The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  I began to suspect that nursing romantic notions about ancestry ran in the family.

  “Now I’ve been constructing a whole different history,” he said, “since I read that I share ancestry with twenty percent of southern Italians and ten percent of Spaniards.”

  He’d only done the one genetic test, and ours was the only match so far. I asked if he’d shared the news with his family.

  “Oh, yeah, I told my mother,” he said. “My mom was wary of it. She doesn’t understand how one can tell you have the same DNA as someone living one thousand years ago. So she’s still curious, but I tried to explain to her the different proteins of the DNA molecule and how they combined and recombined, and the Y chromosome and all of that, but she thought that was still a little far-out.”

  I asked Jim how much he knew about his Hungarian ancestors, wondering if he’d ever heard of “gypsies” in his bloodline, but he told me he only knew details dating back to 1840, when his great-great-grandfather Johann Otumlist arrived in Michigan from Germany. “He came from a community near Nuremberg that decided the Indians needed missionaries. Rather than just sending one or two, they decided to establish a whole community and, through their example and support, to advance the Indians in their spiritual well-being,” he said. “But my great-great-grandfather was not a preacher himself; he was a carpenter and an architect, a craftsperson. So they established a farming community. It’s one of the larger tourist attractions in Michigan now. They adopted all the building standards, so it’s all still very Bavarian.”

  Our Portuguese ancestors may have gone to India for similar reasons, I said, to spread their culture and Christianity to the Indians of South Asia. But as far as we could tell that was the only common element in our stories—two forefathers who left their homes on a mission to faraway lands—and in all likelihood, we agreed, that’s probably all we’d ever know.

  “Yeah, well, the Y chromosome is one out of forty-six [of our chromosomes], so it doesn’t say a whole lot about your genetic makeup. But it does tell you your shared ancestors—that’s still pretty neat. I had never thought, until this, exactly where the family had come from, other than maybe they’d come from Hungary to Germany,” he said. “I guess I had never reflected on the fact that they had to get there from Africa somehow, and the idea that I was Mediterranean at one time was a new one.”

  I decided to ask Jim what he looked like, wondering if any physical feature hinted at the Middle Eastern-Mediterranean ancestry his Y chromosome suggested. He told me he’d been blond as a child, as his sons had been, but all their hair had darkened as they got older. He’d already sent me a picture of himself, he said, and just before we hung up we promised to keep in touch.

  The match with Jim List was bittersweet for my father. On one hand he found it fascinating that one family’s Y chromosome could match another, entirely unexpected family, but disappointing too, that the Y was not his own, and so did nothing to reveal more about his roots in China.

  It was my mother who was most taken by it. She wanted to know all about Jim List, why he’d taken such a test, how he’d felt to learn he had a match with a man in India. Surprised, I told her, just as we’d been to learn we had a distant relative in Maine—Gladwyn, too, when he’d heard by email.

  “Family from Germany and Hungary!” my mother said. “That’s a new one.”

  I told her about the picture Jim had emailed, standing next to his son on his graduation day, beaming. He did look slightly swarthy to me, or perhaps just well tanned. He had lost most of his dark hair and if I looked closely I could see the traces of an epicanthic fold. But, I said, I’d never pick him out for a relation.

  The match was just a shred of shared genetic code, but its significance for me was much greater than that. Our pursuit of the juggler had stalled, my father’s Y having apparently hit the other great wall of China, but Jim List had boosted my optimism. Maybe we would have better luck with the male chromosome the Captain passed down. Maybe we could find a good match with the Crooks Y.

  Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

  9

  GENGHIS CROOKS,

  OR WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

  They say there’s one in every family—a keeper of the record. This is the relative, often north of sixty, who can say where Mum’s mum was born and knows the church where she was baptized, when Great-Granddad died and the names of his parents, and the Irish village they fled to keep from starving. Chances are, somewhere in the keeper’s house is an overstuffed drawer or a box or two brimming with birth and death certificates, old travel papers, photographs and photocopies. In my mother’s family, the keeper happens to be her younger brother Dennis. He is the eldest of the surviving Crooks males and the uncle my mother felt I should ask for the official contribution of the Crooks Y chromosome.

  Before we left for India in 2006, when I began gathering dates and places involving Captain Crooks, Mum had said instantly, “Call Dennis. He’ll know.” And he did. He knew the captain’s date of death and the day he married Bridget Meek in Bombay in 1903. He knew the name of the cathedral where they wed and the names of Bridget Meek’s parents. All of it seemed to be right there at his fingertips.

  That he should also be the one to contribute the Captain’s Y was a terrific coincidence, since Dennis was rumoured to have a link to the family’s Jamaican connection. He had taken up the correspondence with the mysterious New York uncle my mother used to write to, and apparently the uncle had named Dennis in his will. It’s been a running joke in my mother’s family for years—that Dennis had conquered the Caribbean and was sitting pretty on a secret Jamaican stash. I wondered less about the inheritance than what he might have learned from this uncle about the Captain’s family.

  The first time I called him about it, Dennis told me he was pleased to know that someone else was taking up the torch to look further into the Crooks history. My mother had talked to him too, specifically about the DNA test. One afternoon Dennis and her other brothers, Basil and Charles, dropped in at my parents’ place, and they had all teased Dennis about being “the chosen one.” With his willowy frame and aquiline features, he’d never looked like anyone else on the Crooks side of the family, they said, and his DNA would finally reveal all. They all had a good laugh at that, my mother said.

  I’d wished my grandfather were alive to test. It would have been a sweet thing if his DNA could provide the sample that would illuminate the father he never knew. My memories of Papa Freddie are among the earliest I have. In England my mother used to drop me off at her parents’ house while she went to work, and I’d plant myself beside my grandfather for hours. He suffered so severely from rheumatoid arthritis that he could hardly walk without his canes. We made quite a pair; he couldn’t move and I couldn’t stay quiet. I’d jabber on, plucking the thick veins on the back of his hands like banjo strings until desperation, I think, would finally drive him to manoeuvre his false teeth to the end of his tongue and scare me out of the room.

  My grandfather died in November 1971, exactly a year before we left for Canada. I wondered how he would feel about trying to find our roots in Jamaica. From everything I’d heard, he grew up idolizing the legend of his father: a ship’s captain, a life-saving hero of the high seas, the recipient of a royal commendation. Papa Freddie harboured such a strong affection for the sea that he was instantly fond of my father, who wore the stripes and brass buttons of the merchant marine. My parents had met at a Royal Navy dance and it didn’t take long for my grandfather to give the young Mr. Abraham approval to waltz away with his eldest daughter.

  My father knew all about Papa’s dream to sail to Jamaica, after independence from Britain put the Anglo-Indians’ future in doubt. My grandfather had shown him the passports he had stamped for the family, and told him he planned to settle on his father’s sugar plantation. Yet no one knew if the Crooks family in Jamaica actually did own a plantation. Maybe the Captain was like the juggler—a master of reinvention, docking in India desperat
e to bury his past. But my grandfather obviously believed it. Through the online archives of the British Library, I found a reference to a letter he had written to Sir John Colville, the former governor of Bombay, dated February 21, 1948, just six months after India gained independence. The letter turned out to be only one in a correspondence involving my grandfather and Colville, who had also acted as viceroy and governor-general of India up until 1947. Finally I could read about my grandfather’s aspirations in his own words.

  Your Excellency,

  I have the honour to address these few lines to you for your kind and sympathetic consideration and guidance.

  You who have served as his Majesty’s representative out in India are fully conversant as to the prevailing conditions and outlooks of the Anglo Indian community.

  I am at present serving in the GIP Railway as an Assistant Station Master at Poona Station and have on frequent occasions officiated as Station Master, Kirkee, where I have had the honour of meeting you and her Excellency on several occasions.

  I am a married man with a very large family of seven children, whose future outlook in this country is frightfully dismal. Hence I am anxious in their interest of taking them away from here to my father’s country, where his people at this present moment are abiding, and that’s in Kingston, Jamaica. Which unfortunately I am unable to undertake doing on account of financial circumstances.

  My object in addressing your Excellency is to crave your help and guidance (which you have with kindness and sympathy extended unto my fellowmen) in securing for me the necessary passages.

  I may enlighten your Excellency that I had appealed to the Joint Repatriation Officer, New Delhi, for their necessary help and assistance on the grounds to me having been a long standing member of His Majesty’s Auxiliary Force, India, which your Excellency is aware of that every Anglo Indian has served most faithfully and loyally. This unfortunately was denied me on the grounds to me having no War Service. But it is a recognized fact that every Railwayman did his duty during the War, a fact which your Excellency will agree with me, is almost as good as having served in the War.

  I tender unto your Excellency my most humble apologies for encroaching upon your most valued time and crave that you will enlighten me at your earliest convenience, as I am anxious to get away as early as possible.

  I am,

  Your Excellency’s

  most obedient servant

  F.W. Crooks

  My grandfather’s request triggered a flurry of notes from the staff who reviewed the mail to Sir John, who had become Baron Clydesmuir of Braidswood after his return from India. In some memos, officials noted that since my grandfather had not served directly in the war, he could not be entitled to military assistance for passage to Jamaica. Another official pointed out that it could be politically unwise to help him, since the Anglo Indian Association of India was not officially sponsoring any emigration schemes. On March 15, 1948, Lord Clydesmuir replied to my grandfather that he would continue to make enquiries, but said, “I fear there is little that I can do at this end.…”

  Clydesmuir’s rejection obviously did nothing to deter my grandfather. He went on to sell the living room furniture. One way or the other, he was going to get to Jamaica. But then that mysterious reply from Jamaica arrived, with its accusations and warnings, and suddenly changed Papa Freddie’s mind.

  While I waited for the chance to collect the Crooks Y chromosome, I began researching the family the old-fashioned way—on the Internet. We had every reason to believe that the Captain, unlike the juggler, had left us his true surname, and having a name to trace is the lifeblood of genealogy. Knowing his Chinese family name, Jin Li had been able to track his ancestry back a thousand years.

  In Britain, surnames appeared only after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Even then they didn’t become common until about the fifteenth century, as they trickled down from monarchs to the masses. Surnames allowed rulers to keep track of and tax those they ruled. When Napoleon invaded the Netherlands, he decreed that every Dutch citizen had to have one. The public mocked the bureaucracy by calling themselves things like Naaktgeboren, meaning “born naked,” and Piest, which means “to urinate,” under the sadly mistaken assumption that the practice would never last.

  In many European countries the etymology of surnames is more predictable. People were often named after their fathers, such as Johnson or Williamson, or they were named for their trades—Baker, Mason, Miller—or where they lived—Woods, Hill, Buxton. The more entertaining varieties were drawn from nicknames or personal traits, even though the modern-day Mr. Daft might say otherwise (it once meant “mild-mannered”). Naturally, I wondered if Crooks had once meant something other than swindler.

  The British surname database suggests that Crooks was a Gaelic name originating in Ireland, with an unknown etymology. Other sources, including the Irish-based surname database, peg it as Viking, derived from the old Norse term krokr, meaning “bent,” “hooked” or “corner.” According to the Collins World English Dictionary, by the twelfth century crook had entered Middle English; it referred to the curve of any hooked instrument, such as a shepherd’s staff, or even the bend in a winding stream. The earliest references to it as a name seem to apply to an ancient family in Scotland—where Vikings invaded in the eighth century—and then later in the north of England.

  Even without looking, I knew Crooks was a common surname in Jamaica. Sprinter Charmaine Crooks, a five-time Olympian for Canada, hailed originally from Jamaica. The retired English football player Garth Crooks has Jamaican roots. And, in one of my earliest Internet searches, I came across the website of a British author by the name of Paul Crooks who also has Jamaican ancestry. His website promoted his first novel, Ancestors, based on the thirteen years he’d spent tracing his family history. It fictionalizes the story of the author’s third-generation grandfather, who was snatched as a child from West Africa, sold into bondage in Jamaica and put to work in the cane fields of the Crooks Cove estate, a sugar plantation on Jamaica’s north shore. The boy’s life and his struggle for freedom were imagined, but apparently Crooks Cove itself was no fiction.

  Paul Crooks’s website describes a 763-acre estate that had grown to more than twice its size by the early 1820s, home to nearly two hundred slaves who lived in the shadow of a big house on the hill. Its original owners were said to be among the Europeans who had been given plots of land by Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century, when Britain began to colonize the island. The Crooks family named their plot after themselves, and in mass baptisms they also gave the Crooks surname to many of the slaves they owned.

  I took stock. A Jamaican plantation that bore the Crooks name jibed with the rumours of our ancestors being wealthy Jamaican landowners, and it was in operation well into the nineteenth century, maybe even at the time my great-grandfather was born. I ordered the novel online and made a mental note to ask Dennis if he’d ever heard of the place.

  On a hot afternoon in June 2006, I visited Uncle Dennis for the long-awaited swab. He and my Aunty Merlyn live near my parents in one of those seventies subdivisions of low-rise back-splits with wide driveways and perfectly square lawns. When I was young, we’d gather there on Christmas Eve, when the snowbanks could be as high as the cars and the Crooks clan celebrated my grandmother’s birthday. No one knew then that Nana Gladys had actually been born three days before Christmas Eve, but it wouldn’t have mattered. It was her favourite night of the year—the whole family around her, a lavish spread of curry and rice and cousins. My grandmother would wear one of her fancy frocks and take her throne in an overstuffed chair in the living room, the ice in her crystal tumbler of Bacardi tinkling, just like the hidden medals she wore. “My son Dennis,” she’d say, “play some Jim Reeves!”

  I rang the doorbell. No one answered. I waited a minute or two and rang again. The front curtains were drawn. Had I mixed up the day? Had my uncle changed his mind? Forking over DNA can make anyone uncomfortable; my own brother had declined. But
then I heard footsteps and the door opened.

  “Sorry, darling, the bell’s not working,” said Aunty Merlyn with a wide smile.

  The drapes had been pulled tight to keep out the sun and the dim coolness of their house enveloped me as I stepped inside. “Uncle Dennis is downstairs watching the World Cup,” she said. “He’s been glued to it today.”

  My uncle popped up a moment later and we shared a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. We settled in the living room, where my aunt set out a plate of homemade cheese straws and my uncle opened a bottle of wine. I told them how this family project had begun to consume me, what with the testing and the trip to India and the Internet searches. Dennis, the record keeper, understood completely. He told me about his own recent breakthrough: locating the daughter of Nana Gladys’s long-lost sister in New Zealand.

  I took that as my cue and began fumbling to explain how DNA can also connect a person to long-lost relatives they didn’t know they had. I started by comparing DNA to a record that shows how all modern humans descended from Africans; I was partway through when I decided to back up and talk about how DNA made us all human in the first place. But instantly that seemed too abstract and too long a story. It was ridiculous, really, to be nattering on about primordial ooze and single-celled organisms while nestled on a plush sofa with a glass of wine. Just how informed do people have to be to give their informed consent? I wondered.

  I stopped, took a gulp of wine and switched gears. “Okay, so basically we were all black once, until we spread out all over the planet and morphed into different colours and characteristics. And the Y chromosome, which only men carry, can tell us a lot about that history.” At that moment I was grateful that the story of the male chromosome is, like the Y’s size, fairly simple and compact. I explained how the Y is passed from fathers to sons with distinctive markers in its code, and the markers are like the genetic signature of a male lineage. They can reveal where in the world a male line originates and can also link you with a potential relative, if you can find a man with the same markers on his Y chromosome.