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| I had always understood my ancestry to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion? |
Cracking the Code
When my father moved to Oakland, California, after Hurricane Camille wrecked the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in 1969, strangers he encountered from El Salvador and Mexico and Puerto Rico would spit rapid-fire Spanish at him, expecting a reply in kind. “Are you Samoan?” a Samoan asked him once. But my father, with his black, silky hair that curled into Coke-bottle waves at the ends, skin the color of milky tea, and cheekbones like dorsal fins breaking the water of his face, was none of these things. He attended an all-black high school in Oakland; in his class pictures, his is one of the few light faces. His hair is parted in the middle and falls away in a blowsy Afro, coarsened to the right texture by multiple applications of relaxer.
My father was born in 1956 in Pass Christian, a small Mississippi town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles from New Orleans. He grew up in a dilapidated single-story house: four rooms, with a kitchen tacked onto the back. It was built along the railroad tracks and shook when trains sped by; the wood of the sloped floor rotted at the corners. The house was nothing like the great columned mansions strung along the man-made beach just half a mile or so down the road, houses graced with front-facing balconies so that the wealthy white families who lived in them could gaze out at the flat pan of the water and the searing, pale sand, where mangrove trees had grown before they’d bulldozed the land.
Put simply, my father grew up as a black boy in a black family in the deep South, where being black, in the sixties, was complicated. The same was true in the eighties, when I was growing up in DeLisle, a town a few miles north of Pass Christian. Once, when I was a teen, we stood together in a drugstore checkout line behind an older, blondish white woman. My father, an inveterate joker, kept shoving me between my shoulder blades, trying to make me stumble into her. “Daddy, stop,” I mouthed, as I tried to avoid a collision. I was horrified: Daddy’s going to make me knock this white woman over. Then she turned around, and I realized that it was my grandaunt Eunice, my grandmother’s sister—that she was blood. “I thought you were white,” I said, and she and my father laughed.
Coastal Mississippi is a place where Eunice—a woman pale as milk, with blond hair and African heritage—is considered, and considers herself, black. The one-drop rule is real here. Eunice wasn’t allowed on the beaches of the Gulf Coast or Lake Pontchartrain until the early seventies. The state so fiercely neglected her education that her grandfather established a community school for black children. Once Eunice graduated, after the eighth grade, her schooling was done. She worked in her father’s fields, and then as a cleaning woman for the white families in their mansions on the coast. On the local TV station, she watched commentators discuss what it meant to be a proper Creole, women who were darker than her asserting that true Creoles have only Spanish and French ancestry. Theirs was part of an ongoing attempt to write anyone with African or Native American heritage out of the region’s history; to erase us from the story of the plantations, the swamps, the bayou; to deny that plaçage, those unofficial unions, during the time of anti-miscegenation laws, between European men and women of African heritage had ever taken place.
It’s impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families’ pasts, don’t include our non-European ancestors. Both my mother’s and my father’s family name is Dedeaux (I bear my paternal grandmother’s last name), and several relatives on my mother’s side have traced their lineage through European Dedeauxs back to France, but building a family tree of people of color is far harder. I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
I was at a dinner with some professors from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, when one of them told me about the genetic-testing company 23andMe. It cost ninety-nine dollars—that was my first surprise. I imagined that the price of such a service would be exorbitant, but evidently it wasn’t. You order a kit online, the professor explained, and get it in the mail a week or so later, then register it on the company’s Web site, spit into a test tube, seal it, and send it back in the provided box. Around six weeks later, you receive your results. The professor said that his girlfriend had spent hours poring over hers, fascinated by her genetically based health analysis. (Due to an F.D.A. crackdown, 23andMe no longer provides that particular service.) But I was interested in genetic testing for a different reason.
I ordered tests for my father, my mother, and myself. We submitted our samples, then waited for the company’s scientists to decode the ancestral information in our DNA.
My mother and I were sitting at her kitchen table when her test came back. My father was at my sister’s house, surrounded by his children, when he received his. Their results confirmed some of the notions we’d had about our ancestry, as passed down through family lore, and subverted others. My father, who’d always believed himself to have Native American heritage, and who had a strong affinity for Native American history and culture, found that he is fifty-one per cent Native American, as well as nearly equal parts sub-Saharan African and European (British, Irish, Spanish, and Ashkenazi)—23.5 per cent and 22.5 per cent, respectively—and just over one per cent North African. My mother, who has told me story after story about her white great-grandparents taking their mixed-race children to visit their families in Kiln, Mississippi, only to hide the kids in the trunk of the car at the end of every visit when the sun set and it was no longer safe, found that she is fifty-five per cent European—a mixture of British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, and Iberian—forty-one per cent sub-Saharan African, and 3.4 per cent Native American.
My parents’ results gave them the concrete proof of their ancestry that they’d always been denied. My father, a former member of the Black Panther party, proudly claimed his Native American heritage by registering with the Choctaw tribe of Slidell, Louisiana. My mother could at last make educated guesses about the parentage of her great grandparents. It was as if 23andMe had taught them to read the language of their family histories, enabling them to finally understand the incomprehensible book of their ancestral pasts: to read what had been gibberish.
Yet I found my own results both surprising and troubling. I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers. My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties. My father was run out of segregated Pass Christian’s beaches and the local park. I was the only black girl at my private high school in Pass Christian, the target of my classmates’ backwards ideas about race. Despite my parents’ sense of their mixed roots, I had thought that my genetic makeup would confirm the identity that I’d grown up with—one that located Africa as my ancestors’ primary point of origin, and that allowed me to claim a legacy of black resistance and strength.
So it was discomfiting to find that my ancestry was forty per cent European—a mixture of British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Iberian, Italian, and Ashkenazi—thirty-two per cent sub-Saharan African, a quarter Native American, and less than one per cent North African. For a few days after I received my results, I looked into the mirror and didn’t know how to understand myself. I tried to understand my heritage through my features, to assign each one a place, but I couldn’t. All I could see was my hair: hair that grows up and out instead of falling flat, like my father’s; hair that refuses to be as smooth and tidy as my mother’s but instead bushes and tangles and curls in all directions at once. Mine is a mane that bears the strongest imprint of my African ancestors, hair that my hairstylist combed out into a voluminous Afro during one of my visits to New York City, so that I walked the streets with a ten-inch halo that repelled the rain and spoke of Africa to everyone who saw it.
That’s how I remembered myself. I remembered that people of color from my region of the United States can choose to embrace all aspects of their ancestry, in the food they eat, in the music they listen to, in the stories they tell, while also choosing to war in one armor, that of black Americans, when they fight for racial equality. I remembered that in choosing to identify as black, to write about black characters in my fiction and to assert the humanity of black people in my nonfiction, I’ve remained true to my personal history, to my family history, to my political and moral choices, and to my essential self: a self that understands the world through the prism of being a black American, and stands in solidarity with the people of the African diaspora.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t honor and claim the myriad other aspects of my heritage. I do, in ways serious and silly. I read Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney and love all things Harry Potter and “Doctor Who.” I study French and Spanish and attempt to translate the simplest poems by Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca into English (and fail awfully). I watch obscure French movies with subtitles. I attend powwows and eat fry bread and walk along the outside of the dancing circles with a kind of wistful longing because I want to understand the singing so badly, because I want to stomp the earth in exultation and to belong in that circle, too. But I imagine that my ancestors from Sierra Leone and Britain, from France and the Choctaw settlements on the Mississippi bayou, from Spain and Ghana—all those people whose genetic strands intertwined to produce mine—felt that same longing, even as they found themselves making a new community here at the mouth of the Mississippi. Together, they would make new music, like blues and jazz and Zydeco, and new dances, second lining through the streets. They would make a world that reflected back to them the richness of their heritage, and in doing so discover a new type of belonging.
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