DR. MAE JEMISON was the first black female astronaut, an historic accomplishment that has made her a hero to countless people, myself included. She has also been a tireless advocate for children around the globe, founding a number of nonprofits, including one that provides health care for impoverished children in West Africa. Hers is an exceptional story—yet her family’s story contains many haunting, painfully familiar reminders of the slave roots we all share. Indeed, I was able to find only some of her ancestors, because their master made gifts of them to his children. Nonetheless, I felt that our dialogue was among the most positive and inspiring that I had with anyone in the course of filming African American Lives. This was, I think, a testament to Mae’s powerful sense of herself and of her family’s influence upon her.
Mae was born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama, a small town in the northern part of the state. Her parents, Charlie and Dorothy Green Jemison, like many of their fellow African Americans, could not find good job opportunities in Alabama at that time and so decided to move north. In 1960, Dorothy took Mae and her older siblings, Charles and Ada, to Chicago, leaving her husband behind temporarily. Mae remembers the experience vividly, from a child’s perspective.
“My mother went up to Chicago, and then my father closed everything down in Alabama and came up, I guess three or four months later,” she recalled. “It was so funny, because I remember we were all expecting my father to come up for so long. We were living with my Aunt Mary, who was my mother’s sister in Chicago, in Woodlawn. And we were staying in the basement, and we looked outside and said, ‘He’s here, he’s here! My dad is here!’ ”
Mae Jemison in an official NASA photo.
The reunion proved to be a very happy one. At the time Mae’s father was a roofer and a journeyman carpenter. Her mother had two years of college but had been doing odd jobs in Alabama. “She used to clean houses sometimes. And she used to sew clothes,” recalled Mae. “I remember that’s how I learned how to sew. I learned how to do a lot of things from her.” The move north gave both of the Jemisons new opportunities. Mae’s mother’s life especially was dramatically transformed.
“Once we got to Chicago, my dad put my mother through school,” said Mae. “She finished up at Chicago Teachers College, did her last two years and then came out and started teaching. Before then she had worked at Spiegel’s doing warehouse, so she used to have a hard time getting a job, because everybody said she was overqualified for any of the jobs they had. And my dad, he used to always have two or three jobs. He drove a taxi, worked as the maintenance man for United Charities of Chicago. Then he eventually became a maintenance supervisor. And he always did contracting work, too, remodeling homes. He was one of these people who always had a bunch of jobs.”
Clearly, Mae’s parents were impressively industrious. They also, like many other African Americans of their generation, knew that hard work was not enough—a black person needed education to rise in the white world—and they treasured education, encouraging Mae from her earliest days to pursue her passions in school. “My mother was a teacher,” said Mae, “so she was always very excited about learning. I remember that when I was growing up, I loved space exploration. I mean, even as a little girl—oh, God, I loved space exploration. I followed the Mercury, the Apollo, the Gemini programs. I knew song, line, and verse of everything and always assumed I was going to space. And my parents were my role models. They’re how I learned to deal with success or failure. I learned from my mother how to stay up all night and finish a project. She was that way with everything, even with sewing clothes: ‘You got to do that until it is completed.’ I learned from my dad and his buddies—they loved my assertiveness as a little girl. So when I’d run into guys later on who had a problem with me, it didn’t matter, because my dad was the manliest man I knew. And he thought I was fine, so that was that.”
Talking to Mae about her parents, I have to confess that I felt a great rush of pride that we came from the same kind of background. Her parents were remarkably enterprising, I thought, and had much in common with my own parents. They worked tirelessly to inspire their children, teaching them to love and treasure education and hard work. They were part of a truly great generation, a generation that we still do not fully appreciate and from whose principles—sadly, I think—too many of our people are straying. Mae agrees. And as we began to talk more about her parents, my appreciation of them only deepened. I was fascinated to learn that Mae’s parents were unusually engaged with their heritage and their African roots. This was not the case in my home, or in most African American homes. And I think that this foundation in her black heritage profoundly shaped who Mae Jemison is today; long before “Black is beautiful” became a catchphrase on the streets, Charlie and Dorothy Jemison were proclaiming it in their living room.
Mae as a little girl with her father, Charlie Jemison. Mae’s parents placed a premium on education—Charlie worked two or three jobs at a time to put his wife through school.
“When I was a little girl growing up,” Mae said, “we always paid attention to Africa. I remember when Miriam Makeba first came over to the United States back in like the early sixties, my mother took us to get our hair cut off, and we were wearing short Afros. And my mother used to talk about how you were beautiful because you were African, how in South Africa women were beautiful without their hair. And I remember also hearing about Olatunji and his ‘Drums of Passion’—all those little kinds of things were really important to me.”
Chicago in 1960 was still a segregated city. The Woodlawn neighborhood in which Mae grew up was all black, as was her school. Race was a palpable presence in her life. Yet perhaps because of her parents’ attitudes and the examples they set, it did not overwhelm her or limit her aspirations. Rather, it seems to have empowered her.
“I knew that there were race issues when I was growing up,” she recalled. “When I was in elementary school, I couldn’t help notice them. I mean, we’re in the middle of the 1960s! But my parents were very aware of everything that was going on. And race never impinged upon me in terms of how I saw myself as a child or how I saw myself as a person in this world. I always assumed I could do whatever I wanted to do, because I had the talent and the skills and all that, the energy to do it. My mother especially was always very aware of things that were going on. My mother knew about the Nation of Islam—she had gone to Nation of Islam meetings. Now, she did not agree with how they wanted to treat women, and she was not about to join the Nation of Islam. But we knew about it. We knew there were choices. We knew about black liberation. That was part of us.”
Mae attended all-black elementary schools, where her parents’ values were widely accepted. No one complained about her short African-style hair or clothes. In fact, she happily remembers having a sixth-grade teacher who was as excited about her heritage as she was. During the time normally devoted to history, the class departed from the standard European and American history curriculum and actually studied Africa. “I learned about the African countries becoming free,” said Mae, smiling. “And I remember this report that I made in sixth grade. It was sort of one of those extra-credit reports, busybody little girl that I was. I drew this picture on the cover with an African in a business suit and another one in tribal garments. Because the whole idea is, there was this world between which people were transitioning very rapidly to sort of Western ideas and lifestyles as well as maintaining their traditional culture. So for me Africa was just always a part of my life. I was always interested. Civil rights, too. That was always part of our consciousness, too. I remember when Martin Luther King came to Chicago and marched in Cicero. I remember Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, LeRoi Jones. I was aware of all those things that were going on. My mother got the Liberator magazine, the Chicago Defender, Muhammad Speaks—all of that was a part of growing up, part of the background of things.”
Mae believes that this environment gave her levels of self-assurance and pride in her roots that fueled her desire to excel. “I was always very excited about being called African and African American. It made me very confident. I didn’t have to worry. I mean I remember being just six years old; my brother and sister were older than me. They always talked about what they knew about how black people, how we invented the traffic light and shoe-lasting machine and all those kinds of things.”
When Mae ultimately went to an integrated high school, she expected to do not just as well as the white children but better. And she did. She graduated high school at the age of sixteen and went straight to Stanford, where she majored in chemical engineering and African American studies. (I have to confess that I love the fact that the world’s first black female astronaut was an African American studies major!) She confronted sexism and racism within the engineering department, she says, but had the confidence to fight back and succeed. She went to Cornell Medical School, spent summers traveling providing health care in Kenya, Cuba, and Thailand, and she became fascinated with medicine in developing countries. Before joining NASA and becoming the first black woman in space, she even found time to serve as a medical officer for the Peace Corps in West Africa. She’s had an engaged and fulfilling life—and still credits it all to her parents and the values they instilled in her.
“I don’t know that I can trace it back and say what made my parents so special,” she said proudly, “but the stories they told about growing up sort of just blended into everything I knew. They became who I am.”
I was fascinated by Mae’s parents and hoped to find more about what made them so special. Unfortunately, in the case of her mother, who died in 1993, we were able to journey only a short way into her family’s past.
Mae’s mother was Dorothy Mae Green, born in Florence, Alabama, on October 27, 1928. Dorothy’s mother was named Alberta Inman, born in 1903 in Decatur, Alabama. Alberta had five children and put two of them, including Dorothy, up for adoption when they were very young. Dorothy ended up taking the last name of the elderly couple who adopted her—John and Ada Green.
Though Dorothy seems to have been extremely close to her adoptive parents (she named her first daughter Ada, after her adoptive mother), she knew her birth mother and her biological siblings. And the story of Dorothy’s birth mother is very unusual. All five of Alberta Inman’s children had the same father. He was Mae’s maternal grandfather, and he was a very complex man who wore many masks, using a number of different aliases. According to Mae’s family, he called himself Lucius Blount. We spent countless hours searching every possible record for a man by that name or some variation, but we came up empty-handed. And in the end I wonder whether “Lucius Blount” or Alberta herself ever revealed his true identity. This, of course, makes genealogical work nearly impossible. Still, I wanted to learn as much as I could about this situation.
Mae around the time of her high-school graduation. Thanks to her parents’ influence, Mae graduated high school at the age of sixteen and went on to earn degrees from both Stanford and Cornell.
“He was an older man,” said Mae, acknowledging that her grandfather was essentially a mystery to her. “And he lived elsewhere, possibly in the North. He came to town from time to time.”
Speaking with Mae’s older sister, Ada, we learned more. Ada had heard that Lucius was a married man, very good-looking—tall, well educated, and articulate. He was also, according to Ada, very light-skinned and might have been half white.
Ada believes that Lucius met her grandmother, Alberta, when she was a teenager and that Lucius had some business with her father, Jones Inman, a farmer who lived in Decatur. After that, Ada says, Lucius started coming to Alabama every summer from somewhere in the North. She believes that Lucius impregnated Alberta on almost every visit.
Alberta ended up having five children with Lucius, all very close in age. Mae and Ada’s mother, Dorothy, was the last. At first, all the children lived with Alberta and her father. At some point, however, according to Ada, Lucius said that he would take Alberta away to the North with him and get rid of his wife. But he wanted to be able to start life over with Alberta “unencumbered.” So he promised to arrange adoptive homes for all of Alberta’s children. Dorothy and her brother Major were both placed with elderly, childless couples in nearby Florence, so they grew up knowing each other and were always very close. Moreover, the families that they were placed with were very kind and supportive; both of them went to college and flourished.
According to Ada, the other children ran away from their adoptive homes so often that they were returned to their mother. In the meanwhile Lucius had vanished, never to return. So three of Dorothy’s older siblings ended up staying with their mother and being raised by her. They kept in contact with their two adopted siblings and remained close throughout their lives, but the family had been forever damaged. In later years, according to Ada, the children would tease their mother and quiz her, asking, “How could you give up your kids?” Ada recalls that her grandmother was ashamed—and didn’t like to talk about it. She also recalls that her children had a lot of enmity and anger toward her.
Mae agrees with her sister. “One of the things that used to really bother my mother,” said Mae, “is that she felt that Gram was not forthcoming about anything, and it really, really upset her.”
These feelings are easy to understand. It is very hard for an outsider to comprehend the desperate choices that Alberta seems to have made, even given the fact that she was so young. It seems to us today that she exposed her children to unnecessary pain and hardship. It is a sad story, both for Alberta and her children. Unfortunately, we could not flesh it out any further. The only official document we could find regarding Alberta or any other member of Dorothy’s biological family was the 1930 census. It revealed that Alberta’s parents were Jones Inman, born around 1872 in Decatur, Alabama, and Mollie Ray, born in the same town in 1874. We tried to find out more about Jones and Mollie, but we lost track of them around 1910. They seem to have just disappeared from the records. Mae’s sister, Ada, believes that her great-grandfather Jones Inman was half Indian, but this is based only on rumor. And beyond that rumor, I could find out nothing more about him. Mae’s maternal line had run out very early—thanks in part to the mysterious Mr. Blount.
Fortunately, turning to her father’s side, we were able to learn a great deal. Mae’s father, Charlie Jemison, was born in Talladega, Alabama, on December 31, 1925. His parents were Edward Primus Jemison and Susie Anna Dickerson, both also born in Talladega County, Alabama—Edward in 1902 and Susie in 1906.
Mae knew some of these people in her childhood and had heard stories growing up about most of them. “We knew all about my grandmother, my great-grandmother,” she said. “I met a bunch of them, and there was always this idea that there was American Indian in my father’s side, which was fairly pronounced even in him. I never knew exactly where it was or how it came about, mainly because I probably didn’t pay enough attention to it. But I remember my grandfather, my father’s father. He was a teacher of traditional medicine, and I always found him a very fascinating man.”
Tracing Mae’s grandfather Edward’s lines back, we were able to find ample documentation taking us into the slave era—and a rumor that may substantiate Mae’s Native American stories. Edward’s father, Mae’s great-grandfather, was Lewis Jemison, born in 1866 in Mumford, Alabama, which is part of Talladega County. He was the son of Annie and Adam Jemison, both born slaves in Talladega County in the early 1840s. Family members claim that Annie was a full-blooded Cherokee and that her son Lewis refused to call himself black, Indian, or white. “I’m a man and will be treated like one,” he liked to say. Sounds like a man ahead of his time, and a stubborn one at that.
Looking for a white slave owner who might have owned Lewis’s parents, Adam and Annie, we found a man named Shadrack Jemison, who was a wealthy white farmer in Talladega County. He owned a great deal of property, even after the Civil War. Finding a slave ancestor by name before they were freed is the brass ring of black ancestry. Although, as we have seen again and again, the slaves had no names that the law was bound to respect, sometimes, for legal reasons, an owner had to indicate the specific identity of a certain slave. And poring over Jemison family records, we found a deed indicating that on January 1, 1852, Robert Jemison Sr.—who was Shadrack’s father—gave his children large shares of property, including land and some slaves. The deed lists the first names and ages of the slaves whom he gave to each of his children, including a boy named Adam.
Sunnyside Plantation in Talladega, Alabama. Mae’s great-great-grandfather Adam lived on this plantation under slave owner Shadrack Jemison.
Mae could hardly read the handwriting, but there in the deed, she located her great-great-grandfather Adam, listed as being eight years old and worth four hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe our luck. Unfortunately, we could not find Adam’s wife, Annie, but we did find several artifacts that helped us further imagine Adam’s life. First, we found photographs and records concerning a plantation estate in Talladega called the Jemison House. Mae remembers that her parents used to tell her about this house when she was growing up. Looking at the photographs, I can only say that it is a most memorable house—elegant, grand, and imposing. It was built by Shadrack Mims Jemison in 1848, and it is the plantation where Mae’s great-great-grandfather Adam was probably living between 1852, when he was given to Shadrack, and the time he was freed after the Civil War.
The house is still standing today, and it bears elegant witness to the economics of enslavement. In fact, it has quite a history. We found an entry about it in a book published in 1957 called Fascinating Talladega County. It reads, “In the slave quarters behind the house it is said that the master used to punish refractory slaves by putting them in very heavy irons. This they resented intensely and ever since it was first done the manacled slaves were returned to their quarters and rattled their chains so strongly that they are plainly heard in the big house.”
Perhaps that was one of Mae’s ancestors rattling those chains! Regardless, this simple passage, based on an experience shared by many slaves, humbled her. “It is incredibly sobering,” she said quietly. “If you think about the resilience that those people had to have. You know, when folks talk about perseverance and strength of character, strength of mind, to be able to go through all of that and still have some semblance of family …”
But this wasn’t the end of our research into Adam’s story. As we saw in the case of Morgan Freeman’s ancestry, in the Library of Congress there is a collection of first-person slave narratives recorded in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration. Along with that of Morgan’s great-grandmother, Cindy Anderson, we found an account by a man called Perry Sid Jemison who was owned by the Jemison family and was about the same age as Mae’s great-great-grandfather Adam. So their experiences were likely very similar. They probably even knew each other.
Though Perry’s narrative does not mention Adam by name, it describes in general terms how the Jemison family was “scattered about” after the Civil War, and it gives some fascinating insights into what life was like for a young boy on the plantation. It reads, in part:
“I’m Perry Sid Jemison. My mother’s name was Jane Perry. My father’s name was Sid Jemison. The whole family lived together on the Kahoba river Alabama.… There was no food allowance for children that could not work and my grandmother fed us out of her and my mother’s allowance. I remember my grandmother giving us pot liquor, bread and red syrup. The first work I done to get my food was to carry the water to the field to the hands that was working. The next work after that was when I was large enough to plow. Then I done everything else that come to the hand on the farm and never earned money in the slave days.… Abraham Lincoln fixed it so that slaves could be free. He struck off the handcuffs and the ankle cuffs from the slaves. But how could I be free if I had to go back to my master and beg for bread, clothes and shelter? It was up to everybody to work for freedom.
Mae was pleased to imagine that this man might have known her ancestor, that they may have played and worked together. It gave me goose-flesh. It also got us talking about the hardships that Perry and Adam and all other slaves must have endured even upon being granted their freedom. “Imagine that,” said Mae. “ ‘How could I be free if I had to go back to my master and beg for bread?’ ” And she’s right. In so many ways, as we have seen, the sharecropping system that followed the Civil War sought to substitute a new form of slavery for the old form.
Turning back to her father’s mother’s family, we focused on Mae’s paternal grandmother, Susie Anna Dickerson, born on July 21, 1906, in Talladega, Alabama. Her parents were Charlie Dickerson and Fannie Bradford. Both were born in Talladega County, Alabama—Charlie in 1878 and Fannie two years later.
Mae’s sister, Ada, had a very interesting story to tell about her great-grandfather Charlie. According to Ada, Charlie Dickerson was very good friends with a white man named John McKenzie, who came from a wealthy family and owned a lot of property. They were such good friends, in fact, that Charlie stood in for John so that he could get a marriage license to marry a black woman. This was necessary because intermarriage was illegal at the time. What’s more, according to Ada, John McKenzie and his black bride began living with Charlie Dickerson and his family in some kind of “communal situation” when McKenzie’s family disowned him after he married this black woman. The two friends—white and black—then made a living distilling liquor, and when John McKenzie was arrested for it, Charlie Dickerson went to jail for him, since the two friends knew that a black man would not be allowed to hold on to his white friend’s property at that time. Ada claims that McKenzie even gave Dickerson some land when he got out of jail.
Ada heard this story from two white women, who told it to her in the presence of her grandmother Susie Anna Dickerson. Though we could not substantiate it, as many of the pertinent records from this area of Alabama have been lost, Ada believed it to be true—and I see no reason to dismiss her account. Such situations were much more common than we think. As we have seen in the case of ancestors of Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Morgan Freeman, and Tom Joyner, there were many close friendships and sexual relationships (good and bad) between blacks and whites in the post—Civil War segregated South, even though they were illegal.
In trying to verify this story, we became very frustrated. Not only were many local records missing, but we could not find any federal records regarding Charlie Dickerson or his family. As a last resort, we turned to a tool that genealogists often use called Soundex code. It allows one to search for names in a computer database by how they sound rather than how they’re spelled. And in the case of Charlie Dickerson’s family, it proved extremely useful. We found the Dickerson name recorded in public documents in a wide variety of ways—as Dickinson, Dickerson, Dickason, Dickasons, and on and on. This greatly expanded the range of our search. And in the census records, we found a “Charlie Dickinson,” whom we believe to be the same person as “Charlie Dickerson,” living with his parents, Wiley Dickinson and Letitia Cunningham, in Talladega County in 1880. Wiley was a former slave born in 1852, and Letitia was a former slave born in 1855. These two people, I am virtually certain, were Mae’s great-great-grandparents.
Census records indicate that Wiley Dickinson’s father was a slave named Henry Dickerson, born around 1801 in Wayne County, North Carolina. Unfortunately, we know nothing more about him, and we could not identify a possible slave owner for him, so we could not trace the Dickerson line back any further than this. But in the 1870 census, we found Wiley’s wife, Letitia Cunningham, living in Talladega County, not yet married, with her seven brothers and sisters and with her mother, Chaney Cunningham. This is Mae’s great-great-great-grandmother. She was born in 1835. And searching for white Cunninghams who could possibly have owned her, we found that the largest plantation in the entire area was owned by someone named William J. Cunningham. Incredibly, once again we found some interesting records in which slaves were listed by name—including a will that was written by William’s father, Joseph T. Cunningham, dated August 13, 1846. It includes detailed instructions for the distribution of his property and a detailed inventory. There are six pages listing slaves by their first name. Among them, Mae’s great-great-great-grandmother Chaney Cunningham is listed as being worth $125. At the time, she would have been ten years old.
Chaney is included in this will as part of a lot of slaves valued at $2,900. Other slaves in the lot included a man named Bob and a woman named Edy, both listed as being born in 1800. And judging from the rest of the will, it would seem that Joseph Cunningham kept most of his slave families together, which was unusual. It also means that Chaney’s parents were probably Bob and Edy. If true, they would be Mae’s great-great-great-great-grandparents—and they would represent the end point of one of the longest lines in the ancestry of African American slaves that I have ever seen documented.
Mae was thrilled to see her family tree drawn out in such detail down the Jemison line—a joy tempered only by the sadness she felt at not being able to share the information with her father, who died in 2004. “He would have loved this,” she said. “It would have really given him a kick.” I understood. Sharing my family tree with my father has been one of the great pleasures of my life. I can only imagine the pride that Charlie Jemison would have felt in seeing his long line of ancestors.
At this point we began looking at Mae’s DNA tests. Her admixture results were a surprise to us both. They revealed that she had 84 percent sub-Saharan African ancestry, 13 percent East Asian, and 3 percent Native American ancestry. We know where the Native American probably comes from, based on her family stories about it. But nothing in our genealogical research suggested any Asian heritage, which is unusual for an African American. But as I stared at Mae’s facial features, her Asian heritage became readily apparent to me.
“I wonder if that’s Lucius Blount,” said Mae. “Or maybe there were Chinese in Mississippi in the late 1800s doing work projects and stuff like that. Maybe that’s the reason.” This is possible. Chinese laborers were brought into the Deep South to fill a labor shortage after the Civil War. Mae’s mother’s family could have become intertwined with them. But I think her DNA is more likely the result of the fact that there was migration across the Bering Straits that intermingled Asians and the Native Americans centuries ago. And, as we saw with Oprah Winfrey, Native American and Asian can code for each other, meaning that Mae could be 16 percent Native American, the most of any person we tested. In the end it is a mystery—though one that Mae is very happy with. “I’ve been told I look Asian,” she said, “and I love that.”
She is also very proud of her Native American roots. “One of the things that we don’t talk about enough,” she said, “is that when slaves would manage to run away, many times they were accepted by Native Americans. Indians would just help them out. It was a very interesting sort of dynamic, and I think if this dynamic ever became well known, that would make the country much stronger. We need to emphasize this part of history.” I couldn’t agree more strongly, when it can be documented through DNA analysis.
Before turning to Mae’s DNA test results regarding her African roots, we spoke again about her parents and their relationship to Africa. “When I was a little girl,” said Mae, “I couldn’t wait to get to Africa. When I got my own room, I wanted to do it like the Kalahari Desert. And I wanted to put my bed on the floor. My parents, they were the ones who made me aware of things. We listened to the music, African music, my father and mother were very proud of it. I remember when I was growing up, and I wanted to give my parents a special trip. So I got them this brochure to choose a trip, and it had these European tours in it, ’cause I thought it would be easier. They came back, and they said ‘Well, Mae, we want to go to Egypt.’ So they went to Egypt, and my mother and father said it was the most wonderful thing that they had done, because the people there, they look just like us. We were there before anyone. And they were really excited about being there.”
Unlike many of the people interviewed, Mae knows Africa very well, both academically and from working and traveling there. She speaks Swahili and has spent extensive amounts of time in Kenya, Tanzania, and all of West Africa since first going there in the early 1980s. Yet I was delighted to see that she still had her childlike enthusiasm for learning about it. She wanted to know her African roots, she said, just because it would give her so much pleasure. She had no preconceptions, no favorite ethnic group or region. She just loved Africa—and I have to say that I see that love as flowing straight out her parents.
Our initial testing of Mae’s mitochondrial DNA indicated that her matrilineal ancestors were among Bantu-speaking East African Kikuyu people. This posed a frustrating question. There were virtually no Kikuyu taken as slaves from East Africa to the New World, so how would Mae’s first maternal ancestor get here? Bantu-speaking people who were part of the eastern stream of the Bantu migration passed through central Kenya on their way to central and southern Africa. So people enslaved by the Lunda in eastern Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo are likely to have genetic markers similar to people in areas such as Kenya. Fortunately, a second round of testing revealed matches with the Koto and Mafa people of Cameroon, the Hausa of Nigeria, the Mende of Sierra Leone, the Akan of Ghana, and the Mandinka of Senegal. These results were diffuse and by no means definitive, but they were much more accessible to interpretation against what we knew about the history of the slave trade.
John Thornton and Linda Heywood explained that several of these matches were unlikely to have been the source of Mae’s original enslaved maternal ancestor. The Akan and the Mafa, for example, were people from the forest and coastal regions of West Africa and were far less likely to be victims of slavery than the other groups. Indeed, the Akan sold slaves to the Europeans. The Hausa, Mende, and Mandinka groups were very likely matches, however. What’s more, these groups were all associated with the Fulbe (or Fulani) tribe, who were spread from Senegal to northern Cameroon and who frequently intermarried with them, fought wars with them, and kidnapped and sold them into slavery. (Fulbe raiders were notorious slave takers.) And since ethnic membership in these tribes passed through the male line, Fulbe women who married into these other ethnicities may have not been identified as Fulbe. Thus, according to Thornton and Heywood, it is possible that Mae’s original enslaved maternal ancestor might be related to the Fulbe. Indeed, they concluded that a Fulbe connection was the most likely explanation for the diffuse distribution of Mae’s genetic markers.
They argued that it is also possible that Mae’s original maternal ancestor was from the Koto tribe. The Koto were a decentralized society in coastal southwestern Cameroon, and if Mae’s first maternal ancestor was from this tribe, she was probably exported through Old Calabar sometime around 1700—most likely after being kidnapped or taken prisoner in a small-scale war. A number of Koto people came to the Chesapeake area in this manner, especially after 1660, and some of them were among the first settlers in the Piedmont region; thus their descendants might have been brought to the Deep South by the internal migration to the frontiers after 1800. In addition, a group of Koto came to South Carolina in the 1720s and ’30s and might have been among the pioneers of British and American settlements in the Deep South following the Revolution.
Looking back to Mae’s family tree, I saw that the oldest female relative we trace down her matrilineal line was her great-grandmother, Molly Ray Inman, who was born in Decatur, Alabama, in 1874. Her parents, though we could not identify them, were almost certainly slaves. We know that Alabama was settled between 1810 and 1840 by people from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Now, many settlers would have brought slaves with them, and, once there, many would have purchased more slaves—not recent arrivals from Africa, because the slave trade was abolished in 1808, but rather they would have purchased them from existing owners, most likely back in Virginia or the Carolinas. All of this is consistent with Mae’s second round of mitochondrial DNA testing. It does not allow us to narrow down her results beyond the Koto, Hausa, Mende, Mandinka, or Fulbe (although, again, Thornton and Heywood think the Fulbe match is most likely correct). Nonetheless, these results do give a general picture of Mae’s maternal heritage in Africa.
Mae’s testing produced the least conclusive results of any of the people in this project. However, I think Mae was the best prepared of all the subjects to handle them. As we said good-bye, she seemed completely happy, comfortable in her knowledge of who she is and what she has accomplished. “I am just proud to be African. Proud to be an African American. It would have been fun to know more, but it’s great just to know that. I tell people, ‘What difference does it make if you have a position and you mind your table manners and you act just like everybody else? What difference does it make? You have to bring what’s unique to you.’ And part of what’s unique to me is all our history. What we share. I have never been ashamed of African history or African American history. I’m amazed by how much we accomplished—how much actually happened. We ended up having black doctors, black teachers, lawyers, dentists, everybody. We’ve had communities who took care of themselves and were self-sufficient when they had very little to begin with, were given nothing and were in fact denied and had stuff taken away from them constantly. To me it’s a tribute to fortitude.”