One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

by Bliss Broyard

“it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.”

Years later I’d understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty.

Throughout my father’s writing ran the theme that a person’s identity was an act of will and style.

My father used to say that he’d come from nothing. While he’d been raised with modest means in New Orleans and Brooklyn, and his parents only had eighth grade educations, I knew that by “nothing” he meant the existential kind.

some people had parents and siblings, a history and hometown, my father had the literature of his favorite authors: Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Charles Baudelaire, and D. H. Lawrence.

my dad would say that they didn’t interest him. “You know, Blissy, just because you share blood with someone doesn’t mean you have to like them,” he’d explain. The implication was that he liked—loved—us by choice, as long as we remained interesting.

what finally moved me to tears was this fresh evidence of the boundaries around my father’s personal life.

Hadn’t my father once loved his parents and siblings too? What had they done to make his feelings change? Or was it what they hadn’t done—read enough, accomplished enough, remained interesting?

My mother had said that his secret caused him more pain than the cancer in his bones.