A half-hidden family history is no guarantee of an interesting one, however. And for all its prodigious research, One Drop deals more engrossingly with the stories of Broyard and her closest relatives than it does with the 18th-century origins of the Broyards in the US.
Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that genealogical Web sites are almost as popular as pornographic ones, Broyard zealously assembled an account of her roots. Among the first things she discovers about a large, Creole, New Orleans-based family like hers is that racial delineations and stereotypes make no sense at all.
And slavery, which she regards as a defining issue in matters of black identity, holds its own share of surprises. "In a few short hours, I'd gone from believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she'd grown up in a family of black slave owners," she writes after one fact-finding trip. "These weren't the noble tragic figures I'd been expecting to encounter."
Though its scope is large, the heart of One Drop lies with the author's father. She must try - as Philip Roth did in The Human Stain, a book that was seemingly prompted by the Broyard story but goes unmentioned here - to understand the choices he made, whether by action or omission. In a speculative account of what happened when her father applied for a Social Security card, Broyard guesses at how he might have been flummoxed by the decision of what racial identity to choose yet unaware of how important this choice would be. "I doubt that my father walked away feeling that he'd redirected the course of his life," she writes.
Drawing on both her father's autobiographical account and some of what Gates had to say, One Drop culminates in a cultural and intellectual history of Broyard's life and times. His Greenwich Village days (described in his book Kafka Was the Rage) were full of ambition and contention, not to mention consummate lady-killing. (Broyard was "New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic," according to the hot-blooded diarist Anais Nin.) And some of his most assertive early essays about race and hip-ness made his bona fides clear.
Broyard proudly kept a 1950 issue of Commentary near the family's dinner table. But the author's identifying note had been neatly cut out of the contributor's page. Now his daughter knows what it said: that Anatole Broyard was "an anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world." And she wonders, with lucid and sharp introspection, how her own life would have changed if she had known that sooner.
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