DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  She had grown up in Aurora, Colorado, where there were very few blacks, and it was only when she moved to Washington, D.C., to complete her MBA that she became fully aware of the complexities and contradictions of being an African American woman. I was half expecting to hear her experiences of racial discrimination at the hands of whites, but instead she reserved her anger and frustration for the behavior of African Americans themselves. This began to be clear when she told us about a male friend, another African American, who said that he did not like her beautiful head of curly black hair, which she wore in a bob. He told her that he was embarrassed to take her to dinner at an upscale restaurant unless she blow-dried it straight. It was fine to be seen with her and her natural hair at a basketball game, but in his mind the elevated social circles to which he aspired demanded a more Eurocentric look.

  She soon told him to get lost. This was the hair that had protected her ancestors against the tropical sun. That was why it was curly and dense in the first place, a natural helmet against the searing solar radiation. Looking at Ulla with her blond Scandinavian locks, she quite rightly said that fine and straight European hair would have been no good under the African sun. It would have let the damaging rays straight through and toasted the scalp. She was proud that she had inherited the hair of her ancestors, ancestors who had built the great civilizations of Africa. Cooper despaired of the multitude of black women she knew who, although they did not have enough for a computer or even for proper food, nevertheless found the money for long straight hair extensions every month, because they thought it made them prettier, more acceptable. Not to whites, she emphasized, but to other black men. This, Toby said, was very prevalent in Washington, where shops had swatches of long Asian hair hanging on the wall and more than a few black women buying them. They would staple, glue, and tape the hair to their heads, even if this meant they ended up with scalp infections and went bald. In Toby’s opinion, they had been brainwashed into thinking, “the more white-like I am, the better I am.” I was amazed by what Cooper was telling me, but then this was the first time I had ever had a conversation anything like this with a black woman. It turned out that this was also the first time she had ever discussed these things with a white man.

  Toby knew from the work of African Ancestry that a third of African American men carry a European Y chromosome, and she had very strong views of how this came about. It was not just that European men had used their position as slave owners to force themselves on the women in their charge—though that would have accounted for a great number of the Y chromosomes but also that these couplings were at times part of a sexual bargain manipulated by black women themselves. According to Cooper, even before they were put on the slave ships, black women had figured out that if they became pregnant by a European man, there was less chance of being transported. Once in America, she told us, this particular type of relationship between black women and white men continued to flourish under slavery. “We knew,” Cooper confided as if suddenly talking for a bygone generation of ancestors, “that if we could soften up the overseer or even let them sleep with us, they might not beat our husbands or our sons.” Although there were no formal marriages between black slaves, I knew what she meant by “our husbands.” In this way black women had made sacrifices to protect their men. “We knew how to manipulate and maneuver and use sex on behalf of our race,” she continued. This did not end with the abolition of slavery, Cooper added, as white households were happy to allow black maids into the house, but not black men.

  While black women could get domestic work, their men either toiled as low-paid sharecroppers or had no work at all. It was the women who supported their families through the hard times of the Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War, and it made Cooper angry that this seems to have been forgotten when today’s black men try to get their girlfriends to make themselves look more European. Working as a maid brought with it opportunites for sexual contact between white and black, whether consensual or forced. That, in her view, was the explanation for the abundance of European DNA in African Americans.

  Where sex is involved the potential for hypocricy is enormous, as Cooper reminded me when she told the story of Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond had died in 2003, aged one hundred, the only senator in the history of the United States to reach that age while still in office. He was vehemently opposed to racial mixing and a savage opponent of the Civil Rights Bill of 1967, conducting the longest-ever solo filibuster in the history of the Senate, lasting over twenty-four hours. Only after his death was it revealed that when he was twenty-two, he and his family’s sixteen-year-old black maid, Carrie Butler, had a daughter, Ellie May. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged her, though he did pay for her college education among other things. After his death, his family acknowledged Essie Mae, making her eligible for membership of the exclusive organization Daughters of the American Revolution through her lineage descent from Thurmond.

  Our interview had lasted just thirty minutes, cut short because I was due at a radio studio, but I learned more about African American women in that half hour than I had in my whole life. I was very glad indeed that Gina Paige had put me in touch with Toby Cooper, and very grateful to Cooper for being so frank and open. As she got up to leave, she handed me a copy of White Women, the vivid account of her observations and experiences that she wrote in 1998 and which lays them out even more forcefully than she had in our interview.1

  After Toby left, we got straight into a taxi and headed for the studios on the other side of town. Gone were the wide boulevards near our hotel, a stone’s throw from the White House. The streets were narrower and the buildings crowded in on us as the taxi weaved in and out of the traffic. By now it was dark and the people on the street hard to see. Any sense of unease was soon dispelled by the bright lights of the Sirius XM building and, once inside, we were ushered up to Mark Thompson’s studio. I had gotten to know Thompson, though only briefly, through a live radio show for the BBC World Service in which he, Gina Paige, and I had taken part a few months before. It was a discussion and phone-in called Africa Have Your Say, and the topic was the familiar one of the impact of DNA on reinforcing African identity. I didn’t think it was a particularly good show; it suffered from poor participant selection, so too much time was taken up by rants and irrelevances from the phone-in contributors. On the topic of African Americans who visited their tribal homelands, as identified through DNA, I was surprised to hear what an evidently agitated native African caller had to say. In strident tones he told the world that he was fed up with wealthy Americans coming over to his village and embracing their “ancestors,” then hightailing it back to the airport as fast as they could. When asked by the flummoxed adjudicator what he would have liked from his African American cousins, his reply was both brief and direct. “A green card.”

  Thompson had impressed me by his evident strength of feeling about what his own DNA connection had meant. In an echo of Oprah Winfrey’s famous declaration, Mark answered the increasingly bewildered adjudicator’s question of what he felt about his own identity after the DNA test. “I am African,” he retorted without a moment’s hesitation. The slot on his show went well enough, I thought, but there were a lot more things I wanted to ask than there was time for. Besides, it was his show, so he was asking the questions. Very generously for such a busy man, Thompson agreed to come around to our hotel for breakfast the next day.

  Thompson arrived and joined Ulla and me around the table. He told me that his father and mother had met in Washington when she was a student of fashion design. Thompson was born at the Freedmen’s Hospital, which building now houses Howard University’s School of Communications, a coincidence not lost on the broadcaster. He and his mother moved back to her family in Nashville, Tennessee. His father was meant to follow but he did not, so his maternal uncle, his mother’s brother, took on that role, a custom that Thompson later discovered was almost the norm in Africa. Nashville is a college town with Fisk University and Meharry Medical
College (Roy King’s alma mater) being among the first universities, like Howard in Washington, specifically created for black students. Thompson grew up in faculty condos on the campus where, for more than thirty years, his mother was on the administrative staff. This was the early seventies, when black cultural and intellectual activism was reaching a zenith after the civil rights legislation of the late sixties. Everybody involved in the civil rights movement passed through Nashville at one time or another, and the young Thompson was there to see them in the flesh. This infused him with a strong sense of African American culture and of black activism that has stayed with him ever since.

  At eighteen Thompson moved back to Washington as a student at Georgetown University, and it was not long before he clashed with the authorities. This was the time when the tide of international opinion was moving against apartheid in South Africa and there was pressure on the U.S. and British governments to impose economic sanctions. Ronald Reagan was president at the time, with Margaret Thatcher his opposite number in Britain. They were both against sanctions, advocating instead the policy euphemistically referred to as “constructive engagement.” Their refusal to condemn apartheid, or at least not to do much about it, sparked a wave of popular protests on both sides of the Atlantic. Thompson got involved when the student body at Georgetown put pressure on the university to pull out from its substantial investments in South Africa. The crunch came when Reagan’s secretary of state for Africa, Chester Crocker, arrived in Georgetown to give a speech, only to be met by crowds of students chanting, “Free Nelson Mandela.” Thompson covered Crocker’s speech for the student newspaper, and his account grew into an in-depth article criticizing U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa, an article that the State Department asked the university not to run, which only served to fan the flames of protest.

  Within a few weeks the Georgetown students took over the university’s School of Arts and Sciences, built a South African–style shanty on the campus, shut down the schools, and forced the administration to disinvest. They got their way, but they all went to jail for a spell. As we all know, Nelson Mandela was freed and became the president of his country, going on to become one of the world’s most venerated public figures. But it was not always like that. As the final twist in Thompson’s account of his days as a student activist, he told me that he met Mandela when he visited Washington and that the meeting took place in this very hotel, not ten feet away from where we were sitting having breakfast.

  Thompson had already started broadcasting on a black talk station when he got his own show on Sirius XM Radio in Washington in 2001. Not long after that he met Gina Paige and began working closely with her because he felt very strongly that African Americans needed to reestablish their links to Africa, not only for themselves but also for the people of Africa. He had visited the notorious Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana and found the experience both moving and troubling. In one part of the castle, he told me, is the “door of no return” that leads from the dungeons where the slaves were held and opened straight out onto a ramp down to the shore. Once through that door, there was only one way to go, onto the waiting ship and across the Atlantic to the New World. On Thompson’s visit he and the others in his group had talked about what would have happened if, instead of going to the New World as slaves, their ancestors had stayed where they were. At this point a group of children gathered around offering candies for sale. Thompson asked one of them, a girl of about fourteen, what was her name. “Elizabeth,” she replied. That was Thompson’s mother’s name, his grandmother’s, and that of his female ancestors for as many generations back as he knew. The same was true of the small girl, her mother and grandmother were both Elizabeth. It was she, not Thompson, who then said that perhaps, if they were able to go back far enough, they would find that they were both descended from the same ancestor.

  It was very clear to me that Mark Thompson senses the feeling of a severed connection with Africa and that one of his ambitions in life is to help African Americans to regain it, which is the reason he supports and works so closely with Gina Paige and African Ancestry. He has become fascinated by the link between science and spirituality, especially since he became ordained as a minister, and he understands the special qualities of DNA. I now asked him the key question. All through his career as a political activist he had concentrated on his African roots. How would he feel if the DNA test that we were about to do showed that he had other ancestors too, maybe Native American or Asian or, more likely, European? Thompson told me that his mother was very pale-skinned for an African American, but she was raised black. As he was growing up as a kid, people would ask him whether his mother was white, although it was always clear from the way she spoke and carried herself that she was a black woman. It isn’t something that many black people want to acknowledge, but given how fair his mother was, he thought he probably did have some European in his DNA. His father was much darker skinned, and his own pigmentation, he told me, was somewhere in between.

  Thompson then went on to tell me that he was doing a little family history research of his own. His maternal grandmother’s surname was Polk, and her family had lived in rural Tennessee since at least the 1800s. James Knox Polk was the eleventh president of the United States, and his family had a plantation in the same part of Tennessee. During his White House years, between 1845 and 1849, it was Polk’s brother William who looked after the plantation. Thompson’s family traced back to a William James Polk, living at about the same time. Though Thompson knew that it was commonplace for slaves to take on the surname of the plantation owner, there was a distinct possibility that, rather like the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Mark might also have a direct line back to a president of the United States. Any European DNA that we found might possibly have that special pedigree.

  I was very impressed by Thompson and by his thoughtful devotion to his African roots. He had discovered through Gina Paige’s DNA test that his Y chromosome points to an ancestral origin in Sierra Leone while his mitochondrial DNA has come down a long line of matrilineal ancestors from further south, in Cameroon. Before that, like many African Americans, he had cemented his ties to Africa by adopting an African name, Matsimela Mapfumo, which is a blend of South African and Zimbabwean meaning “Firmly Rooted Soldier.” When his DNA results told him that his African ancestry, at least for the two lines tested, was from West Africa rather than the South, the news, if anything, strengthened his feeling of connection. As he explained, when you adopt an African name you choose where you would like to have come from, but when you find out through DNA, then you know. Through his show, the activist in him was beginning to challenge African Americans to become involved and accept some responsibility for the part of Africa that Paige’s DNA tests had identified as their ancestral homes. As we spoke, he was trying very hard to find African Americans whose genetic lines went back to the Congo, the country that, in his view, was in the biggest trouble. He despaired of the minimal coverage given to Africa by the famously insular American media and said he relied on the BBC for most of his information. This was one legacy of British colonialism that he approved of, he said with a wry smile as we left.

  In the planning stage for DNA USA I had come across a reference to a working group on genetics and genealogy organized by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Studies at Harvard. The group had been convened by the institute’s director, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and it looked both exciting and relevant, so I made a mental note to get to see him if I could arrange it. Before I had done anything about it and completely out of the blue, I got a message from a television production company in New York asking whether I would be willing to participate in a documentary with the same Dr. Gates. Of course I was delighted and accepted immediately. Another piece of serendipity. “If you build it they will come.”

  The chosen location for this televised encounter was the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the date proposed fitted perfectly with the
end stages of the journey back to Boston for the return flight to England. Ulla and I arrived at the museum first and waited in the lobby by the dinosaur skeletons. I looked outside to see a film crew gathering at the foot of the steps. A car pulled up, and out stepped Dr. Gates. He was elegantly dressed in a dark blue suit, a beautifully pressed white shirt with a maroon tie, and a matching handkerchief neatly folded in his jacket pocket. In his left hand he carried a cane. In complete contrast, having spent three months living out of a suitcase, both I and my outfit could be summed up in a single word: crumpled.

  Since filming could not begin until after the doors had closed, the museum had been hired for the evening, and we took over the lower ground floor with its charmingly old-fashioned dioramas of the African plains and the jungles of Borneo, exhibits of a sort that have sadly disappeared from most modern museums. The filming went pretty well as far as I could tell, with each of us kidding the other as we talked about why it was that mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes fell into distinct clusters all started off by one person. We filmed late into the night, after which Dr. Gates gave Ulla and me a lift back to our hotel. There was no time for a long conversation in New York, so we arranged something for a few days hence.

  As it was, it would be several months before we met again. This was when Ulla and I returned to Boston to meet up with the New England volunteers to go over their DNA results, which, by that time, had come back from the lab. I had timed our visit to coincide with the Annual Dinner of the New England Historical and Genealogy Society, where the main speaker was to be Annette Gordon-Reed, whose biography of the Hemings family and their relationships with Thomas Jefferson I had read and admired. Dr. Gates had also been invited to the dinner as a guest, to be honored with a specially commissioned genealogy by the society. I took this opportunity to arrange to visit him in Harvard a couple of days later with the promise of an interview.