(Applause.)
So, family holidays were always an intense,
big deal in my house.
My mom would make a gorgeous meal and there'd
be lots of presents and a lot of time spent together
in front of the fire.
I think part of the reason was that my dad had married late.
He didn't have me until he was 46, and so he had
really looked forward to, you know, these kind of
moments of domestic bliss for a long time.
But the other thing was that it was always just
us; just my mother, my father, my brother, Todd, and me.
We had no extended family to speak of.
My mom's parents had both died by the time she was 20,
and her brother and sister lived very
different lives in faraway places.
On my dad's side, his father had also passed
away long before I was born, but his mother and
his two sisters actually lived pretty close.
They were in New York City, which is about an
hour from where we were living in Connecticut,
in Fairfield, Connecticut, actually.
But, except for one visit that they, my, one of my
aunts and my grandmother made out when I was 7,
we never saw them.
And when I would ask my dad about it, he would
say, "well, you know, they don't interest me."
Uh, which I, I heard him say about various neighbors
and some, some parents of classmates and, you know,
people who aren't smart enough or sophisticated
enough, and I knew that both of his parents just
had eighth grade educations and he had
grown up very working class, so this answer, you know,
kind of made sense.
But it did seem like a rather, you know,
cold feeling to have about your own family.
But he was never cold with us.
Um, he was always incredibly demonstrative
and always saying "I love you," and very present;
actually he worked at home, he was a little too
present at times for my liking.
But so I didn't really worry about it so much.
So anyway, one year in 1979, I was 12,
my dad decided that he wanted to get my mom something
really special for Mother's Day.
He wanted to get her something from Tiffany's.
So he'd always consult with me about what kind of
gift to get her, and actually he would consult
with me about virtually everything.
He would even read aloud.
He was a book reviewer for the New York Times for
many years and he would read aloud his reviews.
Um, so I, I later realized, I'm a writer now myself,
that you know it helps to read aloud.
You can kind of hear if a line is working or not,
but you know I thought it was his 12-year-old editor.
Um, anyway, but he always took my feedback really
seriously, especially when it came to things around my mother.
So he brought home a catalog from Tiffany's and,
uh, we spent an evening in his study
before dinner looking through it, and he really
liked these gold earrings that were shaped like sea urchins,
and I thought they were kind of conventional.
They, uh, they looked to me like the kind of thing
like some of the ladies at the country club would wear,
and my mom was a lot younger and hipper than that.
She was only 40 and she was a modern dancer.
But I could see that my dad was sort of reaching
for this particular kind of message with this gift,
you know, something about like respectability and
tradition, you know the kind of gift that would
come in that bright blue Tiffany's box,
so I gave him the thumbs up.
So Mother's Day arrives and we head down into the
kitchen for my dad to present his gift, and he
sits down and he puts the blue box on the kitchen table.
But my mom doesn't see, she's got her back to us
because she's standing at the stove, you know,
making dinner, because even though it was her
day, you know, nobody else had come forward to make
that gorgeous meal.
And in a weird peculiarity of my family finances,
really a necessity of our finances is that we never
went out to eat.
So she's you know at the stove cooking and he says,
"hey come and sit down for a second."
And she says, "well hold on a minute, I'm making dinner."
And he says, uh, and she still hasn't turned around,
so she doesn't see the gift on the table, and he says
"well just turn off the stove for a minute and sit
down." And then she says, "I can't turn off the
stove, I'm in the middle of making this sauce"
and she was talking about egg yolks, I think she was
actually making a hollandaise sauce or
something, and um, and so he says, "well fine then,"
and she finally turns around, but she still
doesn't see the gift because now he has got it
in his hand and he throws it across the kitchen floor,
it lands at her feet, and yells
"Happy Mother's Day" and storms out of the room.
And she looks at me like "I don't know where that
came from." So anyway, needless to say, the...
oh by the way, she wanted me to tell you all for the
record that she did really like the earrings.
But that night was pretty much ruined.
And so I go to bed and I'd been asleep for a couple
of hours and my mom bursts into my room and she wakes
me, and I bolt up in bed, you know, I'm expecting
her to say like the house is on fire or something,
and she's like, "Blissy, Blissy, where's the baloney?"
I'm like, what?
She's like "where's the baloney?
Your father can't find his baloney." And every night
before my dad went to bed he would have a boney and
cheddar cheese sandwich on rye bread, washed down
with a single beer, and I had helped my mom put the
groceries away that day.
And I was like, I don't know, it's in the fridge.
She said, "where in the fridge?
Do you know where?"
I was like, in the meat drawer probably.
And then she went running back down the hallway,
so I lay back down in bed.
I was like she woke me for baloney?
And I can't fall asleep again.
So I go downstairs after a while and I find my mother
in the kitchen and she is kneeling on the floor in
front of the open refrigerator door and she
is sweeping broken glass and mayonnaise and jelly
into a dustpan and she is crying, and my father is
nowhere in sight, and the kitchen floor is strewn
with bottles of ketchup and mustard and jars of olives.
And I lean past her and I see that every one of the
shelves in the refrigerator's door has been pulled off.
I was like, daddy did this?
You know, it was shocking and frightening.
I had never seen my father raise his hand in anger before.
I had never seen him lose control like that.
So my mom starts saying how she just "can't put up
with him anymore, I mean, the baloney was right
there, he just didn't look, he never looks,
and he's just so crazy at times, you know,
and I just can't take him anymore." And, uh, and I
heard my mom, you know, threaten to leave my dad
in the past and it always left me sort of speechless
with fear because as much as I believed that my dad
really loved us, and I did truly believe that my father,
you know, loved me dearly, um, to my mind her
kicking him out of her life was as good as
kicking him out of my brother's and my lives too.
You know, he had that other family that he
didn't see, and I thought well what if I don't end
up being smart enough or interesting enough for him.
So finally I managed to say, you know, God,
what's his problem anyway?
I mean, he got you that special present from
Tiffany's and, you know, he wanted it to be a great
night, and she looks at me like she has an answer,
and I said, you know, what?
She said, "well you know his mother died and,
I don't know, it's Mother's Day and I think he's
feeling kind of guilty." And I was like daddy's mother died?
Grandma died?
When?
And she said "back in September."
I was like, that was nine months ago, you know, how come nobody told me?
And she sort of shrugged.
She was like, "well, you didn't really know her."
I was like, oh, like that was my fault, you know,
but um, but she'd already said enough and so she
sent me up, back upstairs.
In fact, I think she thought she said too much.
And so I head back upstairs.
I'm sort of unsure what to think about this news,
you know, and I get into bed and I clutch my pillow
tightly to my chest and I'm repeating over and
over to myself, you know, grandma's dead,
grandma's dead, and trying to work up some tears, but I,
I didn't know her at all and I, I never even had a
grandparent so I didn't even know what, you know,
losing that relationship meant.
What was most upsetting was the fact that I had
been cut out of this private moment in my father's life.
You know, I couldn't imagine losing my own
mother, and here he lost his nine months ago and I
didn't even know, you know, I wasn't even
invited to her funeral.
So the next morning, um, my brother and I are
watching the Saturday morning cartoons and
I tell him, you know, grandma died.
And he said, "yeah, I know, that sucks."
And I was like wait, wait a minute, how did you know?
And he said "well, um, I found another box of ashes
in the closet in daddy's study." She is there next
to our grandfather.
So um, and then, that's how we learn things in our
house, by snooping.
So that's pretty much where my father's family
remained, his whole family, um, was in the closet.
Uh, you know, nobody ever came out to visit again
and they didn't really come up in conversation,
and I didn't really learn the source of this bad
blood between them, but we had a very cozy, domestic,
close-knit family life.
So, you know, I didn't worry about it too much.
Um, so it would be another 12 years before some of
this started to make sense.
It was 1990, I was 23, and my own father was dying of
prostate cancer and my mom told my brother and me
that there was some kind of secret from my father's
childhood that would explain a lot and that we
needed to know before my father passed away, and so
she wanted us to all get together to hear this news.
But before the date that we made to meet arrived,
my dad ended up having an emergency, a crisis, and
he was back in the hospital.
So the next time we saw each other was around his bed.
And it was this horrible afternoon where he was
having these just horrible waves of pain that were
racking his whole body and he was screaming out,
you know, "help, help me, help," like he was drowning,
and finally my mother bullied this nurse
into knocking him out with morphine.
Um, so we all go outside and we're kind of
trembling and my mom says, you know, "I think I
better tell you what the secret is," because it's
clear that my father's not going to live that much longer.
She says, "well, your father's black."
We were like, that's it?
Uh, because we've been, we'd known for a while
there was a secret and we thought like abuse or some
kind of crime, or you know, and um this actually
seemed sort of cool, and so we asked some questions.
We were like, well, you know, how black is he?
I mean, he didn't look black.
So she said, "well, you know, he's mixed,
his parents were both mixed, they were Creoles from New Orleans,"
and in fact they didn't look black either
and neither did his sister Lorraine and that's why
they had come out that one time to visit, but his
other sister, Shirley, did look you know more typically black.
And, in fact, she married a brown-skinned man who
actually was an NAACP lawyer and he later became
the head of the NAACP for the whole western part of
the Country, which is why we didn't see them while
we out being white in Connecticut.
So, it was not a happy part of their life, I'm sure.
So this did answer a lot of questions.
But, of course, it raised many more.
Chief among them, well, you know, why?
Why had my father been secretive about this?
But the next day a tumor broke through the wall of
his bladder, that's what had been causing all this
pain, and he had to go into emergency surgery and
it looked like he wasn't going to live, and he did
live another month, but the trauma caused
something to slip in his brain and he was never lucid again.
So there was no chance to have a conversation with
him about it, and then he died.
So for the last 13 years, I have had to try to
answer the question of his motivation, you know,
on my own, and you know was it because he was born in
1920 in the Jim Crow south, or you know his
family moved to Brooklyn in 1927 to try and find
work and in his new neighborhood the white
kids had picked on him because they knew his
family was black, and the black kids had also
ostracized him because he looked white,
or because he wanted to be a writer and he didn't want to be
a black writer, or because he wanted to spare his own children,
you know, the same, the pain and
confusion that he'd gone through and have us have
opportunities that he didn't have.
And I haven't been the only one that's wondering.
When my dad got this job with the New York Times as
the daily book critic in 1971, no daily newspaper
in the United States had ever had a black critic on
staff before, except for negro newspapers as they
were then called, and it made certain people who
had an inkling about my father's racial identity,
particularly African Americans, you know just
crazy that he wasn't using this platform for the race.
So, in fact, Henry Louis Gates, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
uh, the head of the African American
Department at Harvard in 1996 kind of publicly
added my dad in an article in the New Yorker where he
summed up his life as a sort of Faustian bargain
where he had forsaken his family and himself to some
degree to further his ambition as a writer.
And then a couple of years ago, Brent Staples, who
was on the Editorial Board of the New York Times,
also an African American writer, had concluded that
my father was living a lie that had chewed and ground
up his life, leaving him a lonely and evasive man who
even his own children didn't think that they knew.
But meanwhile, Brent Staples has never met me,
so I don't know where he got that from.
But, uh, but um, you know, I'll never know exactly
why my father made the decisions that he did, but
one thing that I know for sure is that it wasn't
coldness that he felt towards his family as I
suspected when I was a kid, a couple of years
after he died I found an essay that actually he
wrote and was published just a few weeks before
that Mother's Day in 1979 and it was one that he
hadn't run by me, and it was an essay in defense of
irrational behavior on the part of parents.
You know, if parents don't act crazy sometimes, where
are we going to get our poets and our novelists
from was his point.
But it was really kind of a meditation about his
relationship to his own parents and his childhood.
And he wrote, uh, like every great tradition, my
family had to die before I realized how much I miss
them and what they meant to me.
And he wondered now that he had two kids himself,
you know, how we would regard him when we were grown.
And then he wrote, do they understand that after all
these years of running away from home, I'm still
trying to get back.
(Applause.)