IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to talk with Whoopi Goldberg for long without being intrigued at her sense of timing, at her capacity to improvise, and by how keen an observer of human nature she is. She seems to take her material from the world unfolding around her, minute by minute—even, or especially, in conversation. Whoopi heard that we were doing this project and sent word that she would like to be involved. From the outset she was passionately interested in the process of finding one’s ancestors, saying that she’d love to have her family tree researched because she had no idea who might be on it. “I just want to know who’s there,” she told me with a sly smile. I was happy to oblige her. The stories we uncovered, however, were not at all what I’d expected. I thought I would perhaps find some hints as to the source or inspiration for her humor. Instead I found myself confronting a fierce, independent line of people who had little room in their lives for jokes—and yet some shared a great deal with their brilliant descendant.
Whoopi was born Caryn Elaine Johnson on November 13, 1955, in New York City. She and her older brother, Clyde, were raised by their mother, Emma Harris, in a housing project in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Whoopi’s father, Robert James Johnson Jr., abandoned the family when she was very young, and Emma was forced to support her children as a single mother, working a variety of jobs—including teaching and nursing—to make ends meet. While Emma worked, the kids more or less took care of themselves, sometimes not seeing their mother for days at a time or, if Emma was working a night shift, seeing her only in the early morning as she was coming home from work and they were getting ready to go to school.
Though she had many traumas as a youth, struggling with drug addiction and an absent father, Whoopi eventually triumphed, transforming herself into the multitalented, Oscar-winning actress and comedienne we all admire. The transformation must have required great effort and determination. Yet in person Whoopi is almost coy about it, choosing to deflect praise with jokes. Her brother, Clyde, says that Whoopi’s eventual success took everyone by surprise. As a child, he says, she was friendly but somehow different. “In retrospect,” he added, “she was probably ahead of her time.” He has no explanation for where this came from. And he doesn’t see any ancestral influence in Whoopi’s success. There is no one, he told me, in his family who had any talent as an entertainer.
When Whoopi talks about her upbringing, she focuses not so much on the hardships she endured or the way in which her family shaped her but rather upon the community in which she grew up—a community that continues to inspire her today.
In the late 1950s and for decades beyond, Manhattan’s Chelsea was an exciting, wildly diverse neighborhood. “Chelsea was the neighborhood of eclectic people,” said Whoopi, smiling broadly. “It was all kinds of economic backgrounds, all kinds of jobs—actors, performers, boxers, nurses, doctors. And there was just every conceivable group of people—white, black, Asian, Puerto Rican, Greek, Turkish, Albanian. I mean, you name it, it was in Chelsea. We all spoke a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of Greek, a little bit of whatever. Whoever was near you, you spoke a little bit of what they spoke. You had to be able to say, ‘Could I use the bathroom? Can So-and-So come out to play? Good evening, good morning, good night.’ You know? And because not everybody’s parents spoke English, you had to find a way. That was the neighborhood.”
Whoopi was born the year after Brown v. Board of Education, at a time when many blacks were feeling intense discrimination. Her neighborhood seems to have been insulated from the racial politics of the times, however, and she remembers feeling little if any racism, in the streets or in school. “In New York City, you could never be undereducated back then,” she said. “You could go anywhere and get any kind of education you needed in public grammar schools and Catholic schools, which is what I went to. And in New York, as far as your color, in the wintertime you don’t know who is who. ’Cause everybody has got hats and coats and stuff, so you always were intermingling with people. So it was for me the greatest, greatest place I could have been born. Because it gave me an understanding that fundamentally we are all the same.”
As many of the family histories that I’ve researched for this book have illustrated, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Great Migration reshaped the African American population, when thousands of black people moved from the South to the North. But the trade-off of moving to the North to escape southern racism could be costly. Many blacks encountered severe economic problems and experienced profound feelings of isolation and displacement in their new northern homes. To Whoopi, however, growing up in Chelsea, these issues were distant. Her family had come up from the South a generation earlier, and even though new southern immigrants were streaming in throughout her childhood, all were easily absorbed into the neighborhood’s diversity.
“How would we tell?” she asked me. “I mean, how would we know? There were just new kids in the neighborhood sometimes. And maybe in hindsight you could say, ‘Well, that person was really country.’ But there were so many different kinds of people there. And when you’re a kid, none of that is important. The white kids, the black kids, the Spanish kids—we were all about how many bottles can we collect ’cause we want some candy. That’s what we were into. ‘Gee, it’s so hot, Mr. Softee is coming.’ Or ‘Let’s get the big wrench to open the fire hydrant so everybody can have the mobile pool.’ That’s what I knew growing up. I’ve faced more racism as an adult in this enlightened time than I ever did as a kid. It was a shock to me. I was like, ‘Huh? Where did you grow up?’ ’Cause, you know, in New York it was just, you were there. It wasn’t a discussion about color or any of those things. We all ate the same thing, we all went to the same movies, we all hung in the same places, and it wasn’t till I got outside of New York City that I discovered, ‘Oh, uh, okay, this is a little bit different here.’ ”
As a result of her environment, young Whoopi watched the civil-rights movement unfold from a distance, uncertain as to its significance, living in blessed isolation from America’s racial woes. “It wasn’t until I was older,” she recalled, “I mean really into my teens, you know, when I began to realize what was going on. And then for me it was more like, ‘How can people be so dumb? What’s the big deal with the bus? Why can’t you ride the bus?’ Because it wasn’t something that was in my sphere. In New York you didn’t have to deal with buses and sitting at counters. In New York you went where you wanted. So I saw it all on the television and in magazines. I saw Dr. King and the hoses and the dogs. We all saw it. But, you know, it wasn’t until I was older that I could sort of figure out what was going on, because it just made no sense to me.”
I asked Whoopi how this experience affected her identity as an African American. She shook her head and smiled, bemused. “I don’t consider myself an African American,” she said. “I never have. I consider myself an American, because all I’ve known is this country, and so anytime someone hyphenated it, it always made me think that I wasn’t entitled to everything I would be entitled to as an American. And regardless of how far back the times of arrival go, I still sort of figure I predate most of the folks that I meet. So I’m an American.”
I asked her how her black identity figures into that, and she replied simply, “I never separated them. I am black. It’s just what I am. It’s like I am female, I am black. And I am American. That’s my identity. And it’s straight out of New York City. The person who I am was formulated specifically because of what I learned as a kid and the way I had relationships with people and the fact that the relationships were not ever based in race but were based in what we are doing. ’Cause, you know, if Tommy Tinsley’s mom caught me doing something, she’d beat my behind just as bad as if Ms. Gale found me doing something. The Irish ladies beat your behind, the black lady beat your behind, Mrs. Rodriguez would beat your behind—it didn’t matter, you know.”
I admire Whoopi’s brazen independence, her stubbornly counterintuitive sense of cosmopolitan identity in an era of ethnic fragmentation. So many Americans of all ethnicities today are angrily territorial about their identities—determined politically and emotionally to erect barriers and police the boundaries. Whoopi, by contrast, is ethnically mercurial and inclusive. She delights in defying cultural stereotypes. “Folks who have not grown up around black folks think we have this mythology connected to us,” she said. “They all think we all talk this same way and do this and that and you know what I’m talking about. But it’s a mythology. My human education is vastly different from someone who was raised somewhere else. So I don’t have some of the same ideas. And that’s why I go about my life the way that I do. So people shouldn’t come at me like they don’t understand my culture, you know? I don’t know what that means—‘my culture’? I’m here, this is my culture.”
Unlike most of my other subjects, Whoopi was not especially eager to talk about her parents’ lives. Perhaps she wanted to protect their privacy, which, of course, is understandable. Or perhaps, like many of us, Whoopi sees herself essentially as her own creation—a product of her own brilliant imagination, sui generis, her own branch on her extended family tree. I wanted to see where this sense of independence and individuality came from. Was it just Whoopi’s invention, as her brother believes? Was it somehow the culture of her neighborhood in New York City, as she seems to feel? Or were there some antecedents in her family’s past, unknown to her perhaps, shaping her identity, as if through mother’s milk?
We began by researching her father, Robert Johnson Jr., who was born in 1930 in New York City’s Harlem at the end of the Harlem Renaissance. His father—Whoopi’s paternal grandfather—was Robert Johnson Sr., born in Georgia around 1898. Photographs show him to be a very light-complexioned black man—bearing, as Whoopi points out, an uncanny resemblance to Edward G. Robinson. Whoopi remembers little about him. “I used to wonder about him on occasion,” she said, “but you couldn’t ask him anything. He was not a talking gentleman. You did not question him about anything.”
When Whoopi was growing up, she recalls visiting her father’s parents often in Harlem. But almost all of her recollections of her grandfather revolve around the silence and distance he created. “He was very quiet,” she said. “I only saw him occasionally. I always knew he was at my grandma’s if the door was closed. And when the door was closed, you didn’t make any noise. It was two very distinct worlds, not because it was Harlem and Chelsea but because I think the family connections weren’t as tight, you know? So you went to Harlem and you did what you were supposed to do, and then you got home and did what you wanted to.”
We were able to learn one rather interesting fact about Robert: He was a Pullman porter, which as we’ve seen was a very prestigious job for a black man of his era. Being a Pullman porter gave you status within the community. Pullman porters saw the world by rail. They went everywhere. They were sophisticated. Sometimes they had two families, one at each end of their route—which may have helped explain Robert’s distant personality. The Pullman porters also played a crucial role in the history of the civil-rights movement. They were the first independent black labor union, organized under the leadership of a brilliant labor leader, the socialist A. Philip Randolph. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a historic, visionary group in African American history, one that would have political influence for generations. So these porters were, as a group, remarkably interesting people, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. But no one in Whoopi’s family knew any details about Robert Johnson’s career. He simply never talked about it. “As far as I knew,” said Whoopi’s brother, Clyde, “he was always retired.”
Whoopi was not aware that her grandfather had moved to New York from Georgia. And, indeed, in our interviews, nobody in her family knew exactly where in Georgia he came from. Many thought that he came from a town called Pleasantville, but there is no town in Georgia called Pleasantville. So we did a lot of research, and in the 1900 census we found a two-year-old colored child named Robert Johnson living in a town called Faceville in Decatur County, Georgia, just across the border from the Florida panhandle. Perhaps Faceville became Pleasantville after years of repeating. And for this reason and others, we came to believe that Whoopi’s paternal grandfather was born sometime in 1897 or 1898 and was living in Faceville by 1900.
Marriage and census records told us that Robert was the son of John Johnson, born in May of 1875 in Faceville, Georgia, and Estella Sherman, born in 1874, also in Georgia. They were Whoopi’s great-grandparents. Further research revealed that John Johnson was the son of Alex Johnson and Quilley Williams. Both Alex and Quilley were born slaves in Faceville, Alex in June of 1847 and Quilley in November of 1860. By locating them we had gone back over 125 years in Whoopi’s family history. But we lose the thread at this point, because there are so many black people who share the name Johnson. Indeed, when Frederick Douglass—whose birth name was Bailey—escaped from Baltimore, he took a train to New York, riding under the invented name of “Frederick Johnson.” But when he got to New York, he said there were so many black people called Johnson there that he wanted another name. So he chose Douglass. And he was right. At that time Johnson was the most common surname among free African Americans in the United States, followed closely by Coleman.
Turning to Whoopi’s maternal line, we found a lot more information. Her mother, Emma Harris, was the daughter of Malakiah Harris and Rachel Freedman. Whoopi did not know her grandmother Rachel, who died in 1951, four years before she was born, but she has very happy memories of Malakiah—or Malachi, as everyone called him. “I’d know that face anywhere,” she said, looking at a photograph of her grandfather. “During the war he went to France, and all the French girls called him Malachi. He came back and said, ‘They called me Malachi!’ So he became Malachi. He was a big, tall, beautiful man. I have his smile. It’s his smile that you see on me. And I remember Easter Sunday with him. I remember he gave my brother a Brownie camera for Easter, and there were always wonderful and mysterious things going on with him. He’d go places, and then he’d be gone for a while, and he’d come back. He was an adventurer.”
Malakiah also led us back to a remarkable story in Whoopi’s family’s past. According to his death certificate, Malakiah Harris was born in Palatka, Florida, in 1911, and his parents were James Harris and Clander Washington. This is corroborated by the 1910 census, which places the Harris family in Palatka at that time. We could trace the Harris family back no further. However, the 1900 census indicates that ten years earlier Clander Washington was living with her parents—Whoopi’s great-great-grandparents—William Washington and Elsa Tucker in Alachua County, Florida. That census also indicates that William Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1837, and his wife, Elsa, was born a slave in 1845 in Florida. By 1900, Whoopi’s great-great-grandmother Elsa had given birth to sixteen children, of whom fourteen were still living. Clander, who is the baby, was born in 1891.
Whoopi Goldberg has fond memories of her charismatic grandfather, Malachi Harris.
“Sixteen kids?” said Whoopi, laughing. “I barely got through one.”
Trying to learn more about these people, we uncovered what I consider to be one of the most remarkable stories from the Reconstruction era. In the years after the Civil War, Alachua County, Florida, was extremely poor, rural and underdeveloped; indeed, the entire state of Florida was essentially a frontier. Its hostile climate kept its population tiny relative to the rest of the settled United States. William and Elsa Washington found themselves there, after slavery, trying to start a new life for themselves under freedom. Given their skills, like the overwhelming number of former slaves, they had little choice but to farm. Obtaining land to farm was everyone’s ideal. However, while you might think that uninhabited rural Florida would have been an easy place for the Washingtons to acquire land, it did not prove to be so. You need money to buy land. And most African Americans came out of slavery with nothing. Of course, near the end of the Civil War, General Sherman famously promised freed slaves forty acres of tillable land in his Special Field Order #15, on January 16, 1865—that is the origin of the phrase “forty acres and a mule.” But few slaves got their land, let alone a mule.
James Harris, Malachi’s father and Whoopi’s great-grandfather.
Fortunately, Reconstruction offered people like the Washingtons another opportunity through what was known as the Southern Homestead Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress in 1866 that set aside roughly 46 million acres of land—primarily in Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana—for the former slaves and, initially, whites loyal to the Union to claim. In order to take possession of a parcel of this land, the first step was to select a lot and then pay a five-dollar filing fee, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The program was not well administered. If you wanted land, you had to travel about looking to find a parcel that was available, inspect it, then locate an office to file your claim, which many times proved to be an administrative nightmare.
William and Elsa, however, managed to beat the odds. In November of 1873, the register of entries for the land office in Gainesville, Florida, set down a claim for them, totaling 104 acres. But filing a claim was just the beginning. Now the really hard part began. According to the Homestead Act, in order to own the land you claimed, you had to “prove” your claim by building a home of some kind on it—and then you had to live there and make a wide variety of what were called “improvements” on the land, meaning you had to enclose it, plow it, pay taxes on it, and plant and harvest a salable crop.
William and Elsa Washington’s Homestead Claim in Gainesville, Florida. They would be among the tiny minority of blacks able to keep their land after Reconstruction.
William and Elsa Washington had never done anything quite like this before. They had worked land their whole lives, of course, first as slaves and then as sharecroppers, but this was very different. They had to build and run a farm! Up to this point, they’d been the raw labor that made a farm profitable; now they were taking on the added and incredibly burdensome role of management. They had to make all the decisions about what crops to grow, where to buy seeds, when to plant and harvest, where and how to sell, how to manage the money and buy the equipment. To make matters even more difficult, they had only five years to prove their claim. It must have been terrifying. And this wasn’t the only obstacle they faced.
Reconstruction effectively ended in 1876, three years after the Washingtons filed their claim and two years before the deadline they were rushing to meet. And with the end of Reconstruction came the rise of the old white South, as former Confederates and their children took power throughout every state in the region. For Whoopi’s ancestors, trying to prove their homestead claim in Florida, what had been a tough prospect became an even more difficult challenge. Many homesteaders faced arson or other violence from the angry whites who resented any diminishment of their power. Some faced lynchings by the rising Ku Klux Klan. And the overwhelming majority faced a pernicious, ubiquitous form of economic exploitation. Fighting to keep their land, most black homesteaders were forced to take on massive debts, borrowing money from whites at exorbitant rates, mortgaging everything they had, from their crops to their livestock to their tools. Of the three thousand African Americans who filed homestead claims in Florida, only one in ten was able to withstand these pressures.
Whoopi’s great-grandmother, Clander Washington, daughter of William and Elsa.
But Whoopi’s ancestors were among that group. We found a mortgage for William and Elsa Washington indicating that they borrowed heavily on 40 of their 104 total acres. But we also found an affidavit, dated 1878, that proves they eventually became the legal owners of their land. What they did is an extraordinary accomplishment in African American history. They were slaves who became property owners in the Old South. They joined a tiny minority.
Whoopi was elated by this story, crying “We did it!” as I showed her the deed that proved just how resourceful her ancestors had been. And I was just as excited as she was. I know it can be difficult for people today to fully appreciate how important this was. There is nothing surprising about an African American owning land today. A large number do—and have done so for generations. But in the 1870s, land ownership was rare. Even by 1920 only 25 percent of the African American people owned land. Land ownership was a critical battleground. Land was a primary source of wealth in the nation at that time, and nobody knew this better than former slaves. They had worked the land. Their parents, their grandparents had worked the land. They had seen the land make their owners rich. They knew that if you could own property, you could be independent, meaning you could provide for and protect your family. You had a chance to achieve a measure of economic independence as a black person. Theoretically at least, you could play a small part in the American dream, you could enjoy a certain status and a certain self-sufficiency. The historian John Morton Blum once wrote that the promise of America was land. And that’s why William and Elsa’s story about property acquisition is a story about freedom—a thrilling story of which we should all be proud.
“I’m going to go to Florida and find that land,” said Whoopi, beaming.
I wanted to ask her if she thought differently of her family now, if she thought something had been passed on, not through genes but through sensibility, from generation to generation. I am not sure what I think myself. How could these distant ancestors contribute to the fantastic success she enjoys today? So I posed the question: Did she think William and Elsa had had some influence on her, however small?
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I have to think about that. But I do know that there is a new little fire building inside me. It’s like your head goes up another foot and a half, you know, because they were extraordinary people. They did extraordinary things. I mean, I just think it’s wonderful to know that they got their land. So now I will stop saying to people that all I want is my forty acres and a mule, because we actually got it. We got it. Double that, actually.”
Trying to learn more about William and Elsa, we found a land deed dating from 1898 that shows William receiving eighty acres of land from a person named Daniel Tucker and his wife, Dinah—at the cost of one dollar. This is significant because it is how family members typically gave each other land back then. They “sold” it for a dollar. And by looking at the 1880 census, we learned that at that time William and Elsa Washington lived in Newmansville Precinct in Alachua County just two houses away from the Tuckers. And remember: Elsa Washington’s maiden name was Tucker. So since they lived two houses away and sold land to each other for one dollar, I have to believe that they were related. In fact, given the level of generosity—eighty acres is a lot of land—I believe that the Tuckers could well have been Elsa Washington’s parents, which would make them Whoopi’s great-great-great-grandparents, another generation of landowners in Whoopi’s family line.
Daniel Tucker was born a slave in South Carolina in 1825. His wife, Dinah, was born a slave in Georgia in 1828. We have no idea how or when they ended up in Florida. But, digging deeper, we found that the land the Tuckers gave to William Washington had been purchased by Dinah Tucker in 1871, just six years after all the slaves were freed by the northern victory in the Civil War. Now, how did she get the money to buy all that land so soon after slavery? We don’t know. It would be fascinating to find out. Did a white man or woman who used to own it and who particularly liked her give her the money? Did she have a child with a white man? I think this possibility is very likely. Whoopi agrees. There is no way to know, but I’d say there’s a good chance something like that happened, some tie of intimacy trumping race.
We were unable to resolve this mystery or add anything else to our knowledge of the Tuckers. In fact, we were not even able to connect them definitively to Elsa Tucker Washington. They may have been her parents; they may also have been neighbors who, coincidentally sharing a name, wanted to sell her some land at an exceedingly low price. But circumstantial evidence suggests that a family tie, and a deep one, was obtained between them.
After William and Elsa, this line of Whoopi’s family, like all her other lines, disappears from the written records into the mists of slavery. We could not definitively identify their parents. The paper trail ran out. This understandably saddened Whoopi. “It’s like whole stories are gone,” she said. “Whole lives are gone. Whole histories are gone. And there is not emotional compensation for that. You know when you sit with folks and they say, ‘Well, my family goes back to County Cork or Sicily or wherever.’ I’ll say, ‘I don’t know. I think in Florida, maybe?’ ”
DNA, of course, offers us new tools to explore our heritage and to help us understand our origins. Her admixture test revealed that she was 92 percent sub-Saharan African, 8 percent European, with no East Asian or Native American ancestry, which means that one of her great-great-grandparents or great-great-great-grandparents was probably European—which was, of course, very common due to the treatment of female slaves by their owners. (And perhaps Dinah Tucker and the white man who sold her the land somehow play into this.) However, her percentage of European ancestry is very low for an African American. Most of us have about 20 percent European ancestry. Whoopi is overwhelmingly of African descent.
“I always thought I was a mutt,” said Whoopi. “I’ll stop saying that now.”
We next analyzed her mitochondrial DNA, which tells us about her matrilineal line all the way back as far as it’s possible to go. The tests revealed that she shared genetic signatures with people who today identify themselves as Mende in Sierra Leone and with the Kru people in contemporary Liberia. We also found matches with members of the Papel and Baiote tribes from the modern-day Republic of Guinea-Bissau.
These results were somewhat difficult to interpret, because we know so little about Whoopi’s maternal heritage. The earliest direct maternal ancestor we were able to locate was her great-grandmother Emmaline Morris, who died in New York in 1953. We don’t know anything more about Emmaline. We don’t know her birth date, much less her birthplace, much less her mother’s name or birthplace. One of our professional researchers described her work on this family line as “an insurmountable task.”
Nonetheless, John Thornton and Linda Heywood were able to offer an interpretation of Whoopi’s DNA based on their immense knowledge of the African slave trade. They maintain that all of Whoopi’s matches could be valid sources of her original enslaved African female ancestor. The Papel and Baiote tribes lived very close to one another in the region that is now Guinea-Bissau, and both were taken into slavery in large numbers. According to Thornton and Heywood, many Papel and Baiote people ended up as slaves in Virginia, South Carolina, and even New York, which was a significant destination for slaves from this region in the 1740s and ’50s. Though it is unlikely that Whoopi’s direct maternal line remained in New York undocumented from the mid—eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth, it is not impossible. Moreover, since other members of Whoopi’s maternal line moved to New York after spending generations in Florida and before that Georgia and South Carolina, it is not inconceivable that Whoopi’s direct maternal ancestor followed that path, too—in which case she may well have been a Papel or Baiote sold in South Carolina or Virginia.
In addition, Thornton and Heywood concluded that Whoopi’s Kru and Mende results from the bordering nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia make sense, because during the years that the slave trade thrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one out of every ten slaves who came to the United States came from this area of Africa. And many of these slaves ended up in plantations in South Carolina and Georgia.
I then told Whoopi that I thought she might be interested to know that many of the slaves from this region were what we might call “hardheaded” slaves or “independent-minded” slaves, meaning they fought and resisted the slave trade. Most famously, Cinque, who led the revolt on the Amistad in 1839, was a Mende man from Sierra Leone. Under Cinque’s guidance a group of slaves seized control of that ship off the coast of Cuba, killed many of the crew, and tried to force one of the white sailors to steer them toward Africa. It didn’t work. They ended up being captured by the United States Navy and stood trial before the Supreme Court. They were defended by John Quincy Adams, in one of the most important cases in our history. And they were freed. It’s a very famous story, cherished by African Americans. But the ending isn’t as well known as the beginning. And I love the ending—which is that after their trial, after they were freed, they had the choice of staying in the United States or going back home. This was no choice at all to them. They went home, went back to Africa. They were smart and determined people, who refused to recognize the reality of their enslavement and refused to believe that they had lost control over their own lives. Incredibly, they prevailed. And Whoopi is a distant cousin of these people.
“People should stop messing with me,” said Whoopi in a kind of half growl. “They should stop messing, ’cause this can come about again!”
When I finished laughing at this, she told me, deadly serious, “That’s quite wonderful, though. Really. I think it’s pretty amazing. I love the idea that the Amistad is in my blood. I love that. I love that there’s a cousin or an uncle or whatever who is fifty times removed but, you know, is my blood. I like that. I like that my family, we had skills. We weren’t just any-old-body. We knew stuff. We did this.”
She seemed extremely happy to learn that she came from such an impressive heritage, on both sides of the Atlantic. I asked her if her parents ever talked about Africa, and she replied, inimitably, shaking her head, “No, they were New Yorkers, you know.” I then asked her if she’d ever wondered what part of Africa her ancestors were from. “Not as a kid,” she replied. “Because when I was a kid, it was just Africa, the Dark Continent. The animals, Tarzan. But since then, I’ve grown up, I guess. And this has always become something I hoped I would come to learn about in my lifetime, where I would have some opportunity to find out just who went into this family. And then I can go and see the land and I can go and sniff the air, you know? You want to walk in the places where people who had something to do with your existence walked.”
This is in fact one of the most important reasons to do genealogy, especially if you are African American. This sort of knowledge can ground you; I deeply believe this. Knowledge of your ancestry can provide a certain sense of calm about the past, where before there were only questions—hundreds of years of unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions.
I wanted to know what Whoopi thought of the journey we’d taken. She had known so little about her family when we began. And our journey—like all journeys into the African American past—was incomplete. Despite that, had it been a trip worth taking? Was this information important to her? Had she learned anything about herself? Her answer was very inspiring. “The battles I have today,” she said, “they come from people labeling me and trying to whittle away what is mine, you know? My individuality and my place in the nation. This is my country. I always knew somewhere in my gut that we had arrived early on. So I’ve always said to people, ‘You might have come above on the Mayflower, but I was below on the Mayflower. We came at the same time.’ So this is great, because it sort of cements that and makes it even bigger in me. I now know that this is mine. This country, this is mine.”