One Drop
Two months before he died, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side to impart a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. Born in the French Quarter in 1920, Anatole had begun to conceal his racial identity after his family moved to Brooklyn and his parents resorted to "passing" in order to get work. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the facade.
Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices. Seeking out unknown relatives in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, Bliss uncovers the 250-year history of her family in America and chronicles her own evolution from privileged WASP to a woman of mixed-race ancestry.
“Bliss Broyard’s account of discovering that she is black, after a childhood of unwittingly ‘passing’ at a tony prep school and a snooty yacht club, is among the most elegant and nuanced examinations of race I've encountered, an exquisite rendering of how color is simultaneously a meeting with subtraction and they all-pervasive marker of identity in America. One Drop transcends race, going to the essence of what it means simply to be.” -Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama—The Climactic Battle of the Civil RIghts Revolution
“By tracing two centuries’ worth of the most subtle intricacies of racism, One Drop does a great deal to puncture the whole illusion of race. Bliss Broyard’s extraordinary book is meticulously researched, written with a crystal precision, and honest especially where it hurts.”-Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising
“As this fascinating and insightful book makes clear, Mr. Broyard left a legacy of racial confusion and great autobiographical material. . . . Only after her father died did Ms. Broyard begin to realize how little she understood. And so she begins, in ways to elevate One Drop far above the usual family-revisionist memoir, to make up for lost time . . . with lucid and sharp introspection.”-Janet Maslin, New York Times
“In One Drop, Bliss Broyard delivers an emotional blend of family history, social history, and memoir. Well researched and beautifully written, Broyard’s book is at once a trenchant exploration of the consequences of racial differences in America and a highly personal search for identity, family, and forgiveness.”-A.M. Homes, author of This Book Will Save Your Life
“Broyard’s vivid, compassionate portrait of her complex father raises the question, What is the deep-down cost of living a lie? And her remarkably perceptive and well-wrought saga of blood ties denied and nurtured celebrates the grand diversity and true interconnectivity of the entire human family.”-Booklist (starred review)
“In this resonant memoir-cum-ethnographic detective story, Broyard asks, ‘Was my father’s choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred? Was he a hero or a cad?’ The answer, it seems, is as unknowable as the man himself.”-Vogue
“This is a brave and thoughtful book. . . . Bliss Broyard grapples with [the difficult questions] as honestly and openly as an admiring and adoring daughter could.”-Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
“In One Drop, Broyard 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.”-Lynell George, Los Angeles Times
“Anatole Broyard’s life becomes in these pages not only a record of how a man buried his blackness and constructs his whiteness, but also a testament to the mercurial and performative nature of race. Bliss Broyard has bravely and eloquently taken her father’s legacy of passing and turned it inside out, making whole what was fragmented, making clear all that was hidden. At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive social history.”-Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia
“Broyard’s investigation—including a history of interracial marriage and passing—is powerful and often moving.”-Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly
“Principally Anatole Broyard’s life is of consequence because One Drop, the proving and often poignant account of his daughter’s search for perspective on that life and those it touched, has so much to reveal about race in America.”-Art Winslow, Chicago Tribune
“One Drop is a moving and beautifully crafted memoir about American identity. Bliss Broyard demonstrates that race can make Americans crazy or trap us in mysteries; but sometimes, like it or not, it unravels our self-understanding from the maddening thickets of the past.”-David Blight, author of A Slave No More
“Bliss Broyard’s stunning One Drop illuminates the Anatole Broyard story, though it’s as much a chronicle of Bliss Broyard’s struggle as her father’s. . . . The results are alternately fascinating, sad, and revealing.”-BookPage
“Bliss Broyard walks through this house of mirrors and keeps her gaze admirably steady. With a reporter-like mix of new-subject naïveté and doggedness, she moves from her beginnings in upper-crust Connecticut and New York to Creole society in New Orleans—about as big a cultural leap in the continental U.S. as you can get.”-Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
“ ‘I may never be able to answer the question What am I?’ Bliss Broyard writes, ‘yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself.’ Her brave, uncompromising, and powerful book is an important contribution toward the negation of that question.”-Joyce Johnson, New York Times Book Review
“If you haven’t read Bliss Broyard’s One Drop, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it.”-Debra Dickerson, Mother Jones
“A deeply felt and compassionate book, a daughter’s gift of true sympathy and understanding.” -Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
“A brave, uncompromising, and powerful book.”-Joyce Johnson, New York Times Book Review
“In ONE DROP, Bliss Broyard writes her own account of her father’s ‘passing.’ Reversing her father’s trajectory, she travels back to New Orleans and journeys over 200 years. She uncovers not only her own past, but also the complex and crazy racial history of our nation.”-Margo Hammond, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This sprawling memoir packs a wallop.”-Deirdre Donahue, USA Today