DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  Back at the hotel I sat at the water’s edge. Pelicans and terns flew over the open sea, waders picked at the mudflats as the tide receded. The runway was about a mile away across the water, and I watched the comings and goings of the planes. After what seemed like hours the giant 747 I knew was Richard’s taxied to the very end of the runway, turned, then paused. Was something the matter? Would the plane be recalled to the gate? I almost hoped so. But of course it wasn’t. The roar of the engines throbbed across the bay, and the silver bird began to move down the runway. Slowly at first, then faster but never fast enough—or so it always seems with a 747. It passed the control tower, then the vast hangars, then turned its nose slightly upward to greet the sky, and left the ground. The sky was a brilliant blue, and I followed the plane as it climbed very gently straight ahead. It gradually diminished into a small white bird. How can anything so large look so tiny? The white bird got smaller and smaller until I needed my binoculars to see it. Eventually it turned to the east. I still followed as it became a tiny speck, then put the binoculars down to clear a piece of dust from my eye. When I tried to find the plane again—like Richard’s long childhood—it had vanished.

  15

  The Persuaders

  Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California.

  The great bird that had taken Richard back to England returned the next day with another special passenger. While Richard had been my traveling companion and research assistant on the first leg of my journey around America, I would be accompanied by Ulla on the return leg, from west to east. Once more sitting by the edge of the lagoon outside the hotel, and again in brilliant sunshine, I scanned the southern sky for the red-tipped wings of the Virgin Atlantic 747 that was bringing her from London. Minutes before the scheduled arrival time, I picked out the landing lights shimmering in the afternoon haze across the bay. Slowly, slowly the plane swung around and flew low over the San Mateo Bridge, descending all the time until, with a puff of blue smoke, it was on the ground.

  I was in San Francisco primarily to meet again with the scientists from 23andMe, the genetics company who had been doing the chromosome paintings. I wanted to replenish my stock of DNA-sampling kits and, I hoped, get together with some of their customers who had already had their portraits painted. That evening, as Ulla and I sat in the glass-fronted lobby of our hotel, overlooking the bay, we noticed a blimp cruising in the distance. It looked perilously close to the airport, and I wondered if it had lost its way, or its controls. Then I noticed the genetics company logo on the side. Things must be going well.

  We soon got talking to our fellow guests. These were brief encounters, usually opened by a distinctly American “Hi there, where are you guys from?” These remarks were invariably directed at Ulla, who is tall and blond in a typically Scandinavian way. By the time she had explained that she was from Jutland, on the west coast of Denmark, but had been living in England for many years, nobody was the least interested in my origins. Even so, I did get the chance to join in the conversation when Ulla had explained why we were there and what we were planning to do. Everyone was very interested in what I told them about the project, and one or two had even read The Seven Daughters of Eve. It slowly dawned on me as the evening drew on that we had stumbled across the perfect DNA-sampling location. A comfortable open space dotted with armchairs, where conversations were easy to initiate and nobody felt threatened. There were secluded booths for the sampling itself and visitors checking in from all over America. It was perfect. That was how, that very first evening, we met the woman who chose to become “Sugar Kane,” at least for the purposes of our genetic research.

  “Sugar” was visiting one of her children, who was a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. She and her husband had flown all the way from Jacksonville, Florida. “Sugar” was a retired college secretary who had an interest in her family history, not perhaps as intense as I had witnessed in Boston, but enough to wonder about where her ancestors were from, particularly her grandmother’s origins. She had been only four when her grandmother died, so the memories of her were sketchy at best. However, when later in life she had been leafing through some old photo albums, she realized for the first time that her grandmother stood out from all her other relatives by being much darker skinned and with long straight dark hair and high cheekbones. To “Sugar” she looked as though she could have been Native American. Unable to verify this through any genealogical records, she nonetheless felt drawn to discovering more about Native American spirit life, and began to attend classes run by a medicine woman called Pansy Hawk Wing. She was so taken with this experience that she and five other women, with their husbands, traveled to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota with Pansy Hawk Wing to embark on a vision quest. She and the other women were confined to a special lodge on a hilltop, where they were left overnight without water or food. “Sugar” had her own drum, called Ladybug, on which she drummed through the night. In the morning she and the other women walked downhill to meet with Pansy and the men. From there the women and their husbands entered the sweat lodge, heated, dark, and airless. After some hours they emerged and the women crossed to the moon lodge, where they were “pampered”—her own word—by other women. “Sugar” had found the whole experience extremely invigorating.

  I was not sure what to think. It was certainly not easy to imagine “Sugar,” who looked so typically European, with her blue eyes and dark blond hair, in the sweat lodge at Pine Ridge. I subsequently discovered that sweat-lodge “experiences” were widespread, even outside America. (There was actually one advertised near London.) There is always the chance of cynical exploitation, but there was no doubt at all that “Sugar” had gained tremendous pleasure and self-awareness during her week at Pine Ridge, part of a continuing journey that began when she saw the photograph of her grandmother. It would have been worth it even if “Sugar” had no Native American ancestry, but you will not be surprised to hear that she did not need much persuading to take part in the project to check out her DNA.

  As chance would have it, the more dangerous side of the Native American spiritual experience emerged only days after I met “Sugar” and her husband. Three people died and eighteen were hospitalized after a sweat lodge in Angel Valley Retreat Center in Sedona, Arizona, went badly wrong. James Arthur Ray, the organizer, who ran the “Spiritual Warrior” event of which the sweat lodge was a part, was arrested and charged with manslaughter. At his trial in 2011, he was eventually cleared of manslaughter but convicted on three counts of negligent homicide.

  One very good reason to be in San Francisco was to have a longer conversation with Joanna Mountain than had been possible on my first visit to 23andMe nine months earlier. Ulla and I steeled ourselves for the short journey down Highway 101 to the company headquarters in Mountain View, joining the headlong rush of cars hurtling south toward San Jose. On this occasion we got off at the correct exit to the relative calm of the wooded avenues of Palo Alto.

  Mountain and I started by comparing notes on something that was proving to be one of the most interesting aspects of the research, and that was the wide range of attitudes toward genetic testing held by different groups. Talking to our Cheyenne guide, Serle Chapman, in Wyoming, I had already sensed the intrusion that his people had experienced from mainly white scientists who, they felt, were trampling on their own origin myths. Joanna confirmed that she had seen the same reaction, epitomized by the Havasupai case, when researchers had gone beyond the original study designs by allowing samples to be used in ancestry projects for which there was no consent. This had created a backlash among Native Americans against genetics generally that was only now beginning to be reversed by careful dialogue. However, while there was no appetite for genetic ancestry information among Native Americans themselves, there was a great hunger among other groups to prove, through genetics, at least some Native American ancestry. It was not only European Americans like “Sugar Kane” who were interested in looking for a genetic connection to an indigenous ancestry: I
had seen a similar desire in “Virgil Tibbs,” my African American volunteer from Boston.

  Mountain also had her own fascinating story to tell, not about herself but about her husband Heyward Robinson, who is from an old South Carolina family. Understandably Heyward had his DNA analyzed through his wife’s company and found, perhaps not too surprisingly, that his chromosome portrait showed no trace of orange, the sign of some Asian or Native American ancestry. However, a subsidiary test on his mitochondrial DNA came back with something quite different. The results showed without a shadow of doubt that his direct maternal ancestor was descended from Aiyana, not a European clan mother at all but one of the five matrilineal ancestors of Native Americans.

  Heyward Robinson’s mother was an avid genealogist who had traced the family back to the seventeenth century with no sign of anything but European ancestry. On his last trip back east to see her, Robinson had visited the town his matrilineal ancestors were from and, helped by another genealogist friend, found an ancestor seven or eight generations back who seemed to have come from nowhere. Heyward discovered that his fifth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Keys, was a resident of Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her father, John Keys, had been a fur trader, but the identity of Elizabeth’s mother was a complete mystery, despite many years of research by family members. Mountain checked out more of her husband’s matrilineal relatives and found the same Aiyana mitochondrial DNA in all of them. She also found a small “orange” segment of Native American chromosomal DNA in his mother and sister. This was consistent with a Native American ancestor whose DNA had survived to his mother’s generation and had been passed on to his sister, but which, through the lottery of genetic transmission, had not gotten through to Robinson. Judging by the one remaining “Native American” segment in his mother’s chromosome portrait, it had joined the family tree around three hundred years ago. This was at a time in the seventeenth century when people were brought over from Switzerland to act as a buffer between the English colony in Charleston, South Carolina, and indigenous groups in the surrounding territory. In those ideal conditions for intermarriage, it is not unrealistic to suppose that Heyward’s mysterious ancestor was the fruit of such a union.

  What I found particularly revealing about this story was not just its illustration of the sublime persistence of mitochondrial DNA outlasting all the chromosomal DNA, at least in Robinson’s case, but also what Mountain told me about his reaction. He was both thrilled and fascinated, and it shifted his view of himself. One evening the family was watching Terrence Malick’s The New World, a movie which depicts the early European settlement of America and features the heroism of Pocahontas in saving the English colonist John Smith from execution. To Mountain’s great surprise, her husband turned to their two children and said, “Kids, you have deep roots here.” For Joanna, witnessing this unexpected cultural outcome was, in her own words, “something else.”

  Another reason to visit 23andMe once again was to speak with Mike MacPherson, its statistician. I wanted to check some of the finer technical points of chromosome painting, but soon after he joined us, the conversation turned to the question of the interpretation of the chromosome portraits of Native Americans. Every indigenous North American sample ever analyzed shows a combination of orange and blue in its portrait. Did that mean Native American DNA was always a mixture of Asian and European, and, if so, had that mixture arisen within the last five hundred years, or was it already there in the first Americans? As we saw in chapter 11, the reference populations for the orange “Asian” segments were from China and Japan rather than from northeastern Asia, the more likely source for those ancestors who arrived from Siberia. Certainly mitochondrial DNA evidence had shown that most Siberians had arrived there from central Asia rather than China. Central Asia is getting pretty close to Europe, so the question of the boundary populations starts to come into it.

  When MacPherson had been developing the chromosome-painting algorithms, he had certainly considered what would happen at the boundaries between the three continents. When the world is crudely divided into just three zones—Africa, Asia, and Europe—for the purpose of the chromosome portraits, the situation is bound to be complicated where those zones meet. Anticipating this, MacPherson got hold of DNA from Uzbekistan, in central Asia but much nearer Europe than China and Japan, and from the Berbers of Morocco, where Europe meets Africa. Sure enough, these showed a complex mixture of segments originating from the continental populations on either side of the boundary. The portraits look as though they have come from particularly confused populations with ancestors from both sides of the line separating the continents, but this is just an artifact of the way in which the source populations are defined. It would be the same wherever you drew the lines, because that is what ancestors do: They move about and cross lines. When MacPherson tried this out in Europe, trying to discriminate between chromosome segments with genetic origins in the north and the south, everybody was a mixture of the two. It was one of those instances when more detail confuses rather than clarifies the picture. Much better to accept the inaccuracies of the crude continental divisions and bear them in mind when sitting back and gazing at the chromosome portraits.

  I asked MacPherson the obvious question: If you could go back five hundred years, before recent European contact, what would the chromosome paintings of the indigenous Americans have looked like? Would they be completely orange, in which case any blue would indicate some recent European ancestry, or would they be a mixture of orange and blue, reflecting the ultimately central Asian origin of Siberians and the ancestors of the first Americans? Somehow I wasn’t surprised when he told me he had already tried to simulate this. His answer was that five hundred years ago the indigenous Americans would have had two-tone portraits of 75 percent orange, plus or minus 10 percent. The rest would have been blue. His figures meant that in individual contemporary Native Americans, any mixture with figures well outside this range was probably the outcome of a mixed ancestry.

  I had always assumed that any incoming ancestry would be European, but then I remembered something Serle Chapman had told me as we sat looking at Bear Lodge in Wyoming. He recounted the tale of an Indian raid on a railway construction site in the Rockies during the mid-nineteenth century. Since thousands of Chinese had come to help build the western sections of the railway, it was a mixed labor force of white European Americans, many with an Irish background, and Chinese that came under attack. After a brief exchange of fire, the heavily outnumbered Europeans ran off, but the Chinese stayed where they were. To the Indians they were not the enemy, and also they looked rather similar due to their shared Asian ancestry. So they joined the Cheyenne and no doubt in time passed segments of their completely Asian chromosomes on to future generations, thereby increasing the overall orange component of Cheyenne DNA. Finally I asked Mountain if I might talk to some of her customers who had already had their portraits painted. She very kindly promised to approach some of them and, if they agreed, put us in touch.

  Back at the hotel, the atmosphere had changed. It was Friday evening and already getting dark. There was a frisson of excitement in the lobby, but I had no idea why. I saw a notice on prominent display requesting that guests respect one another’s privacy and refrain from soliciting—with a threat of expulsion for noncompliance. I could hardly believe that this warning was put up with us in mind. Had there been a complaint from “Sugar Kane” about the evening before? I thought it very unlikely, but you never know. My questions were soon answered. Within a few minutes several town cars with darkened windows arrived and disgorged about twenty gigantic men wheeling large suitcases. They didn’t check in at the desk but went straight through the lobby to a suite of rooms that looked as though it had been prepared for them. They were soon joined by a more regular-size man who was welcomed by the staff in the most effusive way. He went into the same suite as the others, and that is when I noticed his bright red shoes. I asked our server, Monica from Foster City, what was going on. “They are the 49
ers,” she explained. “They come here the night before every home game.” I knew enough to realize that she was talking about the San Francisco football team, but that was about as far as my knowledge of the 49ers, or indeed the game of American football, extended. “Who is the guy in the red shoes?” I inquired. “That’s their chief coach, Mike Singletary,” replied Monica in a hushed and reverential tone.

  Suddenly, from the direction of the players’ suite, a giant of a man, some six feet three inches tall and about 250 pounds, materialized and walked up to the couple at the next table. For such a big man he moved extremely gracefully, with none of the rolling from side to side of the merely overweight. He gave the woman a long and gentle embrace and then sat down for a few minutes of animated conversation before leaving to return to the suite. After the couple had finished eating and left the restaurant I asked Monica who that had been. “That,” she replied, “was Ray McDonald.” “And the couple?” “They’re his parents. They come to every home game,” replied Monica. “All the way from Florida.” I was amazed at the devotion, not to mention the expense, of a six-thousand-mile round trip every other week. I was also curious, given that Ray and his parents were African American, how they had come to have a Scottish surname.

  The following day I settled down in front of the big screen in the restaurant to watch the game while Ulla went for a walk along the promenade by the lagoon. The 49ers were playing the St. Louis Rams. Monica was on duty again and, in between serving her customers, came over to explain what was going on, which was a good thing because until then I could not follow the game at all, with players running in all directions, nowhere near the ball. With Monica’s instruction it began to make some sort of sense, the quarterbacks hurling the ball forward, the four attempts allowed to move the ball forward ten yards, and the defense taking out their opposite numbers. With the helmets and the body armor it was impossible to recognize Ray McDonald by his appearance alone, but then I spotted him by his name on the number 91 jersey. No longer the gentle giant of yesterday, playing on defense he charged and blocked with a ferocity that was terrifying. It was a good game for him. He scored a touchdown, and the 49ers won. As well as admiring his play, I could not help wondering whether he also carried the same Macdonald Y chromosome that I first encountered on the Isle of Skye. I felt a tinge of frustration that I had not had the opportunity to find out.