There’s a saying in the Nilgiri Hills about the longevity of the people who live there: that on one hill they live into their eighties, on another into their nineties, and on the tallest hill they never die. My parents could believe there was truth to that when they met Aunty Flo again. She was living in the small tea town of Coonoor with Julie’s granddaughter Hazel, and at 103 she had the stamina of someone in her prime. Up and down she’d go, climbing the steep footpaths to the market in town, a tawny slip of a woman with a thin halo of white hair. She shopped, cooked and insisted on making my parents lunch. For dessert she served pears and plums she had preserved herself. My mother asked if she had learned how to can from her sister, Julie, or if her father had taught her, since Julie had told her he had made his own candied peel from the local fruits. But Aunty Flo said she could tell them nothing at all about her father, that she didn’t remember him. She had been a child when he left.
Any distant memories Aunty Flo did have seemed to seize her in odd jags. Sometimes she would suddenly take my father’s hands in her own, clutch them tightly and gaze into his eyes. “Albert’s son!” she would say, beaming. “Albert’s son!” At other times, she would remember an old flame. My mother had heard Flo had always been in love with a local man by the name of Leo Enos, but that Julie had never permitted them to marry. In the end, neither she nor Leo ever did.
Sometimes, Aunty Flo seemed confused. “Where is my sister Mary?” she asked them.
“You mean your sister Julie,” my father replied.
“My sister, Mary,” she would insist. “Where is Mary?”
My father assumed that his old Aunty’s mind was not quite as clear as he had hoped it would be. Still, it was something to see her, his dad’s sister, older than the century. He thought she looked even more Chinese in her old age.
As so often happens, my father stumbled on the first bits of information when he wasn’t expecting it. He and my mother visited an apothecary in Coonoor one afternoon, and my mother, who has a keen interest in natural remedies, was chatting with the proprietor about the medicinal powers of the local plants. Their conversation eventually drew in my father, who explained their family connection to the Nilgiris and the unanswered questions he had about his grandfather.
The store owner perked up instantly. “I know someone you have to speak with,” he said. “My grandfather!”
A few minutes later, Dad was speeding into the hills on the back of the proprietor’s motorbike. They pulled up to a large house outside of town. It belonged to a Mr. C. Balchand, a wealthy local developer and philanthropist. My father assumed that Balchand must be failing, because his grandson ushered him straight to the bedroom. But the old man proved to be surprisingly spry. He bounded out from under his blankets, asked his daughter-in-law to bring tea and biscuits, and invited my father to stroll in his garden.
As they walked, Balchand told my father that he’d known his father, Albert Abraham, and they had gone to the same school. Then he said he remembered Albert’s Chinese father as well. My father stopped short and took a good look at Balchand, trying to calculate the old man’s age and the odds of meeting someone in 1997, other than his aunt, who had known his grandfather.
Yes, Balchand insisted, he had been a child and it was a vague memory, but “the Chinaman,” he said, was hard to miss in Coonoor. He said that old Mr. Abraham used to travel around the hills on a bicycle, selling his wares. He often wore a loose-fitting black jacket and a small black cap, and a long single braid hung down the centre of his back. Then, one day, no one saw him anymore.
It was Balchand’s recollection that would become the enduring image for my father. Far more than the juggling man, it was the man in black, visible only from behind, flying along on a bicycle with his pigtail trailing behind him.
My father’s investigations puzzled his relatives in the Nilgiris. “Why do you want to go into all that?” they asked him. “Best to leave the past alone, no?”
But on a walk with Julie’s grandson Ron one night after dinner, my father recounted his forays in search of information, telling him that any lead would help. Ron, who was visiting from Chennai, on the coast, suggested there might be something about John Abraham in the records at St. Anthony’s Church, where Julie had been a long-time parishioner. Then, casually, he added, “You know John Abraham came to India as a fugitive.”
“No, I never heard that,” my father said. “I thought he came as a juggler.”
“A juggler and a fugitive,” Ron said. He explained that his grandmother had told him so once, years ago. She said that John Abraham had murdered someone in China, and that he had joined a travelling circus as a juggler in order to conceal his identity. In red pen and capital letters, my father wrote that revelation in his journal that night: “John Abraham commited a crime in China: MURDER!”
The next morning my father went to St. Anthony’s Church. The parish priest was a strapping young Tamil man who called himself Father Francis Xavier, after the sixteenth-century Spanish missionary and saint who propagated Christianity in India. Any other day, my father might have been keen to chat, but after Ron’s revelation he felt a certain urgency to see the records.
Father Francis took him to the small back room where they kept the old church documents, explaining that many had been handwritten by French missionaries dispatched to India two hundred years ago. Each volume spanned about five decades and contained all the baptismal, marriage and death rites conducted at the church during those years. Most were legible, he said, but they were also quite fragile. Then he left my father to his search.
The room was a windowless rectangle. A dim forty-watt bulb dangled over a single wooden table and chair. Cupboards lined one wall, and inside them were the records, large maroon leather-bound volumes, frayed at the edges. My father gently tugged out a few of them, set them on the table and began looking for his Aunty Julie’s marriage record, thinking it might have a few details about the parents of the bride.
Yellowed pages slipped away from gummy spines, and some crumbled between his fingers. Soon he forgot where he was, absorbed by the past lives of strangers—the baptism of ten children in one family … the sudden death of three … the funeral of their father … daughters married off at thirteen. The day disappeared. He had found no mention of John Abraham, or indeed any Abraham. But the cupboards were still packed with volumes he hadn’t touched.
Father Francis greeted him like an old friend when he returned the next morning. Over a pot of the local tea, the priest told Dad he was a native of Ootacamund, the Nilgiris’ most popular hill station, and that he loved the hills, and ran through them at dawn every morning. The rest of the day, he said, he spent saying Masses and being driven around the hills in an SUV to see parishioners. As they finished their tea, he invited my father to join him on a tour of the area and then Father Francis walked him back to the file room.
This time, Dad started with records from 1901, the year his father was born, hoping to find a record of his baptism. But in which month, which day? As he scanned the pages, a word jumped out at him—not Abraham, but Chinaman. Listed as the father at Albert Abraham’s christening was John Abraham, occupation “Chinaman carpenter.” It was the first reference to his grandfather that he’d seen, and all the incentive he needed to keep working backwards, assuming that his grandfather would be mentioned again at the baptisms of Julie and Florence. But as my father read through the records of 1886, he discovered the baptism of John Abraham himself.
On September 11 of that year a male recorded as “John Chinese,” age thirty-five, was christened and reborn as John Abraham. The father of John Chinese, as best my father could read it, was A.T. Chu, or possibly A.T. Choi—the priest had been French, judging by his surname, Peyramale, and his cursive was difficult to read. In the column denoting John Abraham’s occupation was a word that started with C that my father didn’t recognize.
Then, weirdly, in an entry nine days after John Abraham’s christening, he turned up again, but f
ive years older. It was a marriage record from September 20, 1886. It read:
Groom: John Abraham
Age: 40
Condition: Bachelor
Caste or Profession: Chinaman Carpenter
Parent’s Name: Assay [or Assoy]
Bride: Mariamal [no last name given]
Age: 17
Condition: Spinster
Parent’s Name: Joseph [no other name given]
My dad kept flipping forward through the years. He found his Aunty Julie’s birth in July 1887, when John Abraham’s occupation was listed as “merchant.” He went looking next for his Aunty Flo’s christening, but before he found it, the records revealed something startling. John and Mariamal Abraham had three other children between the births of Julie and Florence: a son, Arokiam, in September 1889, when John Abraham was listed as an artisan carpenter; a daughter Mary in November 1890; and another, Annie, in June of 1893. Florence arrived a year later, and finally, in December 1901, they had my grandfather, Albert.
My father had no idea there had been six children, that his father, Albert, had three more siblings. What had happened to them? Had they died? It was common to lose young children to sickness in those days, and even more common in a country battered by outbreaks of cholera, malaria and a long list of parasites. My father himself had a brother and sister who died of typhoid in childhood. Still, he wondered, why had no one ever mentioned them? Then suddenly it struck him that he had heard one name at least—that very week, from his Aunty Flo. Where is my sister Mary? she had asked him. Where is Mary?
My father had assumed Florence was confused, but she hadn’t been. She did have another sister—two others, in fact. And where was Mary, where was Annie, and Arokiam? Had they, like his grandfather, disappeared?
St. Anthony’s had no photocopier, but my father had his camera with him, and he intended to shoot every page where John Abraham was mentioned. Those old, frayed ledgers contained at least one version of his story, confirming his existence and setting out an approximation—but still, the first indication—of his true Chinese surname, Chu.
The Church may have imposed the name change on “John Chinese” as part of his Catholic conversion, and it appeared that the Abraham surname was a favourite of missionaries to south India at the time. But if the juggler was a fugitive, my father suspected the name change might have been no imposition at all. John Chinese may have been perfectly happy to disappear into the hills with a Christian bride, a biblical name, and a brand-new identity.
My father leaned the volume upright against a stack of other ledgers and stepped back to shoot them, but the camera shutter jammed. He pressed it again with more force but the mechanism refused to budge. Then he turned away from the ledger and aimed the lens at the cupboards; it snapped with ease, flash and all. So he turned back to the book, but the camera failed again and again, though each time he shifted it away from the records, it worked.
My father has never been a superstitious man. He usually bites his lip when my mother alludes to anything woo-woo. But that afternoon, as he stood alone in the dim file room with his fickle camera, suddenly hyper-aware of the faint drone of the priest praying with a distressed parishioner and the slight breeze rustling the curtain that separated the room from the corridor, my father was spooked. John Abraham had worked hard to keep his true identity hidden, and there he was, exhuming his secrets.
We should have dismissed John Abraham as an ancestor with nothing to recommend him, a murdering fugitive who left his six children fatherless after their mother died. But quite the opposite happened after my father’s discoveries in 1997. We talked about him often, my father and I. We talked about the Chu name, whether it was real (as in faithfully recorded) and if it could really be said to be ours. (Would you give your real name if you were on the run?) We talked about the adventure that had been his life. If he had once been a caricature, he was now our very own cliché—the relative who really did run away and join the circus. And, of course, there was the abyss of questions, mostly mine, about how anyone could simply hook up with a passing circus and pass himself off as a juggler. How does one fake juggling? And whom did he murder? (I searched for nineteenth-century murders involving jugglers in China, but the only thing I found was the story of a knife-throwing juggler who severed the carotid artery of his wife/model. He later told the judge he wasn’t sure if it was an accident.)
We also wondered what had happened to those three other siblings of Papa Albert. My father asked his relatives in the Nilgiris; they assumed the children must have been sent to an orphanage. But why not Albert, my grandfather, the baby of the family? Did Julie, who was then a newlywed, simply decide to keep him and raise him as her own, and Florence as well? How did she choose whom to keep? We came to realize that discomfort with having a Chinese forefather was not the reason why John Abraham’s identity had been kept hidden, or at least it wasn’t the only one. John Abraham had apparently hidden it himself, running from his past all the way to India and up into the hills, and then running again, taking his secrets to his grave, wherever that was.
And that was the course that ensued for my father, and for me, to see whether a genetic trail could out him—if his own Y chromosome could connect us to a lost ancestry, to China, perhaps to the very corner of the country he’d come from, even if it was the scene of his crime.
In 1998, a year after my father made his second pilgrimage to the Nilgiris, the Y chromosome shrugged off its deadbeat reputation for good, proving again that it had a remarkable power to solve old family mysteries. On the heels of the kohanim report, a retired pathology professor turned to the Y to see if it could finally put to rest the endless whispers about a president and a slave girl.
Eugene Foster of Tufts University in Virginia had been talking with an amateur historian friend about the relentless speculation that Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, had fathered children with a house slave by the name of Sally Hemings. To complicate matters, Hemings also happened to be a half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, born of a relationship between Martha’s father and his slave mistress, Betty Hemings.
Sally Hemings is said to have been a fourteen-year-old latte beauty when she came to care for Jefferson’s youngest daughter in Paris in 1786. Eventually she had six children, and rumours spread of an ongoing affair with her master. It was a point Jefferson never explicitly confirmed or denied, but one that many of Jefferson’s white descendants felt had no truth.
Foster’s historian friend thought that DNA testing of the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings might be the best way to finally answer the question. But, like Skorecki, Foster initially thought such a test would be impossible—that after the genetic shuffling of generations, any contribution from an eighteenth-century forefather would be too mixed or minute to detect. Then Foster heard from a biology professor that new work on the Y chromosome suggested such a test might be worth a try after all.
Since Jefferson had no known sons, it was not possible to use the Y chromosome of a direct male descendent of the president as a point of comparison. But Foster managed to collect DNA from a male descendant of Jefferson’s paternal uncle Field Jefferson, working on the assumption that both men had inherited the same Jefferson Y chromosome from their fathers. Foster also took samples from a group of black men who might have descended from Jefferson’s affair with Hemings.
In all, Foster gathered thirteen samples and delivered them by hand, with all the names removed and randomly numbered, to geneticists in England who were pioneering work on the Y, a team led by Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester. As it turned out, the Jefferson Y was a rare model. Comparing it to the male chromosomes of 670 European men and another 1,200 worldwide, researchers found no other like it. The only match they did find—and a perfect one at that, based on testing mutations at seventeen different sites on the chromosome—belonged to Sally Hemings’s great-great-grandson, fifty-three-year-old John Hem
ings Jefferson, a direct descendant of Sally’s youngest son, Eston. The match, verified by labs in at least three other universities, added the heft of science to 360 years of whispers.
It was not absolute proof of an affair; another Jefferson male might have fathered children with Hemings. Neither could the test reveal whether the alleged relationship between a president and his slave had been a tryst of hearts or of horrors. But given other evidence—Jefferson’s comings and goings coincided with Hemings’s pregnancies—it was compelling enough that even skeptics reconsidered.
The prestigious science journal Nature published the results in November 1998; in the wake of President Bill Clinton’s “inappropriate relationship” with White House staffer Monica Lewinksy, the news had particular currency. The international media splash that followed made it one of the biggest science stories of the year. Once dismissed as genomic detritus, DNA’s drooping don, the Y chromosome strutted into the research limelight like a locker-room braggart, flashing its enduring potential to kiss and tell. Two years later, the first company to offer personal genetic ancestry testing on the Y chromosome opened its doors, followed quickly by half a dozen others. All promised to reveal what a paper trail could not.
In Houston, Texas, Family Tree DNA was the first to market. It was founded in 2000 by Bennett Greenspan, a businessman who, as he told me on the phone one February night, had been an avid genealogist ever since he was a kid. “Some guys are interested in girls, some are interested in baseball,” he said. “I was mainly interested in families.”
Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, surrounded by a large extended family, Greenspan often peppered his relatives with questions about his ancestry. They answered, but not before cocking their heads at a young boy being so curious about his roots. Even after he moved to Houston and started a photographic supply business, his enthusiasm to learn more about his family history never waned. Investigating his maternal roots eventually led him to Buenos Aires, where he found people whose names and stories suggested they might in fact be relatives. But with no paper trail to link their family to his, Greenspan assumed he’d hit a dead end. Then he recalled something he’d heard about how genetic testing had identified a modern-day descendant of Thomas Jefferson and revealed that kohenim men shared a bloodline going back to Aaron, the brother of Moses.
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