The Juggler's Children

  And really, what is this level? Just one tiny chromosome out of his forty-six, a twig on his ancestral tree, one line of descent out of the 1,024 a human has after ten generations. It should give him no cause to abandon the bond he felt with the man he considered his third-generation grandfather. By his telling, John Alexander Crooks had raised four children, showed them what it meant to be free, and shared the stories of their people’s struggle, stories they would share with their own children. The author’s great-great-great-grandfather was their patriarch in all the ways that matter. Whichever white Crooks it was who gave them life, he gave nothing more than a bit of biology.

  But no matter how I looked at it, the result was a hell of a thing. I had set out to solve the mystery of our great-grandfather and inadvertently unearthed a secret about someone else’s. It was vivid proof that no one takes a DNA test in a vacuum. The results have an impact on everyone who shares your DNA: your parents, your siblings, your children, uncles, aunts, cousins—and strangers you had no idea were relatives until genetic testing shook them out of the family tree. Your results are their results, your secrets become their secrets, and they learn them, as you do, whether they want to or not.

  On a spring afternoon a week after Paul’s first result came back, I marched through my parents’ front door and pulled his book out of my bag. “Remember this? I had it in Jamaica? Remember I told you the author sent me his DNA?”

  My mother took the book from my hands and studied the painting on its cover, called “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa,” a tableau of men with whips and branding irons raised, black men and women pinned beneath them, a ship in the distance.

  “What does it mean?” my mother asked. “This match.”

  “There’s more testing going on, but I’d say this pretty much confirms it. The man who wrote this book knows that he descends from slaves on the Crooks plantation at the cove we visited, and his Y chromosome is the same as your Crooks family chromosome, so that tells us the Crooks family who owned that plantation were almost certainly your ancestors.”

  “You mean that plantation where we were? All that land? That belonged to the Crookses—our Crookses?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Look at that,” my mother said. She quickly put the book back in my hands. “What land they had.… Dud, are you listening?”

  My father was going through mail at the kitchen table.

  “See there, Papa was right—the Crookses had a big plantation,” Mum said. “How much my father wanted to go there.” She lamented that the Captain had died too young to take him to that beautiful property—the rolling hills, the inlet, the beach. Mum wondered if any Crooks would have a claim to that land now.

  “I wouldn’t think so. The Crookses lost the land two hundred years ago. It ended up with a cousin, a Dickson, one of the sons of Anne Crooks, the daughter buried in the yard beside James.”

  “Look at that! We were standing at the grave of, what, Papa’s great-grandfather?”

  “Well, we don’t really know which of the Crooks men was our forefather,” I said.

  “That means you still have to dig up James Crooks,” my father said to me.

  “Again with the digging,” my mother said. “We know through this other fellow, this Paul Crooks, that James Crooks was related to my father, that he was a grandfather of mine. Would you dig up your grandfather?”

  “Maybe,” Dad said. “If I knew where he was.”

  “Actually, Dad’s right. It doesn’t prove that James Crooks was our great-great-grandfather or whatever, but I’m hoping that once I talk to Paul Crooks we may be able to figure out the connection.”

  “How wonderful,” my mother said. “We already know so much. It’s amazing.”

  That’s how it went the first time I shared the news. We were joyous just to have the knowledge. We said nothing of slavery or how it was our Captain had got his colour. We talked about real estate. We spoke of the place, not the people. Within that tight frame we could simply love the land as the fount of my grandfather’s line. We could even covet that seaside acreage, wistful for a homestead lost, so long as we didn’t mention the bleak history that must have played out upon it. But the conversation stretched over the seasons to come, and with time, as further tests confirmed the match with Paul Crooks, the blinkers fell away. Eventually we got around to speaking about the slave owners in our family.

  In the aftermath of one of my sister’s elaborate family feasts, bellies full and heads swimming with wine, we started in on Jamaica: how the Spanish lost it to the British; how Cromwell set it up as a colony to spite Spain and the Catholics; how, some time after that, in the late sixteen hundreds, our forefathers had arrived. My brothers chimed in with their English school history of Cromwell, his battle with the Crown, the prisoners-of-war he shipped to the Caribbean, his vicious treatment of the Irish and Scots—and the merits of Braveheart.

  I told them I had to assume our Crookses came from England, but there was also a chance it was Scotland. Scots made up a third of Jamaica’s white population in the seventeen hundreds, and Jamaica’s patois was in part a mixture of African dialect and Scottish accent that evolved among the slaves. Someone asked how many slaves the Crookses had owned. More than 150, I said, maybe as many as 200 at some points. Conrad scowled as if something rotten had hit his tongue. “A hundred and fifty?” he said. “That’s disgusting. Isn’t that disgusting?”

  “It is,” Mum said. “It is terrible to think of it.”

  There was a pause then, and I would remember it—a moment when all of us perhaps did think of it, and none of us said a word.

  The three-thousand-year-old Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, the oldest set of laws known to exist, prescribes death to the son of a carpenter who builds a shoddy house and cutting off the arm of a surgeon who loses a patient, and the breasts of a nursemaid too free with her milk. In it appears the earliest known written record of slavery. But even by then it was a system already well established. As soon as the hunter-gatherers threw down their spears in favour of ploughs, people enslaved other people—to hoe the land and pick out their lice, to build pyramids, fetch water, mine salt, row ships, scratch their backs. There was hardly a corner or culture in the world where slavery didn’t spread: ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, India, China, the Roman Empire, Africa, the Middle East. In Europe, serfs replaced slaves only after the Roman Catholic Church decided it was a rather un-Christian thing for Christians to own other Christians; certainly Christians shouldn’t be exported as slaves to non-Christian lands. For the Vikings (as I pointed out to Stephen more than once), slavery was a primary source of income; thralldom they called it, and slaves were thralls. The word enthralled comes from the Norse term for “captured.” If we all descend from royalty in one way or another, we all descend from cruelty as well.

  But what on earth, with the exception of our DNA, did we have to do with the lives and times of those ancestors? If we bore responsibility for those Crooks slave owners, did we carry a debt for the British, who subjugated an entire subcontinent; for the Portuguese, who pressed Indian women to convert; for a Chinese grandfather who left his children, or any of China’s warring dynasties, or the last to rule in Vietnam? Where would our culpability begin? Where would it end? DNA can magically link us with ancestors from millennia past, but we can no more take blame or credit for their exploits than we can for the randomness of our own DNA. It just is.

  Not everyone feels that way. In the summer of 2006, a thirty-seven-year-old white man named Andrew Hawkins, from Cornwall, England, flew to West Africa to apologize to black people for a sixteenth-century slave-trading forebear. Sir John Hawkins, who is considered a national hero in England for his victory over the Spanish Armada, was also the country’s first slave trader. He made a fortune in the export of Africans and celebrated it with an image of a bound black man woven into the family crest. So it was that Andrew Hawkins, who had once admired his knighted ancestor, put on a T-shirt that said “So Sorry” and chaine
d himself to twenty-six others at a football stadium in the Gambia, where thousands of blacks had gathered from around the world for the annual International Roots Festival.

  The pundits weren’t kind. One called it “absurd”; another described it as “nauseating.” David Robson, a columnist with the Daily Express, wrote that it was “fatuous” to apologize “for misdeeds committed centuries ago,” and that apologizing for the misdeeds of long-ago ancestors was “more fatuous still,” and “when it is tricked-up into a tableau mimicking chained slavery, it is beyond fatuous.” But the blacks at the festival were gracious. They applauded and accepted Hawkins’s apology and those of his shackled peers (some were blacks apologizing for the blacks who had sold Africans to the Europeans). They offered their forgiveness and even said “Sorry” themselves, for thinking ill of Hawkins’s family.

  When I told my parents about Hawkins’s apology, my father said he found it a worthy symbolic gesture. “The blacks were gathered for a roots conference, were they not, to commemorate their ancestry and what their ancestors had suffered?” he said. “This fellow was there to apologize for the role his ancestors played in it. I think it’s excellent.”

  My mother sided with the critics. She thought it pointless and useless to be “saying sorry for something for which the whole world would have to be forgiven.” If Hawkins felt the need to make amends, he should have done something more constructive, Mum said. Good works in the black community, for example.

  I tended to side with my mother, largely because the apology seemed to have less to do with blacks than it did with making Hawkins feel better. But then, having never known the identity of our Crooks forbears, we, unlike Hawkins, had never held them up as champions of any kind. If we had, maybe there would be some instinctive need to say “Sorry” for our ancestors’ slave ownership, though I can’t imagine to whom. We had ancestors at both ends of the whip.

  It was nine thirty, London time, on a Monday night in September when I reached Paul Crooks.

  “Just watching telly,” he said. “MTV … mindless stuff.”

  “Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you, but I was waiting for all the test results to make sure they were accurate.” I thanked him again for sending his sample and told him it was so very good of him to cooperate, given that it was probably the longest of shots, since my Crooks line hailed from Europe and his African forefather had been given the name Crooks through baptism.

  I wondered if he could hear the deep breath I drew next. “Well, the first test, which came back in the spring, looked at twelve markers on your Y chromosome, and the results showed you had two matches with men named Crooks—and both of them are my uncles,” I said. “We match. We’re definitely related.”

  “Oh, really,” he said.

  I read nothing from his tone but genuine wonderment. “Yes, it was a surprise,” I said, given that his hard-won paper trail had told him his paternal line led to Africa. “I wanted to be certain there was no mistake, so I increased the number of markers tested from twelve to twenty-five, then to thirty-seven. The match seems solid.”

  He said nothing, so I continued.

  “The results are convincing enough. We share the same Y-chromosome signature and the same surname and we have Jamaica in common. All of it suggests we share a common male ancestor in a genealogical time frame.”

  “How long ago would that be?” he asked.

  “All of these numbers are based on estimates, but roughly at some point in the past three to four hundred years.”

  “Oh,” he replied.

  “The thing is, Paul,” I said, “because we match, your result also confirms that your Y chromosome belongs to the same haplogroup as my uncles’—the most common in Europe.”

  More silence.

  I hated using the word haplogroup, hated that it sounded like a ten-dollar scientific term that would push the layperson to the sidelines of comprehension. But I saw no way around it, no other way to explain how a quick swab had revealed a secret his code had harboured for centuries. And so on I went, deconstructing the technical jargon, telling him that a Y-DNA haplogroup refers to a group of males whose Y chromosomes carry the same set of mutations, making the men related by way of a common male ancestor who passed them down thousands of years earlier. I described how scientists classify the major haplogroups by letters, and that each one is associated with a particular part of the world—A, B and E in Africa, O in China, J in the Middle East and southern Europe. And in western Europe it’s R1. I told him that he and my uncles belong to one of the subgroups of R1 known as R1b1b2, the most common Y chromosome haplogroup in western Europe.

  “What’s its frequency in western Europe?” Paul asked.

  In southern England, I answered, research suggests that it’s 70 percent, but in parts of western and northern England and Scotland it’s as high as 90 percent.

  It seemed the implications were sinking in. He mentioned relatives in Birmingham who once told him their family had a Scottish ancestor, but Paul said he had never taken it seriously. Now, out loud, he began a mental accounting of his own research, trying to explain the unexpected. “Sarah Brown, who married John Alexander Crooks [his third-generation grandfather], may have been of mixed blood. She came from the Brown estate, and Brown is a Scottish name. A lot of Scottish owned plantations in Jamaica,” he said, “particularly in Hanover Parish.”

  “That may be,” I said, “but this is a Y-chromosome lineage, so it only reflects your paternal line—John Alexander Crooks and his male descendants—since the Y chromosome is passed down only from fathers to sons and doesn’t alter much between generations.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then, after a long pause, he added, “This is quite a turnout.… I’m sitting here thinking how this happened. I’m trying to picture the documentation. I might have to go back now and take a look.” One moment he’d been sacked out watching mindless television, and the next he was pitched into a re-accounting of his family history.

  “John and Sarah had three children,” he was saying, “two boys and a girl. They did have three boys, but one died.… John Crooks was in charge of the estate at the time, and I wonder if he had some relationship with Sarah Brown. I had always assumed Sarah Brown was of mixed blood because there was no record of her in the 1817 register.” He took her to be free, he said, but living among slaves at the Cove. Perhaps John Alexander Crooks had adopted Sarah Brown’s children, perhaps they were not his own. “It was common for African men at the time to adopt the children of the women they were marrying,” he said. “The three children were classified as sambo, meaning that they were mixed as well.”

  I described what I knew of the Crooks family that owned that estate: the three brothers, Christopher, Rice and James; James Crooks Junior, who at birth inherited it from his late father; and his son, John Crooks, who eventually took it over. I told him I had seen the notice John Crooks had posted for his runaway slaves in the Cornwall Chronicle. “I suppose it’s a bit gruesome to think that this man might be our common link.”

  To my surprise, Paul didn’t dwell on the idea. Instead he mentioned that someone at the Hanover Museum had told him that John Crooks had sold off much of the property and gone to Australia. My fears that our conversation would end once Paul heard his test results were proving groundless. Over the next hour I told him there were other men who shared our Y-chromosome signature and that the matches suggested a link to Lancashire, which has a long history of Crookses. Interesting, he said, since he had learned that John Crooks and Richard Dickson were sailing ships to Africa out of Liverpool, which was then in the county of Lancashire.

  “I know these results must be a surprise, and I’m sorry to have to share them.”

  “Don’t be,” Paul said. “That’s why we’re here. If these sorts of things didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be. It’s how we have come to occupy this space and time. But I am sort of confused now; there’s a lot to turn over. I thought the male line led very clearly back to West Africa, so it’s
kind of surprising. It makes me question what they wrote in those registers.” He spoke of the financial incentive for white planters to have children with black slave women, and mentioned that he had not spent much time looking into the white Crooks family. And why would he have?

  When our conversation wound down, I told Paul I would email him his Y-chromosome test results and keep in touch with anything else I learned. I admired his reaction, his philosophical outlook, his calm. Several weeks later I returned to his website and discovered he was about to have a second book published that fall, this one a non-fiction guide to tracing one’s roots back to Africa. Presumably he had not expected that the results of a DNA test could also lead him somewhere else.

  I had come to see the family search as a modern tango, a dance between DNA and documentary evidence, science and paper. The Y chromosome told us the Captain had European forefathers; his baptismal record told us he was coloured. Genetic testing had uncovered our African ancestral markers and Paul Crooks’s novel had introduced me to the white Crookses of Jamaica. The author’s DNA connected us to those plantation Crookses, and now I needed a written record to fill in the details of that connection. Somewhere, some document or archive housed something to reveal which Crooks man, and perhaps which slave woman, was behind the Captain’s line.

  But I wanted more than that. Having come this far, it wasn’t enough just to know how our black-and-white great-grandfather came to be. I wanted to know how he came to be born into a coloured family of social standing just thirty-five years after Britain abolished slavery in Jamaica. Most freed slaves who left the master’s land spent the nineteenth century struggling to make a living as labourers and farmers. But the Captain’s father, George Atkinson Crooks, was an educated man, an accountant, and the Captain’s family—as Clive Harris had told me—were “men about town” in Falmouth, men of means and property.