The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  Bridget knew about loss. I suspect that’s what drew her to the spirit world. She had been married to the Captain for only four years when he died. We don’t know exactly how they met; only that ships had something to do with it. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the port of Bombay was as busy as a Dutch brothel. The whole world sailed in, ships full of women, traders and fortune hunters, wool, tin and textiles, often spun from the same bales of raw cotton that India shipped out. American independence had cost the British their cheap cotton supply, and soon after it was Indian cotton that covered the backsides of the Empire. It also helped to weave a metropolis. Bombay’s population swelled from a mere thirteen thousand to roughly a million over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  My great-grandfather was among the newcomers. Frederick William Crooks arrived as chief officer aboard a vessel that may have come by way of the United States or perhaps Jamaica, his homeland. Ships between Jamaica and India had always been frequent, with the exchange of sugar, salt, coffee, tea and spices; but, in the Captain’s day, between 1845 and 1915, Britain also shipped 36,000 Indians to Jamaica as indentured servants to replace slaves after abolition. No one knows if the Captain had intended to stay in India, but after he met Bridget Meek he did. She was from a well-to-do Anglo-Indian family, her father an overseer in the public works department and eventually a supervisor of the railway. Bridget had four brothers, and they were the ones who first met the Captain. Apparently they picked him out instantly as a fine catch for their sister. He was dashing, worldly, distinguished. As my mother says, “All I ever heard about the Captain was that he was outstanding.”

  Only one image of the Captain survives. It’s a large charcoal sketch that has been folded in three for so many decades it’s practically in pieces now. In it, wearing a tailored suit jacket and tie, he looks regal, confident. There’s certainly something alluring and serene about his gaze. He has slim, chiselled features, a handlebar moustache that must have lashed his cheeks like a bullwhip in the ocean winds, and light eyes like my grandfather’s and Conrad’s. It’s difficult to tell if he was black or white. More likely he was like the rest of us—some shade in between.

  It’s impossible to guess his height from the portrait, but family lore has it that Bridget Meek looked like a child at his side, at least a foot shorter. When she lost her temper, he used to pick her up under the armpits and sit her on top of a tall cabinet until she cooled down. They married in Bombay in 1902, when he was twenty-nine and she was eighteen. A year later they had a daughter, Florence, and in 1905, a son—my grandfather—named after his father, whom most people knew as Freddie.

  The only known image of the Captain, Frederick William Crooks Sr., produced at some point before he died in 1906.

  It was in Bombay that my great-grandfather became a captain; he earned his master mariner’s certificate and joined the Mogul Line, a fleet of British ships that often ferried pilgrims to Mecca. Every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it is obliged to travel to Saudi Arabia’s holiest city at least once in a lifetime, so the hajj gave the Captain steady work sailing up and down India’s coast, picking up the faithful. On one trip, the story goes, he happened upon a boat that had capsized in the Red Sea. He pulled so many drowning souls to safety that he earned a commendation from the king of England. That royal recognition from Edward VII is said to have promised the Captain and his family free passage to England at any time.

  But my great-grandfather never lived long enough to take advantage of the offer. His steady shipboard diet caught up with him quickly, and like so many nineteenth-century men of the sea, he developed beriberi. There was no cure for it then, and the dire lack of vitamin B1 came on like a wasting disease. Masked as fatigue or congestive heart failure, it can cause the limbs to swell and the mind to collapse, often leaving its victims delirious until they die, which the Captain did, at the age of thirty-two.

  My mother heard that his Jamaican relatives had made contact with Bridget after his death, by letter or by telegraph, asking if they could adopt my grandfather, who was just eighteen months old. Bridget turned them down flat. It’s said that the Freemasons helped to support her. The Captain had apparently been a high-ranking member of the brotherhood, and they financed the education of my grandfather and his sister. The Captain’s membership in a secretive ancient society only added to his mystique—that and the idea that my great-grandmother managed to continue her relationship with him for at least thirty-nine years after he passed.

  It could have been otherwise. Bridget Meek was a handsome woman, my mother says: “A backside like a peacock she had.” There were plenty of suitors; even the maharaja of Hyderabad had hungry eyes for her and actually proposed. But Bridget never remarried. Instead, even at the age of sixty, she was still holding tight to the Captain’s memory and her homemade Ouija board.

  I thought of Nana Bridget when the first DNA results arrived. My great-grandmother had her chants and portable alphabet and I had the wizardry of lab tests and fancy Q-tips as I waited for the whispers of long-lost souls from a smudge of buccal cells. Was this budding branch of genetic science any more reliable than her dark arts?

  The first results arrived from DNAPrint in January 2006. Stephen brought them in with the mail on a snowy evening after work. I’d sent in his DNA sample as well, to see how his would compare to the alleged mix of mine. Based on Stephen’s looks alone, his heritage seems to be a straightforward story: he’s tall, blondish, fair and blue-eyed, German-Swedish on his mother’s side, British and German on his father’s. Both sides sailed to North America in the nineteenth century and homesteaded in the west; the last three generations were all born and bred under the big sky of the Canadian prairies. Still, his family had its tales too: that mingled in with the lily white of his father’s side was a bit of Native ancestry.

  Before making their way to central Alberta, the Rouses had farmed in Kentucky, where, folklore had it, a Cherokee great-grandmother had dipped into their gene pool, leaving certain descendants with a touch of swarthiness in the skin and an epicanthic fold to the eyes. Stephen has always relished the idea, believing it deepens his ties to the land where tribes and buffalo once roamed free. Plus, he tans well. After a day in the sun he’ll hold up his arm next to mine and say, “Look at that, Abraham. I’m darker than you. See? One-sixteenth Cherokee.”

  In many ways my husband harbours the same affinity for First Nations people that my father does for the Chinese. But I didn’t really see it until that night, as he stood there in his wet boots, poring over DNAPrint’s “certificate of ancestry.” It looked like a diploma—an extravagant border of emerald green, embossed with a gold seal, clearly suitable for framing. But the look on Stephen’s face suggested it was heading straight to the recycling bin.

  “One hundred percent European,” he said, tossing the paper on the table. “One hundred percent! I’m boring.”

  “Oh, come on, let me see, Paleface. Nothing about Cherokees in there?”

  Stephen didn’t laugh. He looked genuinely disappointed, bewildered even, as though he’d just lost something, his keys, or his wallet.

  “Look, I don’t think anyone could really be 100 percent anything,” I offered. But his mind was far away, back in his boyhood, those nights on the farm when the neighbours would sit with his folks around the big kitchen table, drinking coffee from a giant stainless steel percolator. His father told stories of the Rouse ancestors who had ended up in Missouri, three kilometres from the homestead of Frank and Jesse James, and the ones in Kentucky, near the Cherokee reservation. The aboriginal link resonated with Stephen, adding a certain mystery to the Native farm workers who arrived with the spring as hired hands. But now here he was with a fancy piece of paper that cast doubt on all of it.

  “You have to wonder if there was any truth to the stories at all,” Stephen said.

  I reminded him that this test was a scan of only 176 markers in a code of three billion. “Look, it may be that you do have markers that would suggest a
Native connection, but those markers weren’t identified in this test,” I said. Maybe a broader test would pick them up, I added. Who knows what stories other markers might tell?

  I waited until later that night to open my own results. I doubted that anything would surprise me the way it had Stephen, but I was wrong. European: 49 percent; East Asian: 21 percent; sub-Saharan African: 8 percent. Those numbers should have been intriguing enough: the first real evidence of a Chinese heritage, and a hint that the Captain may well have passed down genes from Africa. But all of this was overshadowed by a fourth figure that scattered my mind in a thousand directions, making me read and reread it: Native American, 22 per cent—as in Indians, not of India but of the Americas.

  “Okay,” Stephen asked, “what does yours say?”

  “Well, according to this, I’m the Native American around here.”

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing the paper from my hands. He read it and then feigned a scowl. “Did you switch our samples? Or is all this just crap?”

  I shrugged. Was it?

  Stephen had believed he was part Native and the test told him he wasn’t. I had no inkling that Native American ancestry played a role in my heritage, and the test says it did—and not just a trifling drop or two but a whopping 22 percent. Did 22 percent of the 176 “ancestral informative” markers the company had tested make me nearly a quarter Native? In which Native populations had these markers been found? North America has more than three hundred different tribes. Was I part Cree, Ojibwa, Mohawk?

  It seemed more plausible that those markers had been passed down through the ages from the same Asian population that Native Americans were descended from. But if that was the case, why had they not been diluted by the genes of more recent ancestors? Didn’t such a high reading suggest that I had a Native ancestor from not so long ago? Maybe this was another family secret buried under the blankets of time and denial. The company’s research suggests that a person begins to exhibit the physical characteristics of a group with a reading of 30 percent. Do I look a little Native? I thought of my father’s nose. I thought of the Indian warrior featured on the logo of the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks and tried to do a mental overlay of the profiles—the noses in particular, that distinctive slope. Had I noticed the similarities before?

  My father is not one for cursing, even if he nails something into his thumb. At home, just about the only time we could count on Dad to use bad language was after Bob Barker asked a Miss America contestant about her lifelong ambitions. If her answer involved anything that included the phrase “world peace”—as in working towards it, praying for it, or promoting it—my father blurted out a resounding “Bullshit.” As I handed him his first DNA results, I wondered if he would break out a four-letter word when he got to the Native part.

  A news channel was droning in the background and my mother was at the kitchen counter making lunch. My father adjusted his glasses and read out loud: “European, okay, 35 percent … East Asian, 36 percent—look at that, Tweet, there it is—36 percent! That must be from my grandfather.…”

  And then, like me, instead of delighting further in the very detail my father had hoped to find, his attention was consumed by the line he read next. “… Native American, 25 per cent.… What’s this? Native American?” My father leaned closer to the paper to confirm what he’d read. “Twenty-five percent?!”

  “Wow!” he said, “Golly! Goodness me, I didn’t expect this. Native American? Red Indians, not brown Indians?”

  “Wow!” my mother said, “Where does that come from?”

  I didn’t think any member of our family had set foot in North America before the 1970s, I suggested, so it could be that the markers were not really Native American but Asian. But the company had been clear from the outset that it could not distinguish European ancestry from South Asian ancestry, because there had been so much mixing between Europe and India. So I wondered why the reading was so high if it was from ancestors so long ago.

  “Yes, of course, from Asia … the Natives came across the Bering Strait,” my father said, referring to the stretch of water between Siberia and Alaska. His mother’s people, the mysterious Snalleckz branch, had sprouted somewhere in Russia before making their way to India, he added. “Given Russia’s proximity to that north-eastern passage, that might explain it. Or,” he said, rolling with it as my mother set down sandwiches, “you must remember the early explorers who came to the Americas, then went back to Europe and to Asia. They took some Native Americans with them.”

  Launching into the history, my father recalled reading that Columbus had dragged dozens of Native Americans back to Europe with him, trying to convince his royal benefactors of the potential labour pool in the New World. The handful that survived sickness and the sea made a lasting impression in the courts of Europe, and my father said he remembered something about a few Natives even ending up in India. Over lunch we continued on like this, wondering if a kidnapped Native had sired one of our ancestors in the subcontinent, whether Indians of India had a common heritage with the Indians of North America, and how I had read somewhere that Sanskrit words of ancient India actually form root words in the language of Native American cultures. And on it went.

  That afternoon we all accepted this science as truth, and instantly felt a need to explain it, to find a narrative that would put flesh on the bones of this discovery. Stephen had lost a story and we had gained one; we just had no idea what the story was. Not that it mattered. Word of our newly discovered Native ancestry spread through the family like a smoke signal. To my sister-in-law, Sheri, the result explained why my niece Candice had looked “like the real thing” when she dressed up as Pocahontas one Halloween. My Uncle Horace said it wasn’t the least bit surprising. “Do you know how many people ask if I’m Native?”

  For my sister, the Native finding was proof of our prescience. Hadn’t we joked as kids that we belonged to a long-lost tribe of wanderers who ate samosas and slept under the stars? Remarkably, Christine’s DNA didn’t have nearly as much of the Native quotient as mine and my father’s. She came in at 11 percent Native, 51 percent European, 2 percent sub-Saharan African and 36 percent East Asian (was this why her son had silky jet-black hair?). Our results were dissimilar enough to suggest that our genomes had clearly been dealt from different decks, which was not a big surprise, since my sister has freckles and enjoys playing Sudoku. My mother’s results had not arrived yet, but it appeared that my sister was more like her and somehow I had inherited nearly all of my ancestral markers from my father.

  I told Christine that Conrad’s results also looked more like Dad’s and mine. Con’s had said: European, 49 percent; East Asian, 23 percent; sub-Saharan African, 9 percent; and his Native American markers were high as well, at 19 percent.

  “So does this mean we really are Native?” Christine asked.

  “What do you mean really Native? Genetically, culturally, politically—what?”

  “You know, as in does it have implications?”

  Her list was succinct: could we join a tribe? move to an Indian reserve? apply for tax-free status? open a casino? We agreed these were probably politically incorrect questions. But then we started cracking jokes about whether it was legitimate to ask those kinds of things now, since, it would seem, we are Native, and so therefore it would be acceptable, wouldn’t it?

  A few days later, when I called DNAPrint in Sarasota to clarify my family’s results, I learned just how seriously some people take these kinds of questions.

  Emanuela Charlton, or Lou, as she prefers to be called, has a PhD in pharmacology and the perfect telephone voice for someone in customer service. A plush drawl that wraps words in velvet is nothing short of a gift when Lou has to tell Mrs. Jones, “This particulaah test cannot possibly reveal whetha you descend from a Russian czaah,” or confirm to the white supremacist that, yes, his DNA does suggest he is 22 percent sub-Saharan African.

  Lou said she had to be as quick and calm as an air traffic c
ontroller or run the risk of a caller crashing headlong into an identity crisis. Often she referred customers to the bar graphs that plot DNA results onto a range of estimates, helping them understand there is a margin of error that suggests a few markers may be linked to one geographic region or another that the test did not pick up. “I can generally get them calmed down enough that they believe the test,” said Lou, who pegged its accuracy at 98 to 99 percent. “There are some people who take the test for the wrong reasons, to prove they are something—100 percent wonderful, or whatever they think they are. You do get some kooks.”

  But most callers, she said, were simply puzzled by unexpected results. In those cases she laid out the randomness of the way DNA recombines with every generation (cue the half deck shuffle) and how a person can inherit genetic bits and pieces from every ancestor they’ve ever had, even a nucleotide or two of a forebear from thousands of years ago. “You know, you go back five hundred years—which isn’t a lot—that’s fifteen generations, and you have thirty-two thousand ancestors to deal with. You go back twenty generations, you’ve got a million ancestors to deal with,” Lou said. “So when people wonder why they’re getting these strange results that they didn’t expect, I tell them, well, that’s why.”

  Most of the gratitude, she added, for this type of testing comes from people who know nothing of their heritage because they were adopted. Then she told me where most of the frustration comes from: “There’s been an explosion of people who want to be Native American. They just want to be—it’s like the in thing these days. Most people that I talk to are annoyed with the test because it didn’t show that they have Native American ancestry. Apparently they want to tie in to casino funds. The government also offers a lot of grants for people with Native American ancestry, for college for their sons and daughters. They scream at me on the phone, asking why they don’t have Native American ancestry.”