After growing up for the first twenty-three years of my life as a Wasp in Connecticut, I learned on my father’s deathbed that he had been raised as “colored” in New Orleans and Bed-Stuy Brookyn.  This revelation answered some questions–such as why we never saw his family–and raised some new ones–such as why did my father chose to live as white and what does all this mean to me.  I wrote a book called One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets in which I try to figure it out.  And here the conversation about writing, family, and racial identity continues…