IT turned out that Mahalia Mathis was not the only resident of Gary, Indiana, to claim Native American descent. Despite the fact that the satellite city of Chicago was 84 percent black, there were enough “Indians” to form a club, and it was to participate in its gathering that Mrs. Mathis had recruited me.

The Native American Ancestry Collective of Gary (NAACG) met on the first Thursday of every month at the Miller Beach Senior Center.^* During our long and illuminating ride, I was simultaneously given a tour of the modern-day Gary, complete with a commentary on its most famous entertainment family, and told of the saga of Mahalia Mathis’s own family, the Jacksons.^† Mahalia’s late husband, Charles, had passed a decade before. Charles, Mahalia acknowledged, had indeed been “colored.” Mrs. Mathis went on to note that both her sons had married white women and that her grandchildren had been spared Charles’s burden. It seemed that her sons had been spared the burden of their mother as well, because it was clear from her tone that she was estranged and isolated from all of her people.

“Your mother must have been so relieved when you came out,” Mahalia Mathis turned in her passenger seat to say to me, reaching out to lightly touch the back of my neck, where my stringy hair met my fired alabaster skin. I giggled nervously, jerked my head, and eventually the older woman put her hand back at her side again.

Once the community center had been entered it was rather easy to locate the dozen or so NAACG members. This was not because the group looked like Native Americans; to my eyes, they looked like any gathering of black American folks, some tan and most brown. What distinguished this group was their attire. The first man I saw in the room had a full Native American headdress, a Stegosaurus spine of white feathers that reached all the way down to his moccasins. He was sitting on the edge of a metal foldout chair trying not to harm his plumage while he sipped his coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts cup. As I walked in with Mrs. Mathis on my arm, he turned toward us and the red war paint he had on his nose and cheeks spread as he smiled. Others in the room were more muted in their attire, but all seemed to have their flair. By the open box of donuts a woman wore a casual coat made of simulated Hopi cloth. Over by the blackboard a tall, slender brother chuckled and chatted on his cell phone, his raised hand a miniature museum of turquoise finger ornaments. Past him, a portly man with chemically relaxed hair tied into two greasy ponytails twirled one of those wet ropes with his finger as he waited for the meeting to begin. The only person besides myself who was not outfitted in some form of indigenous attire was a brown-skinned woman in a pink raincoat sitting in the farthest chair from the door as she read a magazine, but clearly she was the waiting escort of someone in the group.

Somehow it had been spread around the room that I was a reporter sent to cover their event.^‡ The folks, pleasant and welcoming, made their introductions by telling me both their names and their Native connections. Tanisha Johnson—Cherokee. Antony Thomas—Chickasaw. Tyrone Jackson—Seminole.

“We’re so glad you’re here, so glad that you came to record this special day,” Tyrone told me, and the others who began to take their seats as well agreed.

“Well, you know I couldn’t just let this day go by, could I? This is historic,” Mahalia Mathis boomed, her own hair hot-combed back into a Pocahontas bun for the occasion.

I whispered to her, “I’m sorry, what is today?”

“Today, we get our proof. That was my surprise. It will make an excellent essay for you; I know it. Today the truth is revealed, at long last. DNA testing isn’t just for criminals trying to get out of jail free; it’s for decent Indians trying to prove their heritage.”

“It took us a year, and a lot of phone calls, but we found Dr. Hollins over at the University of Chicago to do our test for us, part of a program I read about in the Telegraph,” bragged Antony, handing me a cruller on a napkin. “All expenses paid, all we had to do was scrape a Q-Tip in our mouths and they said they’d do the rest.”

“I’m going to send my baby to college on this evidence, just you watch. We tried to join the Sioux Nation a few years back, and they had the nerve to turn us down. We’ll see about that now,” Tanisha humped, the tassels that lined her coat and pants rippling like the legs of a centipede.

The others were equally excited, and as they told their stories of ostracization by their respective Native nations, I empathized with their obvious pain. Although they didn’t mention it, I imagined walking around Gary, Indiana, dressed in Native American attire had probably led to other incidents of alienation as well.^§

It was out of empathy that I removed a pad from my pocket and began taking notes, half convinced that I might just write an essay about this, that maybe I could play at being a pop psychologist. If this Negro in a Rick James jacket could call himself a war chief, then why not? Then the brother from the University of Chicago’s lab finally arrived.

“Well, as many of you thought, your tests have proven that, as a group, you do have a percentage of Native American heritage. There is a margin of error, of course, but overall your tests proved to have between zero and thirty-two percent Native DNA, between eleven and sixty-four percent European DNA, and as for your African DNA—”

“On average then,” Tyrone interrupted eagerly, “how much Native blood do we have?”

The professor stiffened visibly, put down the chart he was reading from, and leaned back on the desk behind him. “Well, the average … On average you have about six percent. Six percent Native blood among you, which is about the average for African Americans on the East Coast, for instance.”

“Six percent? Six percent?” Tyrone stood, indignant. “That’s all you could find, six percent? Well what the hell is the margin of error?”

“Six percent.” The professor coughed into his hand and then immediately began shuffling his individual results, moving to hand them out just so he didn’t have to stand in the center of the room anymore.

As the NAACG members inspected their individual test results, it became clear to me that the natives were getting restless. Antony, for instance, dropped his Boston creme right onto the floor and declared, “It’s scalping time!” Mrs. Mathis, clearly trying to keep herself composed as the elder of this village, not even bothering to look at her own results, attempted to calm the room. “Professor, you did say that some of us have thirty-two percent Indian, right? You did say that.”

“Well, one of you does. The rest … not so much,” the professor, in motion, offered. Amazingly, his coat was already on when he said this, and most of his many papers had been speedily repacked into his briefcase.

“Me!” came a slight but jubilant voice from the far corner of the room. It was the woman in the pink raincoat, who now pumped her fist, staring at her report as if a great bounty had been won. Her round brown face did look like she belonged to a tribe, but more Igbo than Apache.

When I turned back to Mahalia Mathis, she seemed to have aged nearly ten years in as many seconds. Her mouth was agape, her top denture clacked loosely down for lack of support. Mrs. Mathis thought the thirty-two percent Native was her, I realized. That was the only thing that had let her keep her composure before now. Putting a trembling hand to the folder before her, Mrs. Mathis looked inside, and I peered discreetly over her shoulder. Two percent Native. Twenty-three percent European. Seventy-five percent African. This last bit I saw when I picked the findings off the linoleum after Mahalia Mathis collapsed, unconscious.

Discovering to my great relief that the older woman was neither dead nor in a coma, I carried Mrs. Mathis off the floor and out of the room, placing her barely conscious body in the backseat of my rental car. There she moaned and coughed as I returned her to her residence, invisible in my rearview mirror, her occasional sobs the only proof I had that she had recovered from her faint. At her curb, my steadying arm was all that managed to get her to her door. Not a word was said, not even “Good night.” I was so freaked out by the entire incident, so in a rush to distance myself from the entire event, that I left her front stoop before I realized that I didn’t get what I had come for: Poe’s letter. It took all of my social strength to return right then to Mahalia Mathis’s door and knock on it. “The letter,” I bellowed to the wood, attempting to be both loud and empathetic, repeating this refrain until my throat was as sore as my rapping knuckles. It took me a while to accept that, even if the older woman heard me, she was beyond my reach now.

By the time I got back to the Hudson Valley, I could laugh at some of it as I told Garth what had happened. Garth had his copy of Chesapeake Cabin rolled out on the coffee table, along with printed out driving directions to possible site locations. It wasn’t till I’d finished my story and he looked up at me that I realized he was pissed.

“So that’s it, everybody has to play their roles, right? Black people can’t be Indians, don’t matter what’s in their blood or how they was raised or what the freedman did for red folk. You just got to be on Team Negro if you got any black in you. Even your octoroon ass.” Garth took a bite of a Little Debbie fudge roll so big it seemed to end the conversation right there, as a matter of physics.

“Look, I didn’t mean to offend, okay? I’m just saying it like it happened.” Garth claimed a line of Seminole on his mother’s side, I forgot about that. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to judge.”

“Oh, you judging. Don’t back down now. You let me judge back first. You so scared someone’s going to kick you off Team Negro that you think everybody’s got to stick to some crazy one-drop rule. That’s me judging now.”

I wanted to ask him about his paintings then. I wanted to ask him if there were ever any black people in them, or did they look to him like a window to a Eurocentric fantasy world where black people couldn’t even exist, like they did to me. If that was the attraction. But I took my lumps because he was my boy and I wanted to walk away from this.

“A guy called for you. Booker Jaynes.” Garth’s tone eased, which in its way was its own apology. “Left a New York number, said he’s in the city next couple of days, recruiting a job for the place you called about. Said he wants to meet you. Yo, he ain’t looking for drivers, is he?”

I smiled at my unbelievable luck. Finally.

“Oh, this is big. This is very big. We’re going to Antarctica,” I told Garth. Our conflict was forgotten, smothered by the decades of friendship.

“You on your own there, dog. Ain’t nothing for black folks down there in the cold.”

“White people don’t own ice, Garth. I’m pretty sure they didn’t even invent it.”

* To my surprise the Miller Beach Senior Center was not actually in Miller Beach but in an adjacent community that merely aspired to appropriate the airs of its more reputable neighbor.

† No relation.

‡ By “somehow,” I mean that I don’t know if Mahalia Mathis had emailed the other members or called them, or rather I have no proof of this. But as to the source of this information I, personally, have no doubt.

§ As a child growing up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, I remember one such gentleman who regularly strutted through my predominantly black neighborhood clad in a brown suede pantsuit and a matching strap tied around his forehead. You could hear him coming because he would sing “powwow” songs to the beat of the many beads that hung from him. We used to tauntingly say, “Howdy, Tonto,” to him when he passed, to which he invariably smiled, raised his open palm, and replied, “How.” For years I wondered just that: how? How the hell did that brother end up like that?