The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Through DNA, we had therefore unlocked a crucial piece of Elizabeth’s heritage. Despite all the white Europeans in her family tree, her mitochondrial DNA goes straight back to Africa.

  It was now time for us to solve a few mysteries. Our genealogical research had been able to identify Elizabeth’s third-great-grandfather on her mother’s line, Robert Bond, the ship’s cook from Bermuda who settled in Liverpool. He disappears from the documentary record sometime after 1851, perhaps returning to his home in Bermuda. We had been unable to trace his line back any further using available records. So we turned to DNA in the hope of learning more. But to study Elizabeth’s maternal great-great-grandfather’s DNA, we needed to test a male directly descended from him in her mother’s family, because as a woman, Elizabeth does not carry any Y-DNA at all. One of her male cousins agreed to let us test him, and the results indicated that Elizabeth’s maternal grandfather’s Y-DNA belonged to the haplogroup called E1b1a. This haplogroup dominates the region south of the Sahara. It’s most common among Bantu-speaking Africans, and it reaches levels of up to 90 percent among the Mandinka and the Yoruba people. Its distribution throughout Africa is often used to chart the expansion of the great Bantu migration throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It is also the most common haplogroup among African American males. About 60 percent of African American men can trace their ancestry to this branch of the family tree.

  According to John Thornton and Linda Heywood, many of the Bantu speakers who share the E1b1a haplogroup come from Mozambique. But only 2 percent of the slaves who arrived in the New World came from that region of Africa. And none went to Bermuda. So John and Linda focused on another area where this haplogroup is common, one that did contribute greatly to the Bermuda slave trade. And they concluded that the male line of the Bond family hails from the Senegambia region, in the country that is today known as Sierra Leone, which is dominated by the Mende people. Our consultants’ databases added credence to this theory when they revealed that Elizabeth’s male cousin matches haplogroups with two people living today in Sierra Leone, both of whom are Mende.

  There was one further mystery to try and solve. We wanted to see if DNA could tell us anything about the identity of Elizabeth’s paternal great-grandfather—Clifford Alexander, Sr.’s father—the man who, according to family lore, was a Jewish merchant named James residing in Jamaica at the turn of the twentieth century. To map the Y-DNA of Elizabeth’s paternal ancestors, we collected a sample from her father. It shows that her paternal line belongs to the haplogroup called J1e, which is a subgroup of the haplogroup J, which originated in the Near East about twenty thousand years ago, during the Ice Age. Of special significance, J1 is the most common haplogroup among Ashkenazi Jews. About 40 percent of Ashkenazi men have chromosomes in J1.

  Looking at the Family Tree DNA database, we found people matching this Y-DNA in many places today: there were single matches in Spain, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the Syrian Arab Republic. And all these matches identified themselves as Ashkenazi Jews. This is very strong evidence that Elizabeth’s great-grandfather was in fact an Ashkenazi Jew.

  Elizabeth was not surprised at this discovery. She had long believed the family stories about her grandfather’s being the illegitimate child of a Jewish merchant, and as indicated earlier, there had been some circumstantial evidence to support these stories. Elizabeth was very surprised, however, by what else we learned from her father’s DNA. Her father’s Y-DNA, I told her, pointed to an Ashkenazi Jewish background, and his mitochondrial DNA also pointed to Europe. This, as Elizabeth and I both knew, was highly unusual. Almost 95 percent of the African American people can trace their mitochondrial DNA straight back to Africa because it is comparatively rare to be descended from a white woman who had children with a black man. Elizabeth’s own mitochondrial DNA, for example, show that her mother’s line goes to Angola. But her father’s DNA reveals that his maternal line doesn’t go to Africa at all. He belongs to the haplogroup called U6a, which is European, just like his father’s line. And he has exact mitochondrial matches with people living today in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. There is no doubt he is descended from a white woman. We don’t know her name, we don’t know the story, but we have incontrovertible genetic evidence that there is a story. Clifford Alexander, civil rights pioneer, is descended on both sides from white people. This is true for about 1 percent of the African American people. Anybody who looked solely at his Y-DNA and his mtDNA, in fact, would think he was a European man.

  “Well, it just gets curiouser and curiouser,” said Elizabeth. “But of course, if all of us were known only by our DNA, we’d have a whole different American history.” I told her that truer words were never spoken.

  The autosomal DNA testing conducted by the Broad Institute revealed that Elizabeth is a distant cousin of Stephen Colbert, the television host and satirist who was also profiled in Faces of America. They share eight million identical base pairs on chromosome 2, pairs 160 to 168. Elizabeth was delighted with this news and excitedly told me that she had once been on Stephen’s show and felt a connection with him (that he is also extraordinarily well read and profoundly insightful is another link they share). But she and I, I think, were both still reeling from the amount of information we had gathered and processed together. We had been able to show her that some of her most treasured family stories were true. Some we had verified with a paper trail, some with DNA. And we had uncovered new stories—some wilder than anybody in her family ever could have fantasized.

  “I think there’s something wonderful about having certain sureties disrupted,” she said, looking at her father’s DNA test results. “Especially in the middle of one’s life, to learn that certain things that you always thought were in place actually are much more entangled and complex and deeper than you ever could have known—that’s completely fascinating. I just wish I knew all of the pieces. We happen to know a tremendous amount about Europe in my particular case, but there are still pieces that we don’t know. And what does it mean if you grow up not knowing any of this—a culture that teaches you not necessarily to identify with any of that, not to dream that any of that could mean anything, could have any connection to you? There’s something fabulously disruptive that shakes up the orders of things, when you draw the line in a different way than others might expect.”

  She considered further: “But what does that change for me? Well, it gives me a lot more to wonder about and to think about. And it gives me a more complicated way of thinking, not just about black people and blackness but about human questions, human communities, human families—and very, very tangled and fascinating human histories.

  “I find myself thinking about Charlemagne,” she said, as I rose to leave her home in New Haven. “He was a learned man, able perhaps to prognosticate about the direction of human history. Could he have imagined me, in his wildest, wildest, wildest imaginings into the future?”

  My guess, I said, is no.

  SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

  OPRAH WINFREY

  OPRAH WINFREY IS one of the most famous people on earth. I wanted to involve her in this project from the moment I conceived it, because she fascinates me, as she apparently does just about everyone else. I admire her tremendously for what she’s accomplished, who she is, and what she represents to African Americans. There’s never been anybody in our history quite like her. This fuels my curiosity at its most basic level. I am dying to know how this woman, a descendant of illiterate slaves in Mississippi, dirt-poor scratchers of the soil, became the inimitable “Oprah,” a cultural icon wherever human beings watch TV or film.

  I’m also, I must admit, quite curious about the possible sources of certain aspects of her character. I think that Oprah somehow is as close to an Everyperson as any human being has ever been—she appeals to white people and black people and just about every other shade of people, male
s as well as females. She has an uncanny capacity to name the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, to identify the key issues that most concern us as human beings at any given moment. And I want to know where that capacity comes from—what her family tree might tell us, if anything, about the source of this extraordinarily rare capacity for empathy and communication. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure. There never is. There are tens of thousands of biographies of famous people, and none of them explain their subject fully. Yet each can teach us something, bringing us perhaps just a little closer to an explanation that makes sense. And that’s what I set out to do here: get a little closer to an understanding of what makes Oprah tick by looking at her ancestors. I got a lot more than I bargained for.

  Oprah Gail Winfrey was born January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, a rural town just north of Jackson. Her parents were poor, young, and unmarried. Her father, Vernon Winfrey, was twenty-one years old when he fathered Oprah. Her mother, Vernita Lee, was just nineteen. Both came from families that had been in this area in Mississippi since the days of slavery. And like many African Americans of their day, they both fled the rural South—part of the Great Migration of blacks looking for better economic opportunities in northern cities. But their journeys took very different paths.

  Vernon Winfrey served in the army, got an honorable discharge, and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, taking with him the work ethic that he had learned on his father’s farm. By the late 1950s, he was reaping the benefits of his decision to go north. He ran his own barbershop in Nashville—which he still does and at which he works every day—and his own house.

  By contrast, Vernita moved to Milwaukee in 1954 and felt compelled to leave her infant behind for several years, to be raised by her maternal grandparents, Hattie Mae and Earlist Lee. Oprah had little understanding of why her family had been torn apart. She was told that her mother had moved to Milwaukee to have “a better life” there. She grew up confused about basic aspects of her family. But she has vivid, formative memories of those years she spent with her grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee. And it seems that right from the start she knew she would grow up to achieve more than the Jim Crow South was allowing her family to achieve.

  “I remember,” Oprah said, “standing on the back porch and looking through the screen door, and my grandmother was boiling clothes in a big black pot. And she said, ‘Oprah Gail, I want you to pay attention to me now. I want you to watch me, because one day you’re gonna have to learn how to do this for yourself.’ And I watched and looked like I was paying attention but distinctly recall a feeling that ‘No, I’m not. This will not be my life.’ She worked for a white family and used to always say to me, ‘What you want to do is grow up and get yourself some good white folks. You want to get good white folks, like me.’ Because her white folks let her bring clothes home, and many of the things that we had came from her good white folks. And I think her idea of good white folks was just that they give you things and you get to bring food home. But I also think it meant for her that you at least got to keep a piece of your dignity—a piece—and that’s the best you could do. And so she’d say, ‘I want you to grow up and get some good white folks.’ And, you know, I regret that she didn’t live to see that I did get some good white folks workin’ for me, yeah. She couldn’t imagine this life.”

  Oprah was observing firsthand the rural poverty that drove so many African Americans northward and the forces of racism that permeated every aspect of life in the Jim Crow South. But Kosciusko was also the only place she’d ever called home, and before she was old enough fully to understand its limitations, her mother insisted that she join her in the North. And so the six-year-old Oprah moved to Milwaukee. The difference between life in Mississippi and life in Milwaukee was profound, and the experience was deeply traumatic for her.

  Prior to the move, Oprah says she had no relationship with or memory of her mother. “I’d only been raised by my grandmother,” she said. “I knew I had a mother, but all those years my primary relationship was with my grandmother, and all of a sudden just one day I’m packed up and put in a car and told, ‘You’re gonna go live with your mother now.’ It was horrible. But something inside me clicked. I knew that I was going to have to take care of myself—that I didn’t have my grandmother anymore.”

  In Milwaukee, Oprah’s mother was collecting welfare, working as a maid to earn a bit of extra money—and starting a new family. “My mother had another child,” remembered Oprah. “And she was living in the home of a woman named Ms. Miller. And Ms. Miller was a colored lady, but a very light-skinned colored lady who did not like colored people.”

  Oprah began to cry at the memory of that household. “I instantly knew that Ms. Miller did not like me because of the color of my skin,” she said. “I was too dark, and Ms. Miller would say it. My half sister Pat was five years younger than me, and she was light-skinned, and my mother was staying there because Ms. Miller loved my half sister. And I was put out on the porch to sleep. I wasn’t even allowed in the house to sleep, and it was because I was brown-skinned, which didn’t compute for me because my mother was brown-skinned, too. But I realized she was okay to Ms. Miller because she had Pat.”

  I found this story very moving—and deeply illustrative of the horrible ways that African Americans have internalized racism, the ways we’ve visited pain on each other. It is an unfortunate but vital part of our collective history, an experience that, sadly, is shared by thousands and thousands of people. Our people have long been color-struck. I know because I experienced those feelings myself. I remember, as a kid, being proud that my father was visibly mixed—that his whole side of the Gates family was light. Many of them even looked white; some could—and did—“pass,” and they had “good hair,” straight hair. And I thought that was wonderful. You didn’t want to look like Nat King Cole, even with his beautiful process, his glistening chemically straightened hair. You didn’t want to be too “dark.”

  Oprah recalls sensing this situation the minute she walked into the house where her mother was living. Nevertheless, she was powerless to change things—and her life began to spin out of control. Between the ages of six and fourteen, she moved back and forth between Milwaukee and Nashville, alternating between the homes of her mother and father, growing ever more isolated until disaster struck.

  “I was nine years old,” she said, her voice trembling. “And I got sent back to Milwaukee for the summer and ended up staying there, because my mother had said that she was going to marry her boyfriend and we were going to be a family. But the summer of my ninth year, things changed immensely for me, because I was raped by the boyfriend of my mother’s cousin, who my mother was also living with. He became a constant sexual molester of mine. I thought it was my fault. I thought I was the only person that had ever happened to, that it would not be safe for me to tell. And so I was sexually molested from the time I was ten to the time I was fourteen in that house.”

  This monster abused Oprah publicly and openly, leaving unimaginable scars. “He practically told everybody,” she recalled. “He’d say, ‘I’m in love with Oprah. I’m gonna marry her, she’s smarter than all of you.’ He would say it, and we’d go off to places together. Everybody knew it. And they just chose to look the other way. They were in denial.”

  Alone, with no one to trust or confide in, Oprah saw her adolescence become a living hell. She wouldn’t fully understand the profound trauma of these events for many years. Indeed, there was a time in the black community when the sexual molestation of children was considered to be something alien to the black experience, something that happened only in white families, like suicide, supposedly. “I was about forty when I stopped thinking it was my fault,” she says. “I got all my therapy on The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

  School was Oprah’s only respite, a place where she could feel safe and in control. Her grandmother, Hattie Lee, had taught her to read at an early age, and this gave her a great advantage. “I’d grown up reading,” Oprah recalled, “and
when I went to my kindergarten class, on the first day of kindergarten I was so bored. I thought, I’m gonna lose my mind with these kids sitting there with their ABC blocks. So I wrote my kindergarten teacher a letter. I sat down and I wrote, ‘Dear Miss New.’ And I wrote down all the words that I knew. I said, ‘I know words.’ I knew ‘Mississippi,’ ‘hippopotamus,’ ‘Nicodemus.’ I wrote down all the big words I knew. And so she said, ‘Who did this?’ And I got marched off to the principal’s office, and I got put in the first grade the next day. And then they skipped me to second because I was such a good reader.”

  This was an integrated school. Oprah never went to a segregated school. But Miss New was a black teacher. And the fact that Oprah’s first teacher in kindergarten was a black teacher deeply impressed her. “If she had been white,” Oprah wondered, “would I have had the courage to write that letter? I don’t know. I remember going home and saying, ‘I have a colored teacher.’ And she was colored like me. She was brown-skinned. So I felt like I could connect to her and that she would understand me. And so I got myself out of that kindergarten class.”