The Juggler's Children

  “I tested Dad’s Y chromosome and it shows that his grandfather was Chinese, which we had suspected but never knew for sure,” I explained. “So it could be that the Crooks Y chromosome could reveal something about the background of Captain Crooks, who also left us with certain mysteries. The Crooks Y could tell us where, beyond Jamaica, his father’s line came from. The Captain would have passed it down to Papa Freddie and he would have passed it down to all his sons.”

  “I don’t think my grandfather was really born there—in Jamaica,” Dennis said, surprising me. “Maybe he just stopped there and his real business was in Bombay. His birth certificate says Jamaica, but I don’t know if that’s correct.”

  I hadn’t known there was a birth certificate. “The only official document I’ve seen was a brief death record. It just listed the Captain’s age and the cause of death as beriberi.”

  “I think I have a copy of his birth certificate in one of my boxes,” Dennis said, and offered to dig it out.

  I told him that Mum certainly believed her grandfather had come from Jamaica. She had always told me that Papa Freddie believed that too, that he had gone to extremes in trying to get the family there after India’s independence.

  Even if the Captain had not been born in Jamaica, Aunty Merlyn said, turning towards Dennis, “There was that uncle who used to write to you, right?”

  “The one with whom you corresponded?” I interrupted. “Mum said she passed on the address for you to write to him after she got married.”

  “Yes,” Dennis said. “I was about sixteen or seventeen when I picked up the correspondence.”

  Dennis said he always called him Uncle, and that, like both the Captain and my grandfather, his name was also Frederick Crooks. He used to write encouraging letters from New York urging Dennis to study hard and do well in school. “His letters always arrived from 492 Hancock Street in Brooklyn, with a single U.S. dollar enclosed to pay for the return postage.”

  The uncle once wrote to Papa Freddie as well, explaining that he and his wife had no children and asking if he could adopt Dennis. Of course, Papa never entertained the idea, but the young man and the mysterious uncle continued to correspond. Only after the uncle died in the late sixties did it become apparent that he had been looking for an heir.

  “It was a maid who telephoned me,” Dennis said. “She said she had found a bankbook with my name on it.” From what he understood, the uncle had started a successful gas business in Jamaica. But it turned out that the uncle’s wife—“a Clarice Crooks, I think”—had named her own nephew as the beneficiary.

  “There was money and property, and this nephew was to be the heir of all the inheritance,” Dennis said. What’s more, the funds were in a Jamaican bank and could not be taken out of the country.

  “We spent more on lawyers than anything else,” Merlyn said. “We didn’t get a penny.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said, realizing that all the years of jokes about my uncle’s island fortune had been just that. Yet clearly the Crooks family had some wealth, so maybe there was a plantation after all. I asked my uncle and aunt if they got to know the Crooks relatives in Jamaica during their ordeal, but they said they hadn’t.

  I told them about the old Jamaican sugar plantation I had read about online, called the Crooks Cove estate. It was located in the northwest part of the island, I said, owned by whites and worked by slaves.

  Dennis had never heard of it. “To the best of my knowledge, Papa’s relatives were in Kingston,” he said, but beyond that he knew little about them.

  “Well, you have to think that somewhere along the way the Crooks ancestors descended from slaves brought over from Africa,” I said. “Mum’s DNA test suggested some traces of sub-Saharan African ancestry.”

  “It’s true,” Dennis agreed, “there must be something to it. My father had the kinky hair, Simone’s got it.…”

  I told Dennis there was a chance he might carry a Y chromosome that suggested our Crooks line originated in Africa, the way my dad’s had led us to China. But I also told him I doubted that would be the case. “As far as these things went in history,” I said, “it was almost always the white man with the dark woman, don’t you think?”

  I gave my uncle the consent form and he spent a few moments reading through it.

  “So you’ll have to brush against your inner cheek for about sixty seconds,” I said as I opened the package and passed him a swabbing stick. “Then do it again with a second stick on your other cheek.”

  My uncle opened wide and I tried to keep my eyes trained on my cellphone clock. Jiggling a stick around in your mouth seems like fairly personal business. I’d seen enough to decide that you can tell something about a person by the way they swab. There’s the laissez-faire technique perfected by my sister, the casual up-and-down brushing motion of a swabber whose mind might be a million miles from the swab—nothing to hide, lose or gain. Some do it tentatively, as if one errant thrust could pierce the cheek. It seems furtive, betrays a certain reluctance, as it did that first time with my mother. But I saw none of that with my uncle. He swabbed with vigour, in long, firm, deliberate strokes, as though he were chasing the very last cells of a bloodline.

  I didn’t make it out of the subdivision before I felt compelled to pull over. On the passenger seat beside me, sloshing about in my purse, was the Crooks Y chromosome, passed down through the generations to my uncle from my grandfather and the Captain before him and … who before that? A man owned by another or a man who owned men? I reached into the padded envelope, pulled out the two vials and checked that the lids were screwed on tight. I held one up to the light. It looked like nothing, just a nub of white cotton. Yet it contained a code that could end a century of speculation. I did not think to consider that it would unleash even more.

  In his sobering volume Y: The Descent of Men, British geneticist Steve Jones estimates that the world’s men copulate fifty billion times a year. Globally they release 200,000 billion sperm per second, and for all that effort produce just five births. Women of the world drop only four hundred eggs for the same result. But it’s not how many seeds you have to sow, it’s whether you can sow them at all. And since most men didn’t through history, it whittled down the variety of Y chromosomes that got around. In 2004, Mike Hammer’s group at the University of Arizona published evidence, based on the limited diversity of the world’s Ys, that relatively few men had fathered the world’s population. And those men who did win at the mating game sometimes won big, leaving enough male descendants to populate a large chunk of the planet.

  It helped to think about all this when my uncle’s DNA results arrived. Six months had ticked by without a match for my father’s Y chromosome. That the deCouto Y turned out to have even a single match felt like a minor miracle. Yet I opened Dennis’s results to see that the Crooks male chromosome had matched up with 350 men right out of the test tube—350! Whoever our common male ancestor was, he had been a very busy man. I imagined the Crooks men in my family dining like kings on this news.

  The lab had found that Dennis’s Y chromosome belonged to Haplogroup R1b, the most common haplogroup in Western Europe, the club to which more than half the continent’s men belong. Its origins are unclear, but men of R1b are believed to descend from the first modern humans to populate the continent. I realized that my uncle’s high number of matches had much to do with the fact that many men of European descent had offered up their Ys for testing. It was, as Bennett said, a western European sport. Apparently we were now in the game.

  Not only did the Crooks Y belong to Europe’s most common haplogroup, Dennis also carries the most common pattern within it, the so-called Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype, defined by six markers that are most common among men from western Europe. Scientists suspect it saturates the region because it was caught up in a “genetic bottleneck,” which occurs when something kills off such a large swath of the population that only a few people are left to sire the next generation. The best evidence at t
he time suggested that this Atlantic haplotype emerged about ten thousand years ago as Stone Age populations waited out the last ice age, perhaps around the Fertile Crescent. When the great thaw finally arrived, the survivors kicked off a dramatic population expansion as farming also took off. The markers of the Atlantic haplotype are prevalent from Spain in the south to western Scandinavia in the north. In parts of the British Isles more than 80 percent of men bear its signature.

  As I read the results, I felt an unexpected sense of kinship with the continent of my birth. I’d always felt that my being born in England was little more than an accident of travel. England was the place where my parents had stopped on their migratory route from India to North America—albeit for twenty-two years—and we’d soaked up certain cultural trappings such as baked beans, Benny Hill, that sort of thing. But Blighty had proved an uncomfortable motherland for many of my relatives, a place where they tried desperately to fit in with their not-so-white complexions and singsong accents. My brother Conrad was five when he arrived in London with my parents, fresh from living like a small prince in Bombay. They moved into a flat above a pub where people used to call him “chocolate drop.” The first thing he learned there was how to fight.

  Yet now, through the prism of the Crooks Y chromosome at least, our time in England was recast less as a stopover than a return to the ancient fatherland where one branch of our ancestral tree had sprouted. Way back when the world was still half-frozen, a forefather of ours was there, shivering in a cave and doing his considerable bit to populate the planet. There was little doubt now that my great-grandfather, in his paternal line at least, was not of African descent. As the proxy for the Captain’s Y chromosome, Dennis’s seem to bear the crystal-clear imprint of a white man.

  By process of elimination, whatever African ancestry the Captain had passed down to us, his European Y suggested it came by way of a woman. I had always suspected it would. Wherever European men went in the world, from South Asia to South America and the Caribbean, they came, saw and copulated. In 2003, a study of eight hundred men from the University of Puerto Rico found that 70 percent carried the Y chromosome of a European forefather; yet most of them carried the mitochondrial DNA of an Amerindian or African female ancestor. I had no reason to think the story would be much different in Jamaica, just seven hundred miles away, or in any society where one group dominated another. In the United States about a third of African-American men carry the Y chromosome of a European male ancestor, largely because of the sexual politics of slavery. In Iceland the Y chromosomes of men tend to lead back to the Vikings, but their mitochondrial DNA comes from the Scottish and Irish women those Vikings kidnapped a thousand years ago. The Y is a hidden record of history’s winners and losers, a short volume on the sex lives of powerful men—you lead, you breed.

  In 2003, researchers at the University of Oxford published a paper estimating that in Asia today, some sixteen million men carry the Y chromosome belonging to the paternal line of Genghis Khan. The legendary leader of the Mongols, born in 1162, had several wives and mistresses and is said to have fathered more than forty sons as his armies conquered a continent. In turn, his sons sired dozens of sons of their own. Their particular Y signature, which belongs to Haplogroup C, can now be found at a remarkable 8 percent prevalence rate across sixteen different populations from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea, an area that corresponds to the boundaries of the old Mongol Empire. Still, Peter Underhill, a leading Y chromosome geneticist at Stanford University, told me it’s a stretch to think that every one of the sixteen million men who sport this particular Y is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. These men could just as easily be descendants of the Khan’s brothers, he said, or cousins, or even Mongol men from the same village. Most likely, he felt it was a very common Mongol male line that went through a recent genetic bottleneck.

  Still, the Genghis Khan phenomenon was the first in a string of reports about the remarkable reproductive success of history’s rulers. In 2005, British scientists estimated that 1.5 million men in north-eastern China and Mongolia may have descended from Giocangga, whose Manchu grandson founded the Qing Dynasty that ruled China during my great-grandfather’s time, from 1644 to 1912. A year later, a study from Trinity College Dublin reported that about three million Irish men share the same Y as the fourth-century warlord known as Niall of the Nine Hostages. The male chromosome of the tribal king, whose Ui Neill dynasty dominated Ireland for more than five hundred years, also lives on in about one in ten Scottish men and about 2 percent of New Yorkers with European ancestry.

  Who knows, maybe the founder of the Atlantic modal haplotype was a prehistoric king, a hero who led his people across miles of frozen tundra, or maybe he was reviled as a tyrant who killed off his competitors as his clan bedded down in the caves. As it was, all I could do was stretch the bounds of my imagination as I scanned a sample of his impressive genetic legacy: the 350 names of his descendants, and my new genetic relatives. Their countries of origin included Poland, Cuba, England, Wales, Scotland, Austria, Russia, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Canada … and on it went. They were named Kennedy, Bondelier, Zucco, Guttendorf, Saliceti, Collins, McDaniel, Hershberger, Ellis, Turcq, Barlow, Rodriguez, Ford … and on I read through an unalphabetized telephone book until one entry stopped me cold—Meek. Kenneth Everett Meek.

  The name jumped off the screen. Meek was the maiden name of Nana Bridget, my great-grandmother, Papa Freddie’s mother, the Captain’s wife, the pint-sized conjurer. That was bizarre. Dennis has a Y that matches the Y of a man named Meek?

  Based on mathematical models from the University of Arizona, Family Tree DNA had stipulated that an exact twelve-marker Y chromosome match between two men who share the same last name suggests a 99 percent likelihood of a common ancestor in a genealogical time frame. Did this Kenneth Meek and Dennis share a Meek male ancestor? Was there some unknown connection between the Meek side of the family and Uncle Dennis? No Crooks appeared on this list of 350 men, but here was a perfect match between a Meek and the Crooks uncle who had never looked like a Crooks.

  Oh God, what had I stumbled into? Had my uncle been fathered by a Meek man? Had Nana Gladys stepped out on my grandfather? Had my tinkling-with-holy-medals, guided-by-glow-in-the-dark-Mary grandmother cheated with one of her husband’s Meek relatives? No, that was crazy.

  But then I started to think about my grandmother in more than two dimensions. She was complicated, defiant, independent, but nothing could soften her like the attentions of a man. She blossomed like a peony in their presence. Well into her eighties she would stay up half the night watching love stories on television, even when they played in a foreign language. Nana could recall the name of every boy who had courted her, and as a widow she had a parade of suitors. I pictured her all dolled up in a flaming red polka-dot dress, on her way to the pub to share a drink with Mr. Priest, a silver-haired beau who used to pull coins out of my ears. “Go to sleep, my girl,” Nana would say with a wink, as she disappeared out the front door.

  A few years earlier I had written a long newspaper feature that suddenly felt utterly prophetic to me that August night. It was all about genetic research inadvertently exposing the widespread infidelities of women. Stephen Scherer, a prominent geneticist at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children, had been telling me about the logistical hurdles of running large population studies when he mentioned how often they find that the man listed as the father of a child turns out not to be.

  “Really?” I asked. “Often?”

  At least 10 percent of the time, he told me. They’ll be doing a study on cystic fibrosis, for example, collecting DNA from the afflicted child and both parents, and find the father doesn’t carry a CF gene. Yet to develop the disease, a child has to inherit one copy of the CF gene from each parent, meaning that Dad couldn’t possibly be the biological father. Other geneticists gave me a similar estimate, that roughly one in ten of us is not fathered by the man we believe to be Dad. A British survey conducted by t
he University of Manchester between 1988 and 1996 came to the same conclusion. “Pedigree errors” or “false paternities” is what researchers call these incidents—technical jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else’s block.

  If there was any doubt left in the twenty-first century that women are somehow biologically driven to single-mate bliss, that females are built for monogamy or that mothers rarely mess around, the genomic age was killing it. Researchers have found that false paternities cut across all cultures and socioeconomic classes. Scherer told me they can wreak such statistical havoc on a genetic study that “people have made careers designing software to catch these kinds of things.” I asked him what they do when they do catch them.

  “We toss the samples,” he said.

  Was that what I should do now? I wondered. Toss this result? Abandon it? Start again?

  If you factor a 10 percent false paternity rate into attempts to trace ancestry, it could easily snap entire branches from a family tree. At that moment I had no way of knowing if it actually was a false paternity, only that I could not ignore the possibility. How could I draw any conclusions about the paternal history of the Crooks line if this wasn’t the Crooks Y chromosome? How could I know if it belonged to Europe’s dominant haplogroup or revealed anything about the Captain’s origins if I could not be sure that the Y I had collected from Dennis had actually been passed down by my grandfather?

  My mother was in Mexico with my brother Kevin when Dennis’s results arrived. I was grateful for her absence. My father would be much less likely to give me an earful for entertaining the possibility that her mother had been unfaithful. I called and asked him to meet for dinner on the weekend. Then I called my sister and told her everything. “What do you think?” I said.