The Juggler's Children

  When Shriver asked me what I hoped to achieve with the test, I told him my story: the mix of our background, the mystery of my paternal great-grandfathers. I said I hoped that some hiccup in our DNA might lead us to the Chinese village where John Abraham came from, or perhaps some other signature would tie us to the natives of South Asia—the Kurumbas, perhaps—or point us to the African tribe hidden away in my mother’s heritage. I knew it would probably be several years until researchers had studied enough genomes around the world to offer that sort of precision, so I offered Shriver my diluted expectations—that he would tell us once and for all if our so-called Native American heritage was authentic, plus narrow my father’s roots to a region in China and my mother’s to a region in Africa. As I expected, Shriver was pessimistic about China; they still didn’t have much genomic data from the country. But he anticipated better luck with the African component. Of the ten thousand markers from eleven different populations that he would survey, two thousand of those are SNPS that could indicate whether we had West African heritage.

  I drove to my parents’ in early December to collect their DNA again. For the first time, it required a jab. Shriver’s lab had sent three blood-stain collection kits that included paper cards, each with a blank circle the size of a quarter on it and a push-pin to puncture a fingertip deeply enough to completely blot the circle with blood. I loved my parents for this, that I could show up in the middle of Coronation Street on a Tuesday night and ask to bleed them, and they never groaned or rolled their eyes or asked, “What happened to those fancy Q-tips?”

  My mother’s blood refused to come. She could barely draw two drops from her fingertip. She tried squeezing it, rolling it, holding it downwards to accelerate the flow. My father milked it. I pinched and palpitated. Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes and two bloodied fingers, she managed to fill the circle. My father, however, pricked his forefinger and watched his blood flow like an April creek. He could have stained half a dozen cards. “See how it runs, Tweet,” he cheered. “That’s Chinese blood streaming out.”

  The results from Shriver’s lab at Penn State played out over a series of emails and conference calls that began in January 2008. His research team had amassed a mountain of raw data from our three genomes. By combining the numbers gleaned from the absence or presence of the ten thousand SNPS, they estimated the percentage of our ancestry from each of the population groups. Shriver put the margin of error at 1 to 2 percent and offered a few highlights off the top, namely that the dominant elements in my and my father’s ancestry appeared to be European and East Asian. My West African component was, as the DNAPrint test had found, 8 percent. But my contentious Native American component, originally pegged at 22 percent, had shrunk to 6 percent, which, Shriver was certain, reflected ancestors from Central Asia, not First Nations people of the Americas.

  But the drastic change in my tally was modest compared to my father’s, whose so-called Native American ancestry fell from 25 percent—a full quarter of his heritage, according to the initial test—to nothing at all. The new research found that my father’s Central Asian markers could not be distinguished from those linked to East Asian ancestry, which was now estimated to be 43 percent, 7 percent higher than the DNAPrint result. It’s a good thing tribal status requires more than a genetic test. My mother’s so-called Native American reading rose from 1 to 8 percent, suggesting this time around that I had inherited those markers from her, and again Shriver predicted this reflected Central Asian heritage.

  Central Asian ancestry wasn’t unusual to find in people from South Asia, or people from Scandinavia or France, Shriver added. It implied a heritage that spanned a massive area and so included several diverse populations: ancestors of the first Natives to cross the land bridge into the Americas, but also early inhabitants of northwest India, Afghanistan, China, Mongolia and parts of the former Soviet Union. Random thoughts came to me as he spoke: Jin Li’s unpopular finding that the DNA of the Chinese is not unique to China; my Uncle Horace telling me how often he is mistaken for Native; and my own girl, turning five that year, whose Mongolian birthmark on her lower back was beginning to fade.

  After our wild musings upon hearing of our supposed Native ancestry back in 2005, Shriver’s estimates and conclusions were instantly believable. It helped to explain why my father’s East Asian ancestry was deemed to be 43 percent instead of the 36 percent the Florida test had found. The estimate of his European ancestry rose from 35 percent to 51 percent, and the percentage of African markers climbed from 4 to 6 percent.

  Later I told Stephen that he need not be jealous any longer. I had essentially been kicked out of the tribe; my Native American roots had shrivelled. He put on a brave face and shrugged. “I don’t think about it anymore,” he said. “You know, that story about my swarthy aunt was in our family for two or three generations, and then snap, that was it. I did that test and it was just gone.”

  “Yes, but if one test tells me I’m 22 percent Native American and the next just a paltry 6 percent, there’s more than a good chance that your reading was incomplete.” He raised an eyebrow for a moment. But he’d lost faith. “Nah,” he said. “I’ve tried to focus more on the idea that we were Vikings.”

  My mother too had a startling change in her ancestry predictions. The puzzling finding that she had significant East Asian ancestry—22 percent, according to DNAPrint—was reduced to just 7 percent by the measure of Shriver’s lab, which cut off another vein of speculation. Mum’s European ancestry, meanwhile, increased to 75 percent from 68; it was the dominant element of her heritage. Her proportion of ancestry from Africa rose slightly, from 7 to 10 percent, and Shriver found it was rooted specifically in West Africa, where most slaves began their torturous journey across the Middle Passage.

  Shriver’s test may have been more thorough than the Florida scan, but I knew that testing a different set of ten thousand mutations could well tell a different story. The truth was, at that point, the science just left me cold. There were no “ancestors” to be found in our code, no narrative in our nucleotides or tales to share over a cup of tea, only the limp arms of percentages, margins of error, confidence intervals. When the Florida test came back, I had been a blank slate, a genetic virgin, excited by whatever legible memory our DNA held. But now, after confirmation of our Chinese great-grandfather, after a chromosome had led me to the Crookses of Lancashire, after connecting with distant genetic cousins, the science felt suddenly … underwhelming.

  The questions the results raise will, in all probability, never be answered. Why does my father carry 6 percent ancestry from West Africa? Is it a lingering artifact from the first modern humans that birthed us all? Or is there yet another story linking us to slavery? Or might it reflect the ancient population that gave rise to India’s tribes, even the Kurumbas? And what are the details of my mother’s apparent East Asian ancestry? Shriver acknowledged the shortcomings up front: “These tests give you more information with less precision, less a sense of time, or proportion.” I had known it going in, even as I pricked my own finger at the bathroom sink (flow good to moderate). Still, I looked at the new numbers for a long time, lamenting all the stories DNA could not tell. I doubted I would ever make peace with the frustration. But then science surprised me.

  Months passed. Snow melted. Spring arrived, and on a bright day in May 2008, the Y-chromosome test results for Paul Crooks appeared in my inbox. When I sent in Paul’s kit, I had set the parameters to show only matches with the Crooks surname. Presuming he carried an African Y, I didn’t expect to recognize any names, if indeed any were included with his results. I expected to click in, take a quick peek and scoot off to work.

  But I had to sit down. There were matches—two—and both of them were my uncles. At a dozen markers, the Y chromosome of Paul Crooks the author and my uncles Dennis and Basil shared a perfect match. Exact matches between men with the same surname mean they have, it’s estimated, a 99 percent chance of sharing a common male ancestor in the past thr
ee or four hundred years. I put the chances even higher. I could see in my mind where our bloodlines had converged: a curved beach, a former slave village hugging the shoreline, perhaps an overgrown hill where a plantation house had once stood.

  Had the DNA really done what the records had so far failed to do? Had a common chromosome proved our connection to the Cove? I clicked on Paul’s haplogroup designation. It confirmed that his Y belonged not to an African lineage but to a European forefather. He was, as he had to be to match my uncles, a member of the R1b1 group. This stranger, this young black man who had grown up in England, not far from where my own family once lived, whose novel had first pointed me to the Cove, whose book I had toted around Jamaica like a travel guide, was our relative—a not-so-distant cousin, probably from not more than six generations back.

  Our DNA had suddenly tied us to him and revealed what no other source had. If Paul Crooks had paper evidence linking his roots to that Crooks plantation, and we had links to Jamaica and a biological link to him, surely, somehow, we shared those roots. Our common descent was likely from the patriarch of a slave-owning dynasty, since it was a white man’s Y that united us. But what had been the marrow of that union? The resignation of a woman owned? Rape? Was it as Elizabeth Barrett Browning had described in her poem, “Wrong followed by a deeper wrong”?

  I thought of my mother fighting off bad memories in the shower, hiding during Roots. How would she take the news? As soon as my uncles’ Y chromosomes turned out to be European, the probability of slave ownership had been there, but this sudden kinship with Paul Crooks seemed to cement it. And what of Paul Crooks, whose open-minded curiosity had led him to send his DNA to a stranger across the sea?

  I couldn’t tell him, not yet. The twelve-marker match was significant, given our common surnames and history in Jamaica, but it was hardly irrefutable. That morning, excluding the author, 606 men from all over the world also matched my uncles’ Y chromosomes at twelve spots; the haplotype of our Euro-Y is just that common. That meant Paul Crooks also matched those other men, and none of those others was named Crooks. It was possible—if unlikely—that, while Paul carried an R1b1 Y chromosome, it had come by way of some other European man. If Crooks was a name given to his ancestor through a Christian baptism, it could be that his Y had come down from some other white man who had passed through the Cove.

  I had to confirm the match; I had to increase the number of markers tested. The more markers compared, the higher the resolution of the test, the more solid the data. And with all that was riding on it, the result had to be solid. As illuminating as it was to my family, it could be equally devastating to Paul Crooks and his. He had spent thirteen years tracing his Jamaican ancestry, interviewing his relatives, painstakingly combing through records, maps and slave registers to put together the story of his slave roots. He had not only concluded that John Alexander Crooks, his third-generation grandfather, was African-born and sold into bondage in the Caribbean, he had imagined an entire fictionalized life for him. His novel was in a different league altogether than the world I had created as a child for the juggler, but the two were not entirely dissimilar. We had both of us fashioned an identity for a forefather when none could be known. Now here was I, after a bit of research and a quick swab, with this rank footnote to foul his efforts: Turns out your male line likely hails from Britain, old chap, possibly Lancashire. Turns out we descend from both slave and slave owner.

  It was not a shovel I suddenly envisioned in my hands. It was a sledgehammer.

  16

  SHADOW FAMILY

  A year before I mailed Paul’s sample away for testing, geneticist Mark Jobling and his colleagues at the University of Leicester published a paper about the puzzling case of a white Yorkshire man who carried a distinctively African Y chromosome, a genetic signature so old and rare that only twenty-three men alive were known to carry it—and all of them were West African. Never before had this subtype of the A1 haplogroup been detected anywhere in western Europe, which compelled Jobling and his team to seek out other carriers. They tracked down eighteen other males who shared the Yorkshire man’s unusual surname—Revis—and found that seven of those white men also harboured the surprising Y haplotype of a black man. None of them had any inkling of an African heritage, and despite tracing their family histories to common male ancestors living in Yorkshire in the eighteenth century, none could be found. Had they descended from an African troop the Romans posted at Hadrian’s Wall nearly two thousand years ago, from a captured African whom ninth-century Vikings may have brought north, from a slave who served British nobility in the sixteenth century? No one knows.

  In the end, researchers cast the Revis Y as the first genetic evidence of blacks living among “indigenous Britons” for centuries, and further proof that race must be a flawed concept if a bunch of white Yorkshire folk can have an African forefather. The English press eagerly picked up the story. Jobling told me that his group initially withheld the Yorkshire surname in question, “concerned that tabloids would get hold of the story and say that all people called Revis are Africans.” They feared that boys named Revis would face schoolyard beatings from racist bullies.

  But how did those Revis men feel? I wondered. Did they feel any less European, any less white to learn they were part black? Jobling told me that the original Yorkshire man, one John Revis, a seventy-five-year-old retired father of three and grandfather of six, found the test result “fascinating.” Revis had been away on holiday when the news broke and returned to discover that his DNA had made him a minor celebrity.

  “I had no idea that I was so culturally unique. But I am not going to start eating couscous and riding a camel,” Revis said to the Mail on Sunday newspaper. “It was a shock to find out that, because I was so blond and blue-eyed when I was younger, people thought I was Nordic or German. But the researchers said that if my DNA were examined then people would assume they were looking at a North African man.”

  He noted that the “very white establishment” where he bowls could now boast an ethnic minority member, although, he added, “I doubt anyone would be able to pick me out.” But Revis had already constructed a new narrative for himself. His Y, he felt, was the souvenir of a Berber warrior who came north and “spread his seed all over Yorkshire.”

  His wife, Marlene, was just as startled. “I can hardly believe it,” she told the newspaper. “John has always seemed very English to me. He likes his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday. He has never asked me to cook anything unusual. My friends think our news is hilarious.”

  Blacks who suddenly discover white ancestry rarely marvel at the mystery. The story never plays out as it did in Yorkshire, with shades of the comic. More often, DNA tells the story of European men—conquerors, colonialists, captors—who spread their Y across continents like jam on toast. Article after article on the subject convinced me that I was to be the bearer of decidedly unhappy news for Paul Crooks. African Americans whose DNA reveals a European paternal origin describe sadness, disappointment and desperation for another test to prove the finding wrong. It’s like learning they’ve been branded by biology, the master’s mark seared into their DNA by the hot iron of inheritance. Even Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor of African studies, one of the most prominent black scholars in the United States and host of African American Lives on PBS, admitted suffering “the blues” when genetic testing revealed he was half European. Would Paul suffer the same?

  In the afterword of his novel, Paul mentions that he had once sent away for information about the Crookses from a family research agency, and the first thing to fall from the package that arrived was a picture of a white family. “What a shock!” he wrote. “The only members of the Crooks family that I knew were black—us.”

  I couldn’t shake the guilt. The testing had been my idea, and while I had not expected his Y to match my uncles’, given the depth of his research, I had hoped for it. I wanted it to be true. I wanted his story to fill the hole in our narrative
, and I got my wish. Quickly and conveniently, Paul Crooks had provided a string of code to tie up one of our very loose ends. The author’s Y proved to be an exact match with our Crooks Y chromosome not only at twelve markers but at twenty-five markers as well. At thirty-seven markers we were off by only one, and that one difference was slight. Where Paul Crooks has a particular bit of genetic code—G-A-T-A—repeated ten times at a certain point on his Y chromosome, my uncles have it repeated eleven times—a tiny change, to be expected after a few hundred years. (A later test determined that this was the only mismatch, even after sixty-seven markers were compared).

  Experts estimate that the Y mutates an average of at least once every five hundred times it is transmitted to the next generation. So even without taking into account our common history in Jamaica, the raw DNA match alone suggests the probability of Paul Crooks and my Crooks uncles sharing a common male ancestor within the last eight generations is about 95 percent. I tried telling myself I was merely the messenger and that Paul was himself keen to have the answer. He had swabbed and sent his DNA back to me in a matter of weeks. It would be paternalistic for me to assume he was better off never knowing who, at this genetic level, he is.