According to Thornton and Heywood, the fact that Oprah’s DNA has been found among the Gullah people suggests that her first matrilineal ancestor came to the United States through South Carolina and that that woman’s owner later moved down to Mississippi, leading eventually to the birth of Oprah’s oldest known female ancestor, Henrietta Winters, born in Mississippi around 1850. From South Carolina we can trace a path back across the Atlantic to the region of Africa now called Liberia. We don’t know who owned Oprah’s first enslaved matrilineal ancestor in America, nor do we know her name. But taking the genetic evidence and this historical evidence together, both Thornton and Heywood agreed that it is highly likely that Oprah was descended from the Kpelle people in Liberia and that her ancestor most likely either was captured in a battle or became a slave as the result of a marital dispute, as was custom in this region. Thus I felt very confident telling Oprah that she shares ancestry with the three hundred thousand Kpelle people who still live in the rain forests of central Liberia.
Oprah was stunned by the news. “That’s me,” she said wistfully, looking at the charts of her DNA that I had handed her. “I’m Kpelle. I feel empowered by this.” And no doubt the Kpelle will welcome Oprah as a long-lost sister, just as warmly as the Zulu have done.
Oprah’s admixture results were just as surprising. As we have seen throughout this book, many African Americans claim a considerable degree of Native American ancestry, but most have little or none. Oprah defies this trend; her admixture results are 8 percent Native American and 3 percent Asian. Since these two results can code for each other, we can conclude that Oprah has 11 percent Native American ancestry, placing her among the 5 percent of African Americans who have a significant amount of this genetic heritage. And this is probably the result of the proximity of blacks and Indians in her ancestors’ home in Mississippi in the early nineteenth century, before the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.
This concluded our research. When it had begun, Oprah had lived for the past two decades as one of the most famous people on earth, but also as someone who was unable to name her great-great-grandmother, much less assert the identity of her maternal ancestor’s original African tribe. By the time we said good-bye, all that had changed. She shared an exact genetic match with an African human being who identifies herself as a Kpelle today. She was the heir of Constantine, a remarkable entrepreneur; of Amanda, a devoted educator; of Elmore and Beatrice, who risked all they had for civil rights. Taken together, the recovery of these ancestors—even the bare-bones stories that we’ve been able to piece together—help to explain why it would perhaps not surprise some of these ancestors that their descendant had become the most famous African American in the world.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (New York: Crown, 2009).
PART VI
READING PLACES
THE IDEA EXPLORED in the previous section, that black identity is not a monolith, extends to every corner of the world, wherever the African Diaspora has taken its descendants. Many years before Gates ventured into Latin America to make his documentary, Black in Latin America, he had traveled extensively in Europe and Africa, recording what he found in essays, books, and films.
One idea that recurs frequently in these pieces is that homes have to be built; they do not come ready-made. He goes to Africa, expecting to fall naturally into an ancestral home, but his daughters are quick to remind him of the foreignness of the place. He tracks his different impressions of the West Indian population of London over the course of twenty years: a group that had seemed ill at ease and unrooted during his first visit in the 1970s is very much settled, at home, two decades later. Even Harlem, which has been mythologized as “organically” black, had to be cultivated to become the nurturing artistic environment that it was for so many years (and is again). South America and the Caribbean, which, having received far more Africans as slaves than did North America, reflect black influences throughout their cultures—even as Afrodescendants are disproportionately on the bottom rungs of society.
The African Diaspora is a history of dislocation and relocation. In these selections, Gates looks at the ways in which people of African descent have transformed and been transformed by their diverse locations the world over.
Abby Wolf
AFRICA, TO ME
I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years—in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, if I die the next day, I should be satisfied.
—NEWPORT GARDNER, ON THE EVE OF HIS EMIGRATION TO LIBERIA IN 1826
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
—COUNTEE CULLEN, “HERITAGE”
In view of the present world catastrophe, I want to recall the history of Africa. I want to retell its story so far as distorted science has not concealed and lost it. I want to appeal to the past in order to explain the present. I know how unpopular this method is. What have we moderns, we wisest of the wise, to do with the dead past: Yet, “All that tread the globe, are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom,” and who are we, stupid blunderers at the tasks these brothers sought to do—who are we to forget them? So now I ask you to turn with me back five thousand years and more and ask, what is Africa and who are Negroes?
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, THE WORLD AND AFRICA
By almost common consent, the modern world seems determined to pilfer Africa of glory. It was not enough that her children have been scattered over the globe, clothed in garments of shame—humiliated and oppressed—but her merciless foes weary themselves in plundering the tombs of our revered sires, and in obliterating their worthy deeds, which were inscribed by fame, upon the pages of ancient history.
—HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET
“SO, DADDY, WHAT in the world am I supposed to have in common with them?” my younger daughter, Liza, shouted at me within the confines of our suffocating train cabin, furnished by the BBC and Zambia National Railways. It was more a cry of frustration than anger. In 1994, we were on a 3,000-mile train trip, filming an episode of Great Railway Journeys for the BBC and PBS.
“Nothing!” her older sister, Maggie, responded on my behalf, hoping to preempt any possible response premised on our commonality of ancestors, of black skin, thick lips, or kinky hair. “They live in mud huts,” she continued, “they are covered with dust, their clothes are ragged . . . they don’t even wear shoes!”
What do we have in common? I allowed myself to wonder in silence, seeking to avoid the smug intensity of my daughters’ gaze as they dared me to try to think of a convincing response, even while some part of them might have been desperately hoping that I could.
As, I sat there, amused at my daughters’ honesty, despairing to think of a clever one-liner that would deflect the enormous challenge of their question, these couplets from Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” standard in black literary anthologies, kept dancing through my mind:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea, . . .
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
And then that curiously ridiculous refrain:
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
I had never really appreciated Countee Cullen’s poem before. I had never actually liked the sentiments it expresses about our African heritage—the emotions ranging from ambivalence, at best, to revulsion, at worst—shared all too frequently by my American Negro ancestors and my contemporaries, their African American descendants, in the privacy of their families and in ritual settings like the church, beauty parlors or barber shops, sororities or fraternal orders. The African American’s relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men c
rowded into Bishop Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa. Inexplicably, I suddenly thought of my father, who proudly received the “I ain’t left nuthin’ in Africa” award every year at my mother’s family reunion, and I burst into laughter.
“It’s not funny,” one of my unrepentantly American daughters, now exasperated, shouted at me as I reflected on our standing family joke about my father’s aversion to Afros, dashikis, and most things “African.”
“I know, I know,” I halfheartedly pretended to apologize through tears of laughter and sadness. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure that I could answer that question honestly without resorting to platitudes or appeals to sentimentality.
Four years later, I found myself in the Sudan, in the village of Q’ab, an oasis in the heart of the Nubian Desert long believed to hold the key to a miracle cure for rheumatism. In a run-down schoolroom, the elderly headmaster, Mohammed Ali Hammeto, carefully explained in Arabic that the cure had proven to come from the village sand dune and that each year hundreds of people flock to receive it. They are buried up to their necks in the scorching sand for twenty minutes a day over the course of a week, covered by a little awning to keep the sun off their heads. As their bodies sweat, the mineral deposits in the sand are believed to work miracles. The headmaster said he has seen crippled men walk strong from the village. Throughout the Sudan, this dune at Q’ab is renowned: many have sought its curative powers at other dunes, but to no avail. Q’ab alone holds the secret.
As I prepared to be buried, I addressed the assembled schoolchildren and the villagers, explaining that I was an American, a descendant of slaves, and that I had come to make a film so that Americans and Europeans would know more about the glories of ancient Nubia. A brief silence followed the translation of my speech into Arabic, broken suddenly by a woman who shouted at the top of her voice: “Africa is on your face!” Everyone applauded and laughed. As I looked at the crowd of these multicolored people of Q’ab—their skin medium brown to the silkiest ebony, their hair kinky and tight and soft and straight—it suddenly occurred to me that there are many ways of wearing Africa on our faces, that my daughters wear the great continent’s stunning variety in their own ways, while I wear it in still another.
My father and his father, both of whom I knew, and his father’s father, whom I did not, were legendary in our family for scorning any sort of wistful romance with Africa. My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as Tarzan and in programs such as Ramar of the Jungle and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Cullen’s lamentation of being “three centuries removed from the scenes his fathers loved” was not in all honesty shared by my father and his father, and practically all of the American Negroes I ever met in the fifties or early sixties.
For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by “Africa,” by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony. I turned ten in 1960, the great year of African independence. Without prompting from my teachers or, Lord knows, from my father, I memorized the names of each independent African country and its new leader, learning to pronounce these polysyllables just as our evening news commentator did on television each night. By the time I was twelve, I had become obsessed with Stanley and Livingstone, with Cecil Rhodes’s unfulfilled quest to create a republic from the Cape to Cairo (suitable, he was quick to add, for the comfortable existence of any white man, a part I chose to ignore), and the painstaking persistence of the Leakeys in looking for evidence of the origins of the human family among fragments of bone and tools and utensils sifted from the East African soil. Could I have been the only black person who wanted to throw a party every time the Leakeys identified still another toe bone that lent credence to their claim that all of humanity had its birth in darkest Africa? Peking Man and Cro-Magnon be damned! Such was my passion for “Africa,” a place I knew primarily through the words and pictures of my geography books.
My father’s feeling—shared, I feared, by my two daughters on that sweltering afternoon on the Zambian train—of complete and apparently unambivalent disconnection from Africa has a painfully long history among “African Americans” (many of whom, if truth be told, have never grown comfortable with calling ourselves “black,” let alone “African”). Phillis Wheatley, the very first African to publish poetry in the English language, gave voice to this anxiety as early as 1773, even before it occurred to her to use her powerful pen to indict slavery and European racism: “Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,” she wrote, a land, most probably in Gambia or Senegal, from which she was abducted when she was six or seven. In an earlier poem, Wheatley had called Africa “The land of errors and Egyptian gloom,” thanking the “Father of mercy” for bringing “me in safety from those dark abodes” that were the Africa not of her memory but of the Enlightenment imagination of eighteenth-century Europe and America.1
“Thank God for slavery,” Richard Pryor would outrageously exclaim more than 200 years later, at the end of a devastatingly humorous account of his first visit to Africa. He unwittingly summarized one persistent view among African Americans that no amount of wishful thinking or “political correctness” can seem to wash away entirely, perhaps because its pedigree includes far too many distinguished black intellectuals. Even the redoubtable Frederick Douglass, who as early as 1854 ventured that the liberation of the American Negro slave was inextricably intertwined with the “liberation” of knowledge about ancient African civilization, especially the sub-Saharan “Negroid” origins of Egyptian civilization and what he called the fundamental unity of all Negro peoples—even he preferred to embrace “Africa” more as an imaginative construct than as an actual place, full of tens of millions of black human beings. In fact, in 1872, Douglass wondered aloud “why anyone should leave this land of progress and enlightenment and seek a home amid the death-dealing malaria of a barbarous continent.”2 The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. Writing early in the nineteenth century, a group of free blacks in Philadelphia adopted the following resolution:
Resolved that, without art, without science, without a proper knowledge of government, to cast into the savage wilds of Africa the free people of color seems to us the circuitous route through which they must return to perpetual bondage.3
Douglass would give voice to still another cause for anxiety among African Americans toward their ancestral kinsmen: slavery, and its complex historical causes, including black African complicity in its origins. “Depend upon it,” Douglass wrote,
the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage, and pocketing the ready cash for them will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia. We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave-trade than to stay here to work against it.4
The relation between the descendants of the slaves and their African forebears, Douglass argues, had long been severed by the latter’s willing participation in the commodification of their own brothers and sisters. The Negro American was sui generis, not an extension of a noble past filled with black gods and kings, but a new being, shaped on the American continent just as surely as his neighbors of European descent had been. He was urged to forget his putative African past and create a future as an American; as Cullen would put it in “Heritage,”
What is last year’s snow to me,
Last year’s anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set—
To acknowledge that attitudes such as these run deep and wide in Afric
an American culture (assuring my father and my daughters a vast and distinguished company) is not to deny the contrary view, of Africa’s and Africans’ long and distinguished traditions. The 3,000 black men who crowded into Bishop Allen’s church in Philadelphia in 1817 felt compelled to protest colonization because several black leaders such as Paul Cuffe, James Forten, and Allen himself were quite enthusiastic about it. However, Douglass contemporaries Martin R. Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, among many others, celebrated the connections they believed to exist between American Negroes and the African continent. For Blyden, Africa was “the negro’s home.” “Your place,” Blyden advised his fellow American Negroes, “has been assigned you in the universe as African, and there is no room for you as anything else.” Nor was there a geographical locale in the world more appropriate and suitable for the Negro than Africa:
Africa is his, if he will. He may ignore it. He may consider that he is divested of any right to it; but this will not alter his relations to that country, or impair the integrity of his title. He may be content to fight against the fearful odds in this country; but he is the proprietor of a vast domain. He is entitled to a whole continent by his constitution and antecedents.5
For Blyden, the future itself belonged to Africa and the Africans, because “Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world . . . it may be that [Europeans] may have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith.”6 In a gesture that must have struck his colleagues as quite bold if not outrageous, Blyden declared that the Dark Continent, with its millions of supposedly benighted Africans, would be the salvation of a decaying and decadent Western civilization.
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