The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  Scotland Yard, the FBI and the RCMP all came calling to try the test themselves. But the work was controversial; ethicists cautioned against a new age of racial profiling. They pictured police hunting suspects of certain colours based on DNA tests that might be wrong. People with African ancestors might look white, they charged, and those who look black might have more European ancestry than African. But other ethicists argued that DNA might be a more reliable way to generate physical descriptions than relying on live witnesses, whose reports are notoriously biased.

  For me the debate was academic; I knew what my family looked like. What caught my attention was that the same test police were using to catch criminals was available to the public for tracing “bio-geographical ancestry.” The Florida company claimed its test could provide an overview of the continental populations that had contributed to a person’s genome—East Asian, sub-Saharan African, European and Native American. It was the only test on the market at the time to scan points in all twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. With the apparent mix within my family, I wondered if those points would span the globe.

  My mother’s curiosity eventually got the better of her. I had started taking a notepad when I visited, interviewing my father about his family history. My mother couldn’t help but join in. Along with names and dates, she often knew details that my father had never heard, like why his 103-year-old Aunty Flo had never married, or how she had learned, even before my father, that John Abraham was a juggler.

  These sessions usually unfolded over pots of tea and often ended with my mother and me taking off for a walk in the park near their house. One day she started asking questions about DNA and how it worked.

  “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “that people in the same family can look so different? Look at Aunty Sarah. She had that red hair—no one else had the red hair. But see how it comes out so many years later. How does that happen?”

  We were pushing Jade in her stroller, following the path that runs along the creek. I started to pick my way through an explanation of how DNA is inherited. “Well, you know how a baby is made, how sperm carries the father’s DNA into the egg and it mixes with the mother’s?” I said, or something like that. And then we laughed, because I was giving my mother the sex talk. I wheeled through an ugly thicket of false starts before settling on analogy, comparing a woman’s DNA to a deck of playing cards that’s copied and shuffled and cut in half before it ends up in her mature egg. The sperm that invades the egg carries the father’s half-deck of DNA, which has also been copied and shuffled. When sperm and egg get together, they make a new life with a full deck, unlike any that has been dealt before or will be again. So there’s always a chance, I said, that a red-hair card belonging to some long-ago ancestor will get played.

  Coming from a family of regular poker players, this seemed to go over well. “Amazing,” my mother said.

  We walked on but hadn’t gone far before she asked the question that mattered most. “But how can anyone tell from your DNA where your ancestors came from?”

  By the mutations you carry, I told her. Each time that deck is copied and shuffled, changes can spring up in the DNA. Certain changes became common only in specific parts of the world—in China or Europe or Africa—mutations rarely seen anywhere else. So people who carry these certain mutations likely inherited them from ancestors who lived in those places.

  “All right,” my mother said, as we neared the playground. “Let’s see.”

  The great message that scientists delivered with the first draft maps of the human genome was one of harmony: we are all 99.9 percent genetically identical. At the level of DNA, Dolly Parton and the Dalai Lama look like twins. Race, they concluded, is nothing more than a social invention, with no basis in biology. There might be more genetic variation between two Greeks than between a Greek and a Swede, or between two men who look white when one carries the genes of an African forefather. Under the skin, we’re kin.

  Even so, many experts doubted that a mere 0.1 percent could account for the vibrant diversity of our species. A few years after the maps were in hand, scientist Alan Bernstein predicted, “That figure is going to come back to bite them in the ass.” Bernstein was president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research at the time, and he turned out to be right. The premise that so-called racial groupings were not absolute wasn’t wrong, but the estimate of our homogeneity was off by a full percent, or more, some researchers say. In the context of DNA, a script of three billion pairs of letters, 1 percent is a Grand Canyon of diversity—thirty million changes to a code in which even one can spell the difference between health and disease, life and death.

  Figuring out how these changes differed between populations became a priority for many researchers. Most were looking for differences between genes that would reveal why certain diseases affect some populations more than others, the way genetic glitches trigger high rates of sickle cell anemia in Africans or cystic fibrosis in Europeans. Others were asking more provocative, if not incendiary, questions around the role genes play in abilities. Why are so many Jews so smart; why are West Africans such brilliant sprinters and East Africans leaders in long-distance running?

  Others were using genetic mutations to map human history: how and when people migrated out of Africa to populate the planet, where they went and how they evolved into such a dazzling panoply of shapes, colours and sizes. Mark Shriver was one of those researchers, a young molecular anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University whose research had spun into the genetic ancestry test that DNAPrint was selling. Shriver had been compiling a catalogue of the unique genetic mutations that exist in populations, studying something called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPS (usually pronounced “snips”). They’re the typographical errors that can pop up in a genome during the copying and shuffling of the chromosomal deck of cards that goes on before conception.

  Nature is not perfect. With every new generation, typos creep into the code, resulting in a T where there used to be a C, for instance, or an extra A in place of a G. Sometimes these typos lead to maladies so disastrous they cause a miscarriage or early death. Others spread widely through a population, for all sorts of reasons. Some of these mutations gave their carriers a survival advantage, such as the one that allows Europeans to tolerate lactose from cow’s milk all through their adult lives, and the SNP that helps shield sub-Saharan Africans from malaria. Those who didn’t carry the mutation were more likely to die off. Or it may simply be that the initial carrier of the SNP had many children, who in turn passed on the mutation to future generations. Or, as Mark Shriver suggested the first time we spoke, it may be that the initial carrier’s mutation resulted in a trait many found attractive, upping the chances of winning at the mating game and passing that mutation on within the region.

  However a SNP finds its way across a population, certain SNPS have become what researchers call “ancestrally informative markers”—signposts in the genome associated with the regions where they are prevalent, and possibly originated. Testing these SNPS often turns up surprising results, Shriver said, and usually reinforces the idea that most of us are “racially mixed” even if we don’t look it. Shriver, a white guy, had learned that first-hand when DNA testing uncovered his African ancestry. It turns out his genome bears a certain mutation known as the Duffy Null allele, a gene variant that offers protection against malaria and is found almost exclusively in sub-Saharan populations. When we spoke, Shriver was developing a test to scan ten thousand of these ancestrally informative markers across the genome. But in the meantime, needing a place to start, I bought the 176-marker test that DNAPrint was offering for $250.

  I was keen to test my whole family—my parents, my siblings and me. I wondered what different combinations of their genes my parents had passed down to each of us and whether our DNA would be as different as we each look. Would some of us bear biological evidence of a Chinese or Jamaican heritage? Three generations later, would our ancestral markers bear any trace of the jug
gler or the Captain?

  My siblings and me on holiday in the English countryside before leaving for Canada in 1972. From the left, Conrad, me (on his lap), Kevin and Christine, with Dad.

  There are things you can count on when my family gathers for an evening at my parents’ house. Shoes will pile up at the front door like discards at a bowling alley. Someone will ask for the good Scotch and one of my parents will disappear trying to find it. My father will turn on the stereo and someone will turn it up loud.

  That night it was “Volare” blasting through the house as I set up a makeshift clinic in the kitchen. Eventually everyone ends up in the kitchen. I set out the DNA kits on the table while my father lined up the booze on the counter—wine, Johnnie Walker, vodka, soda and, that night, the ice bucket. When the ice bucket is out, its an occasion.

  I liked the idea of holding the inaugural swabs on my mother’s birthday. Birthdays were often subject to my grandmother’s wishful thinking—Nana Gladys felt they ought to coincide with major holidays. She always celebrated her own birthday on Christmas Eve, even after my father found documents proving she was actually born three days earlier. Nana also used to insist that my mother was born on Remembrance Day, even though her birth certificate said November 12. Collecting the first round of DNA on the actual anniversary of my mother’s birth felt somehow like a small jab at the truth.

  My sister volunteered to go first. Growing up, we used to play an absurd game to fill in the gaps of our ancestry, each of us spinning a yarn more far-fetched than the other. In the days before the swab we’d bet five dollars on who would be most surprised by the results. I thought it might be Dad, she thought Mum. We both assumed that nothing would surprise either of us.

  Christine sat down at the table as I opened the packages that had arrived from Sarasota in a big white envelope. Its return address was Coconut Avenue, which made me picture lab techs in Hawaiian shirts spinning a little reggae along with DNA in their centrifuges. Each kit contained two “cytobrushes,” one for each cheek. They were white, nearly as long as a toothbrush, and had stiff, jagged cotton ends for scraping buccal cells off the inner cheek. Buccal swabs became popular in the DNA-collecting field because their storage requires no refrigeration or preservative. They don’t always provide as much reliable DNA as a blood sample, but they’re more appealing to study subjects than a prick in the flesh.

  I peeled off the plastic and handed the first stick to my sister as Jade buzzed into the kitchen with her arms extended like an airplane. “What’s that?” she asked, stopping to watch my sister jiggling the stick in her mouth. “Is it a Popsicle?”

  “Okay, I’ve gone up and down fifteen times,” my sister said. “Should I keep going?”

  “Can I have a Popsicle?” Jade asked.

  “Yes,” I told my sister, “keep going.”

  My mother came into the kitchen. “Oh, you really are doing it?” she said. “I don’t know, Carolyn—we’re drinking.”

  I was beginning to see this as a blessing. All DNA clinics should serve whisky with their screening tests, to wash away the apprehension.

  “She’s serious. She’s really doing it,” Mum said again. “I should brush my teeth.”

  I read my mother the instructions when she returned. They outlined the potential for unlikely injuries associated with swabbing, such as slashing your inner cheek and subsequent infection. My sister pointed out that there was also a chance that someone would miss her mouth completely and jab herself in the eye.

  My mother didn’t laugh. She looked very serious. Maybe it was the video camera that Stephen had set up to record the event. She took long, hard, deliberate strokes, as though with enough pressure she could erase the past and any anxieties that came with it.

  Conrad was happy to open wide, which was something. Genes had not been kind to my eldest brother. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the mid-eighties and it had cost him dearly: his children, his marriage, his home and career. Life since had been an odyssey, an endless run-on sentence of hospital stays, impulsive globetrotting, medication and too few merciful stretches of stability. The most recent years had been better. He has his own apartment, friends, hobbies and the tonic of routines to keep him grounded. And as much as his brain chemistry can let him down, his encyclopedic memory can be a marvel.

  As the eldest of us four, he had spent more time with my mother’s father, Papa Freddie, than any of us. He remembered hearing our grandfather talk about how much he had longed to sail to Jamaica, to meet the Captain’s family—his family—and toil on the Crooks plantation. “He wanted to sweat in his father’s fields,” Conrad told me once. That night, as he passed back the swabbing stick, he asked me if I thought DNA might lead us to that plantation.

  “Maybe, Con,” I said. “I hope so.”

  By the time my father took the chair he was in a fine mood, as he tends to be when the family gets together. The alcohol has little to do with it; my father sets up a hospitable bar but he has never been much of a drinker. I did a story once about a gene mutation that people of Asian descent tend to carry, one that blocks the metabolism of alcohol, making them particularly vulnerable to the effects of even a small amount. Any more than two glasses of anything and Dad sings “Pennies from Heaven.”

  As I suspected, my father had championed the family project from the get-go. He even did his bit to persuade my mother to give DNA a try. “What are you worried about, Tweet?” he’d said to her one afternoon, when we were in their car, stuck in traffic. (My father rarely calls my mother by her first name, which is Thelma, unless he is talking about her to someone else.) “DNA will be a much more reliable way to find out about family history than depending on hearsay or folklore,” he added. My father wrinkled his nose when he said folklore, as if the word itself smelled of something rotten. “This is science, Tweet.”

  Before the first swab session, he had begun lending me his favourite books on Indian history, pointing out passages with special relevance, such as Nehru’s address to the nation on the eve of independence, when my father had huddled with his family around the radio, fearful of what the change would bring. He seemed to feel about DNA the way he felt about books: at least one reliable version of our story was written there. I also think using science to explore history appealed to the engineer in him, although my father usually balks at the stereotype. He spent most of his career as an executive in the energy field for large engineering firms, and spent more time at boardroom tables and power lunches than with blueprints. But on the home front where my mother managed the people, my father was the chief engineer, constructing desks, and wall units, a conservatory, and cubicle shelving to hold the shirts he irons into factory-perfect rectangles. My father is no expert in genetics, but he could appreciate its methods, its attempt at precision. That it might now, in his ninth decade of life, reveal his mysterious grandfather to him was, he told me once, a gift.

  He swabbed slowly, one cheek, then the other, and handed me the sticks.

  From behind the video camera, Stephen told my father he could now be cloned.

  Dad laughed loudly and started out of the kitchen. But then he froze, turned back and stared straight into the camera. His eyes were moist behind his glasses as he raised his snifter of cognac high above his head. “Well, here’s to you, grandfather.”

  I was tucking his swabs into their sealed packages and stopped to watch him for a moment, suddenly realizing—and fearing—the expectations my father had riding on his DNA. But then I heard him return to the living room to tease my mother.

  “Now that they have my DNA, they can clone me,” he said, “which means there will be a few Dudleys running around. You better make sure you know the true one.”

  “How will I know that?” my mother said wearily.

  “How will you know? Oh, I’ll have to tell you in private.”

  “Oh, Dud,” she said.

  A few weeks before my mother’s birthday, my brother Kevin and I had been at a soccer fundraising dinner for my
niece. We were waiting in the buffet line with our plates when he asked me why I was so interested in DNA testing—if I thought it truly represented who we were as people, if a mere string of molecules encoded our souls. Success had given my brother the luxury of time to mull over some of life’s big questions from varied and exotic perspectives. He travels widely and devours books on world history, mysticism and philosophy.

  His was a valid question. But even if the answers DNA provided were imperfect, I told him, it was already clear that it revealed the story of human evolution. By those same measures it was possible that DNA could tell us something about where we had come from in the more recent past.

  But would that change anything, he asked, about me, or us as a family, to know those things about our heritage?

  I didn’t think so, I said. But the truth was, I didn’t know.

  I understood why Kevin decided to take a pass on the DNA test that night. Our talk had left me wondering if I’d leapt to the far side of biological reductionism, searching for our identity in the filaments of ourselves. By the time the results came back, I would have many of the same misgivings.

  3

  BLACK ARTS AND RED HERRINGS

  My great-grandmother Bridget Meek Crooks believed she could communicate with the dead. I presume she must have felt someone from the other side pick up, or she wouldn’t have kept calling. Even when she travelled, she took a homemade Ouija board with her. If no one staunchly religious or easily spooked was in sight, she would pull out her handcut letters of the alphabet, arrange them on a flat surface and set to work channelling. My mother was twelve the first time she saw it—her father’s mother sitting bolt upright, eyes shut and chanting, trying to summon the dearly departed to the kitchen table. It was 1945 and Nana Bridget had come to look after my mother and her six siblings at their home in Poona, south of Bombay. Nana Gladys was in hospital, recovering from the miscarriage of what would have been her eighth child.