The Juggler's Children

  My father saw exhumation as an entirely logical next step, which surprised me. My father is not a fan of open caskets, feeling they invite a certain disrespect towards the dead at crowded wakes. But on the phone one afternoon he told me, “Go on, make the call. You must exhume him. You have to do it. You never know, John Rosser might agree.… They might even have a bit of bone, something they came across during the landscaping.”

  “You mean something they kept? A bottled shard on the mantel or something?”

  “Could be,” Dad said.

  It could be that the elusive story of my father’s grandfather made him all the more determined to get to the bottom of my mother’s, however radical the route. But I suspect the prospect of exhumation also appealed to my father’s inner engineer: a cool, clinical approach—problem: solution—and one that involved tools. Exhumation offered the chance not only to run a DNA test but to test DNA itself. Was it truly possible to discover if there was a biological link between my Mississauga uncle and an eighteenth-century planter buried on a Jamaican hillside, just by using a bit of spit and a few centuries-old cells? Was I prepared to dig up a dead man to find out?

  Roberta Estes told me the idea still kept her up nights. I had called her at her home in Michigan. From the talk she gave in Houston, I knew her to be one of the most experienced genetic genealogists around, and certainly the only one I knew who had gone as far as getting a quote to dig up her dad. But she hadn’t gone through with it. Why? I wondered.

  Roberta told me her story from the beginning: how her father had died when she was seven and how as a child she had always badgered her mother with questions about her ancestry. Then, after she grew up and had her own child, she began investigating her father’s family. Her project eventually grew to involve Y-chromosome tests, tracing descendants of one Abraham Estes, who came from England to America in the seventeenth century. Finding a Y to represent her father’s line was a struggle that eventually led her to a second cousin, a great-grandson of her paternal grandfather. His Y chromosome proved to be an odd mismatch with the Abraham Estes line, off by five markers on twenty-five tested. Strangely, the mismatches were not on markers prone to mutating but on those considered fairly stable. She thought work in the Kentucky coal mines might have messed with the Y of her Estes forefathers, or, if the mismatch was not the result of genetic damage, perhaps her father’s family was indeed from a different Estes bloodline.

  With no other Y sample available from her father’s line to test, she thought it an unanswerable question. But then she came across a letter her aunt had written that revealed her father had led a double life. While he was married to her mother, Roberta’s father had another wife in another city, and another child—a son; in fact, she and her half-brother were born just five months apart. In 2004, Roberta found him in Ohio. His name was David and he lived just two and a half hours away. She wrote him a letter that included a picture of her father, and two weeks later he called. “This is David Estes,” he said. “Are you my sister?”

  That first contact was a “breathtaking experience,” Roberta told me. They spoke for three hours. He, like her, had known nothing about his father’s other life. They traded childhood tales, marvelling at the parallels, how good old Dad used to take them both fishing, tell them the same jokes, photograph them in the same poses. Roberta said she and her new-found brother made an odd pair, she a conservatively attired professional consultant who managed technology projects for the government, and he a tattooed, long-haired long-haul trucker. But there was no question about the fast bond they forged. “I had found my family,” Roberta said.

  Except the genetic tests said differently. David’s Y did not match the Y-chromosome sample from her father’s line. Roberta commissioned two other tests to compare her DNA with David’s and the results showed they were definitely not siblings. “It was clear that my dad thought David was his son,” she said, “but I finally had to accept that we weren’t siblings.” With the relationship that she and David had built, Roberta discovered that the test results meant nothing to her, that DNA is not the glue that binds families. Their emotional attachment proved to be the stronger adhesive: “I know there are better tests now that could tell me if he is my brother, but it doesn’t matter. In my heart, he is my brother.”

  David’s Y-chromosome result eventually raised new questions about her dad. Perhaps he was David’s biological father; it could be that her father was not actually an Estes. Did that mean she was not an Estes? If she wasn’t, who was she? It was that line of inquiry that led her to the brink of exhumation. She knew some relatives might object, and she knew too that there were no guarantees she could harvest enough DNA from her father’s remains to conduct a reliable Y-chromosome test. But aside from all that, it was something else that stopped her—the lesson she had learned from her brother’s DNA test. If she exhumed her father and ran the test, would the results change her life or make her think differently about her father, or herself? Were the questions, as she put it, “a good enough reason to dig up the dead”?

  “There is still a part of me on long and lonely nights that still wants to go dig Daddy up,” she told me. “But no matter what the DNA would show, I’m an Estes. It will be on my tombstone. The DNA really doesn’t matter.”

  My mother had said hardly a word about the prospect of exhuming James Crooks. Considering that he was possibly a great-grandfather of hers, it seemed odd. One Sunday afternoon as we made an enormous batch of Christmas kulkuls, we talked it over. There is always time to talk while making kulkuls. I think of them as an Indian version of the Timbit, hardly bigger than a doughnut hole. They’re made from a firm dough that’s rolled into little balls, flattened against the back of a fork, then curled off it to form a ridged tube that’s fried or baked and dipped in sugar. As far as opportunities for weighty conversation go, kulkul-making offers the indoor equivalent of fishing.

  “You’ve never said what you think about exhumation, Mum. Are you for or against?”

  “We’ll need another cookie sheet,” my mother said, leaving the table to hunt for one.

  “Mum,” I said, “what do you think?”

  “Carolyn, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s your decision. It’s your project.”

  “Come on, it’s your family too,” I said.

  My mother sighed. A long sigh.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not keen,” she said, “not at all. I’m not worried about spirits or ghosts, nothing like that. But if someone is laid to rest somewhere, that’s where they should rest. It’s not for us to disturb it.”

  My father was rolling dough at the table, lining up perfect rows of bite-sized spheres. “It’s only bones,” he said. “I don’t think he would mind you trying to find out if you’re family.”

  “Who?” I asked. “John Rosser?”

  “No, James Crooks,” Dad said with a wink.

  “But there must be some other way,” Mum insisted. “I think there must be other means to find out rather than to do that.”

  At the end of the day that’s what haunted me. Was I really willing to jump from confirmation of having a white man’s Y chromosome in our family straight into a grave? It was like finding out you carry a few Native American genetic markers and then applying for tribal status—a hell of a reach. And when I did a logical accounting of the facts, I fell short, far shorter than the case Roberta Estes could make: I had a coloured Great-Grandpa Crooks born in Jamaica who carried a western European Y haplotype. That didn’t seem quite enough to claim a blood connection to the European Crooks plantation family in Hanover. If I knew the Captain’s family had come from Hanover, that would at least give me stronger grounds for considering exhumation to prove the link.

  Yet a powerful gut feeling picked up where the facts left off. When we were there at the old plantation, I felt a connection to the Cove that reminded me of my feelings at the yellow church in Kochi. After we left the Rossers’ yard that day, we had driven back down to Henrietta’s cottag
e, triumphant in the afterglow of finding the tomb. We ate ackee, cut fresh from one of Henrietta’s trees, and bought mango ice cream from an old man who sold it from a cooler strapped to the back of his bicycle. It was late, the sun dipping low in the sky, but we felt compelled to stop at the Cove itself, a tiny curve of beach bathed in the half-light, framed by rust-coloured cliffs that opened to the endless sea beyond. I thought of the many eyes before mine that had gazed out over those waters, the desperate souls who had lived in shacks by this shimmering sea, longing for a homeland that lay on its other side. Paul Crooks had imagined that too. In the afterword of his book he describes stopping in Lucea at a point overlooking the Cove: “Looking out over the horizon, I imagined a slave ship coming into port,” he wrote, “the port where my ancestors entered the New World and a life of bondage.”

  Looking out to sea from the shoreline of Crooks Cove.

  We all wandered down to the shore, even Troy, lost in thought. I took off my shoes and let the water wash over my toes. My father and I collected shells and bits of coral and Stephen filmed that final walkabout. Later, back home, I watched myself turn towards the camera after he’d asked, “So, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we came from someplace,” I said. “We didn’t just come from the airport in 1972.” I sounded so sure, as if I’d unravelled the final inches of an umbilical cord. Maybe it was just the moment’s romance, finding myself in a scene I had envisioned while reading Paul Crooks’s novel. Was that it? If I had never read the book, if I had never read up on the history of the Cove, would I have felt such a link to this former plantation? Would I feel as tempted to dig up the man who owned it nearly three hundred years ago? If we had come across the tomb of some other old Crooks in a graveyard, I wouldn’t be mulling over the costs of a backhoe. But the story of James Crooks was one I knew, one that explained at least half the mystery of my great-grandfather, the coloured captain from a well-to-do plantation-owning family with his white man’s Y chromosome. I wondered, had I found the first James Crooks buried in one of those overgrown Jamaican cemeteries, if his tomb were in a row of the forgotten, tended only by goats, would I have fewer qualms about exhuming him?

  As it was, the Rossers were, however distantly, related to the James Crooks we’d found in their yard. Their inclination to honour his final resting place had shown itself—even before they knew he was kin—in their decision not to plough it under. Rather than disturb the dead, they had made a mini-cemetery of their front garden, adorned it with a rockery and shrubs. My mother was right. Before taking the extreme step of exhumation and horrifying that nice retired couple on the hill, I had to exhaust other means of confirming whether we had a connection to the Cove.

  Besides, after looking into various cases of exhumation, I had serious doubts, just as Roberta Estes did, about the quality of DNA we could recover. One geneticist told me that if conditions are ideal, DNA has a shelf life of some twelve thousand years. But if conditions are less so—a wooden coffin immersed in warm, wet soil, for instance—the chances of extracting a Y chromosome are dodgy. Scientists working with the alleged remains of Christopher Columbus exhumed in Seville had no luck harvesting his Y chromosome. They have had to rely on the Y they managed to extract from the remains of his son, Hernando. The elusive Y has also been one of the obstacles to confirming the whereabouts of Jesse James’s remains. In fact, in most cases involving ancient remains, or even those just a few hundred years old, scientists base their findings on mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material people inherit from their mothers. A cell can contain thousands of copies of the mitochondrial DNA women pass down, but only one copy of a Y chromosome, and it’s the tiniest one. That’s why the genetic history of the world has traditionally been constructed from maternal lines. So even if I did receive permission to exhume James Crooks, there were no guarantees I would get the chromosome I needed.

  So back I went to reading about the white Crookses of Jamaica, hunting for male descendants of James Crooks, potential proxies for his Y. By now I knew the generations by heart: James Crooks the first had one son; James Crooks the second had three—James the third, Richard and John. All three brothers went to England for an education after their father’s death, but all three apparently returned. John ran the plantation before he went bankrupt and disappeared, Richard apparently was a surgeon in the military, and James Crooks the third became a Falmouth merchant. The only reference I found to a male descendant of any of them was a death notice in the Columbian Magazine from October 1798: “In Trelawny, at Falmouth, Mr. Thomas Crooks, only son of Mr. James Crooks.” It seemed to place James Crooks the third, or at least his son, in the Captain’s birth town. I could find no mention of any children Thomas might have had, or whether he or his father had any illegitimate coloured children. Yet I knew from the Cove slave register that there were fifteen coloured Crookses, nine of them men, who might well have carried the Y of a Crooks forefather. It was hard not to imagine them as some had been depicted in Paul Crooks’s novel—as the master’s children.

  Desperate as I was for a lead that didn’t involve a truckload of dirt removal, reaching the author took on a new urgency. Paul Crooks was the only living, Y-toting male I knew with a direct tie to that old Crooks plantation. On a November evening in 2007 we finally connected by phone. It was late in London, near eleven o’clock, but we had a long chat, talking about our day jobs but more about the family history work and writing that consumed our nights. There was a similarity to the rhythm of our lives, and after a few minutes we began comparing some of the names and details we had come across in our research.

  He told me that none of the family names I had included in my initial email were familiar to him, nor, he said, did they appear in his files. I told him that was just the sort of luck I was having, and why I hoped I would have a better chance of piecing our story together with DNA testing. My mother’s paternal line was a Y chromosome of European heritage, I said, but African markers had also been identified in my mother’s DNA. I told him too that some relatives had certain African features. Although Paul had traced his paternal line to Africa and it was likely a hell of a long shot, I asked if he would be willing to let me arrange a test on his Y and compare it with our own. He didn’t need much persuading. “Sure,” he said. “I’m curious too.”

  His quick agreement surprised me, and impressed me. Paul had invested thirteen years, closed the book (literally) and travelled to Ghana, and still he was ready to jump into the gene pool to learn more. His signed consent form and two vials of buccal-cell swabs came back to me just before Christmas. I added his name to the Crooks project and sent the samples down to Houston.

  Paul’s was one of three tests I arranged that fall. Eager to cling to whatever threads science had to offer, I reread the results from DNAPrint in Florida—the test that had given us the first glimpse of our genetic diversity, the first to provide biological evidence of our East Asian ancestry and the only one to suggest an African origin. It was also the test that introduced the red herring of Native American ancestry, and scanning the genome had come a long way in the few years since. A new microchip had made it possible and affordable to quickly scan not just hundreds but hundreds of thousands of spots on a genome, or even multiple genomes, at the same time. The possibility of improving on those initial results from Florida led me back to Mark Shriver at Pennsylvania State University.

  Shriver was the scientist who had helped develop that test for DNAPrint (which ceased operations in 2009), and he’d continued his research into ancestrally informative genetic markers. For a couple of years we’d been speaking about his possibly running updated tests on my family. Like most population geneticists he was hard to get hold of, spending weeks in the field collecting DNA to identify distinct mutations linked to human diseases and, in his case, markers related to facial features, jaw shape, nose shape, the space between the eyes and so on. Tying genes to physical traits had so far proved to be a tricky business, but one of Shriver’s aims was to
be able to generate a portrait of someone with nothing more than a DNA sample, which had big potential for forensics. For Shriver it was also helpful in his work on ancestry. By the end of 2008 he had a chip able to scan ten thousand markers across the genome that offer insight into a person’s geographic heritage, dwarfing the power of the 176-marker test we took in 2005. It made it possible, for instance, to distinguish the DNA of East Africans from West Africans, and northern Europeans from southern Europeans. It was still a work in progress, but in November Shriver and I made a plan to test both my parents and me.

  With its focus squarely on heritage information, Shriver’s test had caught the attention of celebrities, predominantly African Americans, whose ability to glean their past through surname searches or property records so often runs into the brick wall built by slavery. Many African Americans have vigorously embraced genetic genealogy, with whole church congregations swabbing together and specific companies catering to people eager to trace their African lineage through the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. That fall, Shriver had just wrapped up his participation in the second installment of the PBS television series African American Lives. The two-part documentary had relied on Shriver’s admixture tests for a big-picture look at the ancestry of a wide range of black luminaries, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey among them.

  Like the DNAPrint test, Shriver’s work has its critics: those concerned that laypeople will draw more than they should from this sort of DNA analysis, getting hung up on labels that they are 20 percent white or 30 percent black or half Asian. Some have said it elevates the concept of race from social invention to scientific fact. But Shriver and other scientists argue that the genome exposes race for the social illusion that it is. Shriver, after all, is the white man who discovered he has West African ancestry of 11 percent only after testing himself. This jibed with what the testing had already revealed to me: that even someone, like Jim List, who suspects he knows his heritage can suddenly find he has a genetic relative in south India. Any deep dive into DNA proves that race is a skin-deep farce. No distinct lines can be drawn between or around any one group.