‘In hora mortis meae voca me, et iube me venire ad te’ (at the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you). This is the prayer of Christian hope.”

Pope Saint John Paul II, Letter to the Elderly, 1999

I read a book weeks ago, that starts with a death bed. Bliss Broyard wrote a book** about her father Anatole Broyard, and her search for either his or her own identity, after he died. He lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village in the 1950’s and then became a New York Times book reviewer in the 1970s and 80’s. She says of her dad dying, “[he] reasoned that by developing a style for their illness, a stance that incorporated it into the ongoing narrative of their lives, sick people could ‘go on being themselves, perhaps even more so that before.’ He didn’t want ‘grotesque lovingness’ which he saw as false behavior.” The grotesque lovingness in this case was his daughter trying to tell him she loved him, as he was suffering and struggling near the end. Broyard, himself, wrote a book or essay about dying that I think his daughter is quoting.

Over the course of the first chapter of this book, the theme of inventing or creating yourself, of being yourself only with a lot of work, ‘developing a style’ for your final illness, came up, over and over. The determination that you could create a kind of “eternal moment of remembrance” for yourself was the essence, according to Bliss, of an essay her father, Anatole, wrote about dying.

This whole set up is foreign to me, as an idea, and as an experience around someone dying. The Broyards were not imagining much of an afterlife or judgement. They were not asking Our Lady or Jesus Christ to accompany their dad, or nor asking the Heavenly Father to call him, as if He knew who Anatole Broyard was.

Bliss Broyard’s father was African American, but had never told her or her brother. Her mother, a dancer for Martha Graham, was of Norwegian descent. Broyard had lived his life, determined not to be boxed in as “black writer”. He had the looks to pass as white, and this set up an idea in him that he could choose who he would be.

Okay…? But! We are born with DNA that determines many of our physical characteristics. I say ‘many’ because the environment may limit the expression of our genes. If we are starved in childhood we will grow slowly, though we might have otherwise been very tall. There’s also a lot of argument about how much of personality is pre-determined. In this case Anatole Broyard’s physical appearance gave him a choice that others in his family did not have. He could pass as white, but his sister could not. Her heritage showed physically. He rejected the idea that his heritage would determine who he was and what he would do, but his sister didn’t have that luxury.

Bliss, his daughter, mentions more than once in her book, that her father’s idea that you can choose who you will be, meant that family was entirely expendable. Your friends are forever, he said, because they are your choice. Not so your family. She had a different idea.

“Because I’d come from my mother and father — been made up by their parts — [I thought] that I had a right to know everything about them. I was them, And they were mine, for better or worse.” Bliss was “intensely curious to know myself — as a grown-up, not my parents’ child. I thought, conveniently, of identity as a kind of board game, where solving the mystery of my father would allow me to move forward onto the next level of discovery.” (p. 11)

This goes back to the quote at the beginning of this essay. I believe that God created us. That he gave us a soul, and that soul identifies us. Our lifework is to be the person that we were created to be. And in the end, God calls us home. The prayer says, “Call me and bid me come to you.” Call the specific person you created. This is what Broyard did not believe. He felt that he created himself and that it was up to him to keep creating himself, even as he was dying. His daughter, on the other hand, felt at times as if the only way to know her own identity was to understand her father’s choices more deeply.

Anatole’s family was from New Orleans, and they were a complex mixture of African American, in part by way of Haiti and Saint Domingue after the violent revolution there in the early 1800’s, as well as Choctaw Indian, and White. Bliss Broyard wrote a lot about the Creole culture and its different ways of dealing with ancestry and race. Different, I mean, from other parts of the United States.

It turned out as Bliss delved into the matter, that some people had always known about her dad. Further, there were a lot of other Broyards on both sides of the color line. The book is from 2007, so nearly twenty years old, and the discussion of race was somehow different from more recent commentary.

The book mentions that Henry Lewis Gates, an African American academic, wrote an article about Anatole and his background for the New Yorker magazine, while she was still researching her father and his life. I went and read the article and was struck specifically by a line where Gates says that Broyard’s family was African American since the 1700’s. Bliss’s research shows explicitly that in the 1850’s, Henry Broyard, Anatole’s great (?) grandfather, switched from White to Black on official census papers, when he married a Creole woman.

Questions of identity and how it is created are central to the book. Bliss shows clearly that Anatole Broyard’s choices were not as free as he thought they were. He was defined in part by where he came from, not solely by his own choices. She also comes to realize that she has more choice in who she is or will be, than she thought as a child or young adult. In the end she told a fascinating story and did it very well.

** One Drop, My Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets. Bliss Broyard. Back Bay Books (Little, Brown & Company). New York. 2007.