One Drop by Bliss Broyard

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

Bliss's account of the moment her mother encouraged her father to reveal his life-long secret that he passed as white:

"We want to know you," I said. And I did, but of course at twenty-three years old, I was also 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. Years later I'd understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty. But back then I wanted to figure everything out, myself most of all. I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, which I equated with being an interesting person, and since I was too young to feel I'd earned my own complications, I'd happily take some of my father." (page 11)

Bliss's description of the Mississippi River:

The Mississippi didn't evoke any of my usual associations with water: the expansiveness dissolving to melancholy when standing on the edge of the ocean, or the clean deep breath of a clear flat lake. (page 139)

Bliss describing her father:

But his conflict wasn't between black and white as much as it was between provincial and sophisticated, old-world and modern, literal-minded and literary-minded. (page 346)