by Lisa Alther
“In a few weeks, I hope.”
He nods. Then he says, “I know you all often disagree with my opinions, but I think you’ll have to agree that I do have some good ideas when it comes to ice cream.”
We congratulate him on his discovery of the Buster Bar.
Soon the results of my private DNA testing start to roll in via the Internet. I learn that my father’s Y chromosome is associated with a group who spent the last ice age in the Balkans. Afterward, some went east to Anatolia or west to Sicily, but most followed the retreating glaciers to spread out over central and northern Europe. This type of Y chromosome is thought to have been carried to Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders around A.D. 400.
Puzzled, I gaze at my computer screen. After all this smoke — Portuguese Indians, Mongolian blue spots, Siddi, and shovel teeth — it appears that my father’s flame is European.
Then I remember my fan analogy. His Y chromosome represents only one out of 1,024 ancestors ten generations back. I won’t know anything about those other 1,023 until the remaining tests are completed.
To keep myself entertained while waiting, I go to the Red Cross to donate blood. I often flash back to my idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura episode, when I lay in bed with nosebleeds that lasted for days. I wonder whether the Red Cross will even accept my blood. I’m also curious about what type it is, since no one but my grandmother and a doctor at the hospital had blood that matched mine.
The Red Cross does accept my blood, informing me that my clotting time is now faster than average. And they covet it because it’s type B-positive, which is rare in the South, where the vast majority are type O or A.
Back at Ina’s house I log on to the Internet and discover that type B occurs at its highest frequency in a swath across Central Asia, with hot spots among the Roma, Rajasthanis, several Turko-Mongol populations in the Altai Mountains, and some northern Siberians. Could my grandmother Reed, cofounder of the Virginia Club, have descended from Gypsies?
As I’m digesting this entertaining possibility, I come across a Web page announcing that a bloodstain on the shroud of Turin has been analyzed and that Jesus’s blood type was AB, the universal recipient. This means that God’s blood type is either A or B….
Later that week, I go to the platelet donation center for a second opinion on my clottability They, too, are enchanted with my swarms of platelets and my rapid clotting time. So I lie on a stretcher for a couple of hours as a needle in one arm funnels my blood through a machine that extracts the platelets and plasma, returning the depleted residue through a needle into my other arm.
Meanwhile, I watch a Harry Potter DVD in which various characters transform into rats and werewolves for reasons that entirely escape me. While disentangling me from the web of plastic tubing and binding my bruised arms with crisscrossed purple bandages, the phlebotomist coyly promises to tell me what my HLA factors are if I’ll return for another donation. (HLA stands for human leukocyte antigens, which determine immunities and transplant compatibility. A prominent geneticist named Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has mapped the frequencies of some of these factors in various population groups.)
As I lurch like Quasimodo from the collection center, clutching a complimentary jar of spaghetti sauce in purple-latticed arms, I wonder if I might metamorphose into a vampire that night and prowl beneath the haloed moon in search of my missing plasma. My taxi driver, eyeing my purple bandages and no doubt sensing himself in the presence of a fellow eccentric, asks me if I’ve ever considered the fact that, since the Bible says that love for all mankind resides in the bosom of Abraham, someone with three nipples is a powerhouse of God’s love. I confess that I haven’t thought of this before. I’ve known people with six fingers but never anyone with three nipples.
Extending his hand for me to shake, he informs me that I now know one. He adds that his nephew is a second. I ask if he thinks this trait is genetic. He says he doesn’t believe in genes, that God fashions each person specially for his or her specific function. Silently I rue my multiregional upbringing, which has bred in me an alarming unflappability that tends to attract the more colorful members of the human community.
The next day I order an analysis of my CODIS markers on the Internet. These are a set of non-sex-related DNA sites within the nucleus of the cell that the FBI uses to establish a unique genetic bar code for each convicted felon. Via Internet databases you can compare your CODIS markers to those of various groups all over the globe.
Meanwhile, the results of my father’s mitochondrial DNA test arrive. The DNA that he inherited from my grandmother (which my grandfather also shared) turns out to be a variety found at its highest percentage in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, the spawning grounds of both Native Americans and Turkic nomads, with slightly lower frequencies among Slavs, Finns, Saudis and some populations in the Caucasus. (Often — though not always — the frequency of a particular DNA marker is highest at its point of origin. Then the marker fans out geographically, like the ever fainter ripples from a pebble tossed into a pond.) Like good sausage gravy, our plot appears to be thickening.
One day I receive in the mail a CD-ROM from the lab, reporting my father’s AncestryByDNA and EuroDNA results. (These are the tests that sample markers from the “junk” DNA in the cell nucleus.) I pick up my shard of quartz salvaged from the dig at Pardo’s Fort San Juan, which I’ve been using as a paperweight, and I palm it for courage. Then I insert into my computer the disc that will at last tell me who my father is and who my elusive Reed grandparents were, genetically speaking. When I click the icon, a chart pops up. It reads:
I sink back in my chair. Once I pull myself together again, I study the charts and graphs and read the explanatory material. I realize that these tests still don’t answer the question of Portuguese input, which would be included in the Northern European percentage.
Grabbing a pad and pen, I calculate that in the mid-eighteenth century my father had sixty-four four-times-great-grandparents living along the New River in the Squabble State. Since my grandparents were cousins in two different lines, ten of those people were the same, so there were actually fifty-four of them. Eight were fully Native American, or sixteen were half-breeds, and so on. Abby Easterd, Pocahontas, Nicketti Hughes, and Betty Reeves are just the tip of the wigwam. I can hear my poor grandmother generating torque in her coffin.
In addition, two were fully East Indian and/or Roma, or several were partially so (unless their 4 percent represents just statistical “noise”). Eighteen were northern European, or more were partly so. But the real surprise is his twenty-five four-times-great-grandparents with Italian and/or eastern Mediterranean origins.
I have a vague idea who some of the Native Americans and northern Europeans were. But I have no clue about the East Indians or southeastern Europeans. None of the family data I’ve collected hints at such origins. Were they descended from shipwrecked Croatian sailors, or the Turkish slaves dumped on Roanoke Island? Were they the offspring of the indentured Armenian textile workers or East Indian servants brought to Jamestown? Were they prisoners from English jails deported to Virginia? Were they kidnapped urchins or paupers lured aboard ships to Virginia with promises of land? Recent scholarship unearthed by Brent Kennedy documents secret deals between Queen Elizabeth, the Ottoman sultan, and the king of Morocco to colonize the New World jointly so as to block Spanish and French efforts. Could my ancestors have been pawns in their empire-building games?
Or are these unexpected results evidence of ancient migrations from hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago? Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, has recently discovered an archaic version of a genetic marker on the X chromosome in subjects from southern China that is thought to have been passed down from Homo erectus ancestors nearly two million years ago. Yet for all these amazing advances, DNA techniques are still in their Model T phase. They can identify only the “what”s with any certainty, and the interpretation of those “what”s is sometimes more of an art t
han a science. The “when”s and “where”s are still ballpark estimates that, like diet tips, are constantly shifting as new research rolls in. So all I know for sure is that Mediterraneans, and perhaps East Indians as well, appear to have left their calling cards in my father’s DNA — like the imprints of prehistoric ferns that I once found in chunks of shale at the coal mine near my grandmother’s birthplace in Darwin, Virginia. Or like Champ, silently snaking along beneath the speed boats on Lake Champlain.
Greek, Roma, Turkish, Italian, and East Indian were not acknowledged categories under the Virginia Racial Integrity Law. The only labels permitted were “colored” or “white.” German immigrants in America weren’t widely accepted as “white” until the late 1700s; the Irish, until the late 1800s; and Italians, Jews, and eastern Europeans only in the early 1900s. As recently as the early twentieth century, Arizona declared illegal any marriage between a white person and a “Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu.” In practice, how someone was categorized under the Virginia law depended on his or her skin tone. If it was dark, that person was labeled “colored,” and therefore African, regardless of actual origins. Even some with fair complexions were labeled “colored” if their ancestors had been designated “mulatto” in the censuses from the mid-1800s.
But certainly my father’s Native American ancestry, being greater than the one-sixteenth allowed the First Families of Virginia who descended from Pocahontas, qualified him as “colored” under the one-drop rule. And in accordance with the laws of genetics, his parents, combined, would have had around twice as much Native American ancestry as he. My grandmother knew about Pocahontas, but was she aware of her more extensive Indian heritage? Is that why they left Virginia as the racial climate chilled? I’ll never know, but at least I now know this much.
I walk into my father’s room the next day, wearing my baseball cap that reads
RECYCLE YOURSELF: DONATE PLATELETS.
My parents are watching Matlock with my brothers Bill and Michael.
Michael has recently retired from his pathology lab in Pennsylvania and moved back home with his wife, Kathy. He’s “come in from the cold,” as he puts it. After an unpromising start as a blanketed bundle in a hospital window, he’s turned into a strong, solid man with a wry sense of the ludicrous and the same sweet smile as when he was a boy. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads
CLUB SANDWICHES NOT SEALS.
Bill has recently moved back to western North Carolina with his wife, Cici, after thirty years in California. He wants to raise their children in these mountains and valleys rather than on the beaches of La Jolla. He says there are values here he wants them to absorb.
Bill may have a point. I’ve succumbed to the pull of these mountains myself, for at least part of the year. I went away because I felt I didn’t fit in. I discovered that I don’t fit in anywhere, and neither do most people. It’s called (drum roll, please) the Human Condition. The qualities I dislike in people here I found in people everywhere. But those I like, I haven’t often found elsewhere.
Because money can be scarce, many people here have learned to make do with very little and not to judge others by their possessions. Because they’ve often been ridiculed as hillbillies, crackers, and rednecks, they’ve learned to laugh at themselves — and not at others. Because they’ve known darkness, they’ve learned to seek the light in most situations.
My parents can’t quite believe their bad fortune. They finally get us all through school and settled into houses with mortgages we can afford, located far away. They start looking forward to some down time, alone. But here we all come back home again, determined to brighten their golden years with our presences. They smile bravely and do their best to act glad. But I’m sure they envy their friends whose children are in prison or in rehab in distant cities.
Plopping down in a chair, I report my father’s DNA results.
After a moment of bewilderment over all the rogue Turks, Greeks, and Italians, my father smiles, savoring his new role as Melungeon poster boy.
My mother sighs. When she married my father in New York in 1940, she probably thought she was getting Rhett Butler, not ChiefSit’n’Bull.
Michael starts singing “We Are the World.”
“This is really annoying,” mutters my father. “If only we’d known about the Native American part, Bill, Michael, and Jane could have gone to medical school for free. Do you realize how much tuition we could have saved?”
The phone rings. The Chief answers. He listens for a while, apparently to some fundraising pitch. Finally he replies, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. You see, I’m Cherokee, and I need to give my money to my own people.”
12
All-American Stir-Fry
SEVERAL QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED, even while new ones have arisen (which I won’t have enough time to resolve in this life or the next). But the one that got me into this in the first place — Were my father’s ancestors Melungeons? — hasn’t been. I suppose it depends on the definitions being used. No, they weren’t Melungeons, if Melungeon means those directly descended from the community on Newman’s Ridge in the early nineteenth century who bore the traditional surnames.
But yes, they were Melungeons, if that means the larger population of ethnically mixed settlers in the Squabble State. Refugees from the racial and economic tyrannies of the Tidewater oligarchy, many pressed westward into the mountains of northwestern North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and southeastern Kentucky, where they appear to have merged with detribahzed Indians, themselves probably already quite mixed as well.
But there’s also a socioeconomic element to Melungeon-hood: those with enough money and social standing in their communities were allowed to be whoever they claimed to be. As one researcher puts it, “Money whitens.” Whatever may have happened to them beforehand, once my ancestors were living with others like themselves, they bought and sold land, married and produced many children, died and left modest estates. Most were farmers. A couple owned a thousand acres. Cornelius Vanover VI, the half-Cherokee son of Abigail Easterd, was a miller and an herb doctor. Several were teachers or preachers. Although many signed their official documents with Xs until the last half of the nineteenth century, Cornelius Vanover’s son William was elected commissioner of revenue for his county. Within the confines of their own small world, my ancestors don’t appear to have been persecuted — unless by their own fears of being unacceptable beyond their borders.
My father and we children grew up believing ourselves to be northern Europeans, and the Virginia Club agreed. This raises the question of which is more dominant — one’s cultural heritage or one’s genetic heritage. Some of the Cherokee membership rolls give the “blood quantum” of those on the list. Many are designated only l/32nd or l/64th or 1/128th Cherokee by “blood.” Yet the Cherokee Nation considers their descendants, and they consider themselves, fully Cherokee. Clearly, many more factors than just genetic endowment contribute to shaping someone’s sense of identity. But what happens within the psyche when one’s cultural heritage and genetic heritage don’t match? What happens when there are several heritages?
Luckily, my family has plenty of company in our ethnic no-man’s-land. Ina’s test has shown her to be:
Brent Kennedy’s brother has received the following results:
Others with suspected Melungeon ancestry show similar mixtures. Some even admit to having Mongolian blue spots, though I haven’t checked them out in person.
So what does this hodgepodge make us, in addition to Melungeons? It makes us Americans, for one thing. Many branches of my family have been on this continent for at least twelve generations, and the Native Americans for perhaps 14,000 years. My ancestors crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia, sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower, saved Jamestown from starvation, and were saved from starving at Jamestown — in addition to the thousands with unknown or less glamorous stories. I am, indeed, an Ur-American.
Yet my own DNA results show
me to be:
The analysis of my CODIS markers (those used by the FBI to establish genetic bar codes for felons) suggests a similar makeup, which I corroborated by scrolling through the interminable Internet databases of gene frequencies until I developed the chronic squint of a roulette croupier. The contemporary populations whose barcodes most closely approximate my own are Tuscans, southern Croatians, Moroccan Arabs, Portuguese, and Byelorussians. This doesn’t mean that my ancestors necessarily belonged to these groups, since current populations sometimes don’t resemble earlier ones and since gene flow has never respected geopolitical boundaries. But it can suggest generalized geographical origins.
One of my HLA factors (the human leukocyte antigens analyzed by the platelet center) reaches its highest frequency in Lapland, among the reindeer-herding Saami of northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Northern Russia; another, in Central Asia, New Guinea, and several Amerindian populations. Despite my own moments of skepticism, I find it difficult to explain these echoes of concordance among the different types of tests, unless they happen to be pointing to some genetic truths, however ancient they may or may not be.
The famous American melting pot that historians portray as commencing with the nineteenth-century immigration from Ireland and from southern and eastern Europe actually existed here right from the start. It’s a shame our founding fathers chose to portray the fledgling United States as an outpost for wayward Anglo Saxons, rather than as the panglobal mosaic it really was. Our resulting history might have been less grim.
It’s particularly ironic since, as one example from many, Thomas Jefferson’s Y chromosome has been classified as haplogroup K2, which is believed to have originated in the Levant. His political enemies taunted him with having a mulatto father and a half-breed mother. In fact, his mother was a Randolph, one of the families associated with descent from Pocahontas.
Several books have been written, accurate or not, tracing the genealogies of five American presidents to African and/or Native American ancestors — Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding, and Coolidge. Some researchers maintain that Lincoln was of Melungeon descent via his mother, Nancy Hanks. (To say nothing of the King himself, Elvis Presley, whose mother’s ancestors came from western North Carolina and claimed Cherokee and Jewish ancestry.)
