The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  John Robert Bond died peacefully in Hyde Park in 1905, never returning to England. I wanted to find out more about the family that produced this remarkable individual. Unfortunately, this proved very difficult. We knew that his mother, Ann Evans, had moved from her home town of Mold to the nearby city of Liverpool sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s. The 1851 census records for Mold list her father, John’s maternal grandfather, as a man named John Evans. At the time, John was sixty-eight years old, and according to the census, he was a former farmer turned pauper. We were able to trace John Evans back three more generations to Elizabeth’s seventh-great-grandfather Edward Evans, born in nearby Northop, Wales, in January 1706. But we couldn’t find out much about any of the people along this line. They most likely lived in the same region for generations, earning a subsistence living as farmers and miners like virtually everyone around them.

  We were also unable to determine why Ann Evans left Mold for Liverpool. Maybe her reasons were economic; maybe there was some kind of conflict with her family. There is no way to tell. But in Liverpool, she met and married the ship’s cook from Bermuda, Robert Bond, and this may have made it impossible to return to her family. Neither Elizabeth nor I can imagine this white girl from a small village coming to the big city and marrying this mulatto, then returning to her hometown.

  “That’s a story,” said Elizabeth. “Even a hundred years later that story is seen as a novelty. Think about that confrontation. Even now when people talk about our president’s parents, that’s seen as a novelty. Of course, we know these comings together aren’t so novel after all. But it had to be traumatic—it couldn’t have been just ‘Oh, a negro; come, sit down, take tea.’”

  We then tried to learn more about the ship’s cook, Robert Bond. This search proved frustrating as well. Census data indicated that he and Ann lived on Leeds Street, in the dock area of Liverpool, one of the busiest ports in the world at that time, with a well-established black community. The census indicated Robert had come from Bermuda—and this conforms to what we know of nineteenth-century Liverpool. Many sailors from the Caribbean settled there because of the shipping industry and married local women and had families. But we could learn nothing more about Robert or his ancestors. We could not even figure out what happened to Robert and Ann after 1851. They simply disappear from the historical record. The fact that Robert was a cook on a ship offers a clue as to why there’s no further trace of him or his family. Perhaps he and Ann died, or perhaps they went back to Robert’s home in Bermuda. But we just don’t know. We do know that their son did not disappear. John Robert Bond made his mark on history. He was a half-English, half-Caribbean freedom fighter. I wish we could have learned more about him—but the little glimpse we have is nonetheless wonderful and inspiring.

  I asked Elizabeth how she felt knowing that so much of her ancestry—on both her parents’ lines—was white or at least racially mixed. “Well, you know,” she replied, “blackness is not a monolith. It never has been. We were always already mixed in a million different ways. Even as our family stories and our family trees differ, things are much less black and white, if you will, than rigid categorizations would have us think. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that our social identities are not very defining in many ways. I care about all my ancestry, but I’m still black—always have been. I just have always seen it as something that’s a complicated weave.”

  Moving back down Elizabeth’s maternal family tree, we traced the ancestors of her mother’s father, Arthur Courtney Logan. Arthur was born in 1909 in Tuskegee, Alabama. His mother, Adella Hunt, was born in 1863 in Sparta, Georgia, and her ancestors stretch back six generations to a man named John Batte, who was born in 1606 in Yorkshire, England. He is Elizabeth’s eighth-great-grandfather. He is also her oldest immigrant ancestor—and he was a wealthy white Englishman. It is unclear when the African and Anglo populations mixed in Elizabeth’s maternal line, but there is no question about John Batte’s ethnicity. He was as English as can be. His former home in England, Oakwell, is today a museum, and he lived the life of a gentleman of his time and class.

  The story of John Batte’s journey to the New World illuminates the diverse economic and cultural systems that shaped early America. Virginia was settled with a very different attitude and ethic than New England was. The original settlers of New England were fleeing religious persecution; the people who went to Virginia, primarily, were there to make money. In 1606, the year when John Batte was born in Yorkshire, King James I of England gave a charter to what was known as the Virginia Company of London which allowed its shareholders to establish a colony on the coast of America. Almost as soon as the first settlers arrived, they realized that there was money to be made in farming and land development, the colony’s most basic resource and the major resource that Europe lacked (Europe’s poor and middle classes had almost no access to land ownership—it was all controlled by the nobility). But while there was plenty of land in Virginia, there was a shortage of people to clear it and work it. So the Virginia Company came up with a plan which they called the “head rights system.” Businessmen would pay the cost of transporting indentured servants from Europe to Virginia. The servants would arrive and work off their indenture for a fixed period of time (usually seven years) and then become freemen, qualified to own land. This plan supplied the colony with labor. The reward for the businessmen who paid for the transport was significant: for every individual they brought over they received fifty acres.

  Elizabeth’s ancestor John Batte saw a pot of gold in this system. In the year 1628, when he was just twenty-two years old, he set sail for Virginia with a business partner and thirteen indentured servants. In exchange, he received a land grant of 750 acres in Charles River County, Virginia. John, however, did not remain long in America. Records show that he returned to England and then, for more than a decade, traveled back and forth from the colony to his homeland for business. In the year 1643, he received a second grant of 526 acres in James City County, Virginia, for transporting another eleven people from England to the colony. This meant that he and his business partners owned more than a thousand acres of land in Virginia in 1643, all farmed by indentured servants and, possibly, by African slaves (the first slaves came to Virginia in 1619, but the slave system did not come to dominate the colony’s economy until almost a century later). In 1651, John moved his family to the colony, after fighting on the losing side in the English Civil War. He died sometime around the year 1653, a founding settler of Virginia and a wealthy man.

  “He was entrepreneurial,” said Elizabeth, looking at the many records we had of her eighth-great-grandfather’s business deals. “But it also makes me think about what enables you to make your mark as a person like this. Well, one thing is that a whole lot of other people have to do the laboring for you. I think about all of those indentured servants and eventually the slaves who did that work. That’s a question mark. He exploited people. And it’s impossible for me to not read that against all that it takes for non-white people to make their way.”

  I then told Elizabeth that however she felt about him, John Batte was by no means the end of this line of her family. He was from the English upper class, and his well-documented roots stretch back generations to John I, King of England, and his titled mistress, Clemence. John I was born in 1167 and is a crucial figure in world history. The youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he engaged in a long power struggle with his brother, King Richard II, also known as Richard the Lionhearted. The rivalry between these brothers is a focal point of the Robin Hood legend, and it has been treated, with varying degrees of accuracy, in countless films, poems, and novels. As a child, I remember thinking it was just a fairy tale. But it was, in fact, a very real rivalry, and when Richard died childless in 1199, John inherited the crown—and a divided nation. From the beginning of his rule, the barons of England and Scotland blamed him for a multitude of social problems as well as for heavy taxes, the loss of English territories in France
, and abuse of power. After years of conflict, the barons finally drew up a list of demands and threatened civil war if John didn’t agree to meet them. This led to one of the most significant events of the past two thousand years: in June 1215, John and the barons met at Runnymede, outside London, and drew up a document which came to be known as Magna Carta.

  Magna Carta was a milestone in the history of world government. It limited the king’s powers and led to what we now call English common law—and it forms the basis of the constitutions of many countries, including our own. It was, in essence, the first document to declare that no man is above the law.

  Elizabeth’s ancestor John was forced to sign Magna Carta, which is not exactly inspiring. But among the barons who forced him to do it was another relative of Elizabeth’s: her twenty-second-great-grandfather Saher De Quincy, the Earl of Winchester.

  “That is completely mind-blowing,” said Elizabeth. “How about that? It stretches me completely beyond anything I could have imagined. I thought I had some English ancestry, but I just wouldn’t have thought to take it there. It never occurred to me—again, in part because of my own devotion to African American history and culture and bringing out the voices that haven’t been heard—to think that there are volumes and volumes about these people. I could spend years in the library reading about them. It’s amazing.”

  Moving back even further from King John, I showed Elizabeth that her family is deeply intertwined with the royalty of almost every medieval European nation—from France to Italy to Germany, including a figure even more important than John: Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Born in the year 742, Charlemagne is called “the Father of Europe” and was the greatest ruler of his age—a legendary warrior and statesman who was one of the people who wrested Europe out of the Dark Ages. The power base and center of his court was in Aachen, in the western part of Germany, on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands. In the year 770, Charlemagne inherited the title King of the Franks and went on to accumulate titles and territory by waging war all over the continent. He ventured as far east as Hungary and south to Lombardy in northern Italy. In 774, he became King of Lombardy and, in 800, Holy Roman Emperor—crowned by Pope Leo III himself.

  Charlemagne was a man of war and conquest, of course, but he was also respected as a man of learning. His reign ushered in what is known as the Carolingian Renaissance, which included a revival of art, religion, and culture—in an era when almost all these things were on the verge of being lost to Western civilization. Most of the surviving works of classical Latin were copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars. And through internal reforms and foreign conquests, Charlemagne helped to define what we now think of as Europe. We also know what he looked like. His biographer, who was his servant, described his appearance: “Charles was large and strong, and lofty of stature, though not disproportionately tall, his height is well known to have been seven times the length of his foot; the upper part of his head was round, his eyes very large and animated, nose a little long, hair fair, and face laughing and merry.”

  Charlemagne is Elizabeth’s thirty-seventh-great-grandfather. He had good reason to be smiling all the time, to be laughing and merry. He had twenty children that we know about, thirteen with his five wives and seven others with his five acknowledged mistresses. Elizabeth is descended from his second wife, Hildegard, born sometime around the year 757 in what was then called Rhineland.

  I told Elizabeth that her family tree is more radically mixed than any African American I have ever studied. She laughed, but we both know this kind of knowledge can be somewhat confusing. Most African Americans have some white ancestry; according to geneticists, 58 percent of the African American people have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry, the equivalent of one great-grandparent. And we have already discussed the fact that fully three out of ten black men trace their ancestry to a white male, most probably during slavery. At some point in our lives, we almost all realize that one side of our family profited enormously by exploiting the labor of another side. Elizabeth is unusual, in my experience, in that she can put names and faces for quite a distance in time on both sides. I have white ancestors whom I cannot name, starting with my great-great-grandfather on my father’s side. Elizabeth, on the other hand, can point to John Batte and say, “I descend from this man who owned a manor in England in 1640, a man who helped settle Virginia.” And Elizabeth, like Quincy Jones, who was profiled in the first African American Lives series, can point much further back than that—to legendary kings and queens of Europe. Very few African Americans can do that. And it is, I think, a very complicated thing to know about oneself.

  Asked how she feels about these people, she replied, “I have ambivalence about them, not because they’re white but because of how they built what they had. All of this stops when it gets to the black people—that generationally amassed wealth doesn’t make it all the way down. It’s hard to feel that connection. And I can’t look at the aristocrats on the European side without thinking about that moment where they start to mix in the United States with people of African descent. What happens to those lines? I keep going back to the case of Captain Batte. What is privilege if it’s tied to exploitation? Unto itself, it’s not just a beautiful coat, right? This is a complicated, thorny history that’s not just about beautiful things but also about the human cost of beautiful things.”

  I reminded her that one of the most important facts about African American history is that our ancestors who came to this country as slaves almost invariably came because they were captured, in Africa, by their fellow Africans, carried to a port, and sold to Europeans. Africans were not innocent in the slave trade. Our African ancestors fought and captured and sold other Africans into the slave trade to the New World. And if we could trace our roots back to African nobility, as someone like Elizabeth can do directly to European nobility, we would most probably realize that we are related to dark-skinned kings and queens whose privilege was built on the same kind of exploitation that white men like Captain Batte employed. It’s just a fact. There are no innocents on our family trees. The sad truth is that the only reason most of our poor ancestors didn’t exploit other people is that they couldn’t.

  “That’s true,” said Elizabeth. “And in a funny way, you know, it takes me back to my little teeny-tiny nuclear family and the two grandparents that I knew. I’ve made a life for myself essentially knowing about only two generations, drawing on what I respected and was proud of in those generations. I’m so proud of the grounding and sense of self that my parents and grandparents gave me. That sense of identity wasn’t so much about being able to go far back but about connecting to a history of struggle and commitment to issues of justice—the ethics with which you live your life. So the micro matters—that’s what’s important, that’s what you can get your teeth into. But then what do you do with the centuries?”

  I told her I had no answer to this question. She has millennia of documented ancestors, stretching back farther than any African American I know. But only she can decide what they mean to her, how the knowledge of their names and stories will shape her identity over time.

  Turning to our DNA testing, I told Elizabeth that her admixture results revealed that she is 66 percent European, 27 percent African, and 7 percent Native American. She told me that she had more or less expected this result, given what she knew from the genealogy. She had even heard stories, she said, that her maternal grandmother, Edith MacAlister, was part Native American—and though we could not verify these stories, they could well be true. She certainly does have a fairly significant amount of Native American ancestry, unlike most African Americans.

  We then began to look at some of the most interesting DNA results that I have ever seen. Elizabeth’s mitochondrial DNA belongs to a haplogroup called L0a. This is a subgroup of the most ancient haplogroup of all, L0, which arose about 150,000 years ago in Africa, probably in what is now Ethiopia. Over the millennia, offshoots of L0 arose in many different parts
of the African continent. Elizabeth’s originated about 55,000 years ago, and, ultimately, its members were very likely part of the Bantu migration just a few thousand years ago, one of the greatest migrations in human history. Between three and four thousand years ago, a small group of Bantu-speaking Africans migrated out of a core area in what we think is southern Cameroon and basically peopled a huge percentage of the rest of central and southern Africa, bringing a totally new genetic mixture to African populations. They carried their language and their genes west and then to the southeast, all the way to Mozambique.

  When geneticists compared Elizabeth’s mitochondrial DNA with everyone in the Family Tree DNA database, they found that she shares a genetic signature with thirteen people living today in Guinea-Bissau, eight in Gabon, seventeen in Cameroon, five in Ethiopia, and four in Angola. These are her genetic cousins. They all share a common ancestor in the past few thousand years. Another testing company, Roots for Real, which is based in Cambridge, England, also ran the results through their database, and they found that Elizabeth matched people living today in Nubia, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. The vast geographic spread in the distribution of these findings—she has matches all over Africa through her maternal line—shows just how far the Bantu migration went, how radically it changed Africa just a few thousand years ago.

  I showed Elizabeth’s results to two prominent slavery historians at Boston University, John Thornton and Linda Heywood. They worked with me on African American Lives, and I asked them to review Elizabeth’s data to see if they could narrow down the African origins of the first slave ancestor on her maternal line—the woman in her family who was first brought to the New World. They were able to rule out her matches in Nubia, Ethiopia, and Gabon because none of these countries was involved in the slave trade to Jamaica or to the United States. There was some slave trade with Cameroon, but it was insignificant. So that left us with either Angola or Guinea-Bissau. Elizabeth has more exact matches in Guinea-Bissau, but her haplogroup tends to be more common in Angola. Also, her oldest known ancestor on her maternal grandmother’s line was from Virginia, which, along with other southern states, received a high percentage of slaves from Angola. So based on our genealogical research on her mother’s side and her genetic analysis, Thornton and Heywood concluded that Elizabeth’s original female African ancestor most probably came from Angola, along with 24 percent of the ancestors of all the African American people. In addition, based on the history of the slave trade, Thornton and Heywood also concluded that Elizabeth’s ancestors probably lived near the Angolan coast, in part of what was known as the Lunda Empire, which sold large numbers of slaves, captured in wars with neighboring African tribes, to the Dutch and Portuguese.