has long been described as the slave mistress and mother of many children fathered by Jefferson, who was the key author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president, serving in office from 1801 to 1809. Historians, both professional and amateur, battled for centuries about the paternity of Hemings’s children. Although some still debate the matter, it wasn’t until the results of a
DNA
test were published in the magazine
Nature
in 1998 that historians and public institutions began to accept what many African-Americans had long believed: that those children were indeed fathered by Thomas Jefferson.

In 1802, the American journalist James Thomson Callender set off a political firestorm that has lasted more than two centuries when he published an article in the
Richmond Recorder
titled “The President Again.”

It began with these words:

It is well known that the man,
 
whom it delighteth the people to honor,
 
keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!

For having the temerity to suggest that the president of the United States had conducted a long-term affair with a black woman, Callender was vilified over the years as “obnoxious,” “a liar,” “a scoundrel,” “tempestuous,” “unsavory,” and “generally odious” — to quote just a few epithets. The allegations did not appear to damage the political career of Jefferson, who was easily re-elected two years later.

Like many others, Jefferson’s daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph denied that the president had had a relationship and children with Hemings. Two of Jefferson’s grandchildren also claimed that, for moral and practical reasons, the liaison would not have been possible. In 1979, Jefferson historians persuaded the
CBS
television network to drop plans to air a television miniseries (based on the best-selling novel
Sally Hemings,
by Barbara Chase-Riboud) about the relationship. One 1979 letter to
CBS
chairman William Paley from Merrill Peterson — a prominent University of Virginia historian who had written a book dismissing the Jefferson-Hemings story, as created on “the flimsy basis of oral tradition, anecdote, and satire” — said the network should “reconsider lending its name and network to mass media exposure of what can only be vulgar sensationalism masquerading as history.”