THE PBS DOCUMENTARIES that led to this book—African American Lives 1 and 2—were produced as two separate series, broadcast two years apart. After the first series aired, the response was quite generous. People—and especially African Americans—came up to me on the street, in airports, everywhere, to offer their comments. Mostly they said kind things, but I got one consistent criticism. “Brother,” some would say, “you did a good job, we’re proud of you. But how come you just pick the big Negroes? How come you didn’t pick a person like me?” One of the most important lessons of African American Lives is that all of our ancestors were “average Negroes,” even those of the rich and famous.
I knew what they meant, and I took it to heart. I said to my fellow producers, “Why don’t we research a quote/unquote, average African American family?” Everyone loved the idea, so we did a national competition. Over two thousand people responded, writing in to tell us about themselves and explain why they wanted to learn more about their ancestry. The winner, hands down, was a woman named Kathleen Henderson, who was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and still lives there, surrounded by her family. She works for the University of Dayton as the director of student engagement, and I am certain that she is great at her job. She’s one of the most charming and open people I’ve met. I’m sure her students just adore her. She told me that she had entered the contest because she loved her family’s oral tradition and, like the people who stop me in the street, she came from a family who watched my first series, saying, “Why doesn’t he do a family like us?” She appreciated, she said, the fact that I had seen the light. I appreciated her candor in turn—and was pleased by the many richly layered stories we uncovered in her family’s past.
Kathleen Henderson was born on January 12, 1959, in Dayton, Ohio. Her parents were Gay Estella Doster, born on February 6, 1935, in Middletown, Ohio, and James Edward Henderson, born on August 13, 1931, also in Middletown. She has two siblings and many aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Kathleen grew up in a changing neighborhood—one that reflected much larger patterns in America at that time. When she was born, the area of Dayton in which she lived was predominantly white, but within a few years that began to change. The white families started moving away and were replaced, almost without exception, by black families. By the time she reached adolescence, the neighborhood had become predominantly black. “It was an interesting experience to have,” she reflected. “Not so much watching all the white people pull up and move out, but seeing how everything worked. Because the neighborhood wasn’t really segregated by law, but we were still pretty segregated by just what opportunity provided. And there were good things and bad things about this. The good thing was that you had all kinds of black families in the same block, reflecting all classes.”
Kathleen and her family were shaped by a complex sociological and economic dynamic with vast implications for the United States. Between 1950 and 1960, census data show that populations in the largest American cities increased negligibly—by just over 3 percent—while suburban populations exploded—going up by well over 60 percent. This is what sociologists have called “white flight.” Looking behind the numbers, one learns that almost all the suburban growth was due to the movement of white people from the cities to the suburbs. The cities, even though their overall population numbers stayed relatively flat, became overwhelmingly black. Many believe that this had a devastating effect on the economic life of African Americans, because the removal of middle-class and upper-middle-class whites destroyed the tax base of most cities, wrecking school systems, health care, and other infrastructure, while significantly diminishing business opportunities. Kathleen was a perceptive observer of this phenomenon, and she sees it in very human terms, as a complicated process, almost a mixed blessing, rather than the all-out disaster that many scholars have proclaimed it to be.
“There were people who were striving to do something different, and they moved out,” she said. “But there were people who were comfortable in whatever kind of working-class role they had. My great-grandmother, who lived with my grandmother, became kind of the neighborhood grandparent, you know? So you couldn’t walk from one block to the other without being reported. So you felt safe and secure. It was a real neighborhood. A mixed-class black neighborhood. At least before integration really took hold.”
When the civil-rights movement came, the neighborhood Kathleen knew was thrown into chaos. “It started to be very tense,” she recalled. “There was an armory that was about two blocks away from our home. And there was a riot that erupted in Dayton in this armory. This was 1966 or ’67. And I can still kind of remember trucks rolling out of that armory. And the neighborhoods were on fire in some places. You knew something was going on.”
Kathleen’s father, James Henderson, was an active supporter of the civil-rights movement, more sympathetic to the vision of Malcolm X than that of Martin Luther King Jr. Hearing Kathleen describe him, James sounds like Mae Jemison’s parents, and he had a profound impact on Kathleen’s feelings about her African American heritage, just as Mae’s folks did. “My father talked about Africa a lot,” Kathleen said. “My father was always saying, you know, ‘You came from a great people.’ He talked about the Marcus Garvey movement, his ‘Back to Africa’ movement. I learned about the civilization of Timbuktu, a lot of that. So there was always kind of a connection in our family with Africa and just being black. And that rubbed off.”
I wondered why Kathleen’s father took such pride in his African ancestors. Though this was not wildly unusual in his generation, it was not by any means the norm—and I’m always eager to learn why some people were on the cutting edge of black culture. Kathleen thinks her father’s views had a lot to do with the hue of his skin—a trait he shares with his daughter. “My father was pretty brown,” she said. “And so, of course, the kind of colored jokes that you have within the family—he heard a lot of those. And he and I, being the brownest in the household, had a bond. Maybe his talking about Africa, in some ways, was to help me feel comfortable with being as dark as I am and being connected with him.”
Kathleen Henderson’s mother, Gay Doster, around 1950.
I find this fascinating. I have heard many people tell me why they became cultural nationalists in the 1960s, why they valorized Africa and Malcolm X, but I’ve never heard anyone explain this intrafamily color dynamic—which, of course, all black people know about. We all discuss who’s darker and lighter, sometimes humorously, often with cruel intentions and evil consequences. But we are aware of it. There is no denying that. It is a vital part of our culture. I am not proud of it, but I have participated in it, and I love the way Kathleen frames the discussion so lovingly, in such a moving way, with regard to her father.
There were other reasons, of course, that Kathleen’s father—and mother—felt drawn to the civil-rights movement. Like many young black couples in the 1960s, Kathleen’s parents knew that the world needed to change. They were both educated and successful, at least as successful as you could be if you were black in 1960s Ohio. Her father, James, was a systems analyst, and her mother, Gay, had done very well in high school. But Kathleen believes that her parents “felt the pains of being colored” from their earliest days in Middletown, attending segregated schools and then living in Dayton, a city that, outside their small neighborhood, was hostile to them.
“My father was a pretty bright man,” she said, “and he always felt that there were a lot of opportunities not open to him, even though he could prove himself and he ended up doing a lot of work. And even for my mother—she was going to go to college, but the schools were tracking her very carefully and closely, and she just felt that the message was always, ‘You’re never gonna go to college. You’re gonna do the things that all the other colored girls do.’ So things were painful. I even remember there was an amusement park when they were kids. It’s now closed. But back then, every year at the end of their year, the kids in the school there in Middletown would go. But it wasn’t open for the colored kids to go to. As we got older and things relaxed some, they opened the doors to us. But my father wouldn’t have none of it. He wouldn’t go. ‘You didn’t want me before,’ he’d say. ‘Well, you ain’t getting me now.’ It was a very, very hard experience for my father.”
I’m very familiar with these kinds of experiences—most African Americans of my generation are. We can all remember these humiliations, so blatantly thrown up in our parents’ faces, as if they’d happened yesterday. Of course, such humiliations have not entirely stopped, not by any means. America’s racism has grown more subtle, perhaps, more diffuse, but it has not disappeared. And I think it is important, as we look around us today, to remember what was so close to the surface just a generation ago. I can feel James Henderson’s pain, even today, in his daughter’s words.
It is important to note, however, that Kathleen’s parents did not lose themselves in their pain. They were determined to transform their world. They became committed civil-rights activists and were also deeply involved in their children’s education, knowing from years of accrued experience that schooling was the path to a better life, the only hope to break the shackles of segregation. It is no coincidence that many of the great civil-rights battles were fought over schools and educational issues. These people knew that knowledge was power.
“My parents were very active in our education, growing up,” said Kathleen. “I remember there was a real movement to bring black history into the school. There was a real movement to fix things. They were very involved in that. My father especially. Like, I remember there was a form that you were supposed to get signed and bring back into school. It was just a simple enrollment form, just stating our address, but my father wouldn’t sign it. Every year you come back to school, and the teachers will call roll. And, you know, ‘Kathy, do you have your paper?’ No. ‘Well, next time you bring in your paper.’ I would go back home, say, ‘Daddy, please.’ But he wouldn’t sign it, because he said he didn’t think they were being fair with the money. He said he wouldn’t sign it until we had new books in the school. And all those new books were going to the east side of Dayton—to the white kids, with Dayton being segregated. So he wasn’t intending to sign nothin’. He was a hardheaded dude. But that was the way my parents were. They always wanted us to have an opportunity. What you did with that opportunity was on you, but you at least had this opportunity.”
Turning back a generation on Kathleen’s family tree, I was curious to see how her parents were shaped by their families. We were amply rewarded for our efforts. James Henderson’s parents—Kathleen’s paternal grandparents—were Elwood Henderson and Elizabeth Morton, both born in Kentucky in the early 1900s. Elwood died in Middletown, Ohio, in 1936, so Kathleen never knew him, but she heard many stories about her grandfather when she was growing up, and she believes that Elwood’s untimely death had a profound influence on her father.
“My grandfather died when my father was three,” she said. “And I think in some ways that probably influenced my father’s need or want to make certain that he was there and present with us kids. Because of what he missed early on. I mean, for a young boy, not to have your father there is challenging. And my father made it his goal to meet that challenge, you know? And my dad was a lot of fun. My mother, I think, she sometimes had a difficult time understanding when us siblings would fight. She would be very upset if my sister and brother and I would fight. My father was more carefree. And always very, very family-oriented.”
While Kathleen never knew James’s father, she had a great deal of contact with his mother, Elizabeth Morton Henderson, who died in 1999 and was a consistent presence in Kathleen’s childhood and adult life. “She was a tough lady,” Kathleen recalled, smiling. “Thank God that she lived as long as she did, and I was able to grow up and not be afraid of her. When I was a child, she was a little scary. I loved her, but, you know, she’d come to visit us during the summertime and we were excited to go to the Greyhound bus station to pick her up. But we were also excited to take her back.”
Kathleen remembers her grandmother, Elizabeth Henderson, as a stern and at times intimidating figure in her childhood.
Kathleen believes that her grandmother Elizabeth was very aware of status and class and that this, in many ways, informed her character, fueling her sense of decorum. “Her mother and brothers, they were the folks who worked in the house,” said Kathleen. “They were house servants. And they were just very class-conscious, to be honest. They were always telling stories about what happened. They tended to be a little more secretive about things.”
This distinction—between blacks who worked in the house and those who worked in the fields—is as old as the African American experience itself. It not only helped to create a class divide within the black community, it has also contributed to some harmful stereotyping and rather troubled social relations within the race. The simple fact of the matter is that our ancestors who worked in the houses of white people often had access to information and education, which their brethren and sisters in the fields did not. That they also developed a set of social concerns and status concerns that led to tensions in later generations is an undeniable aspect of their experience—and Kathleen perceived these issues in her grandmother Elizabeth’s behavior.
We traced Elizabeth Morton back to her parents—Kathleen’s great-grandparents—Hummons Allen Morton and Elizabeth Jackson. Hummons was born on October 18, 1883, in Winchester, Kentucky, and Elizabeth was born on March 6, 1883, in nearby Logan County, Kentucky. Both died before Kathleen was born, and she knew little about them. But we were able to trace the family back further, because we found Elizabeth Jackson’s death certificate, dated February 4, 1918. It indicates that her parents were Dennis Jackson and Julia Mason. Both were born into slavery around 1845 in Logan County, Kentucky. That means that they spent the first twenty years of their lives as slaves.
“Imagine that,” said Kathleen. “To be twenty and a slave, and then suddenly you’re free. I bet they were excited—but I’d imagine they were also very afraid, just not knowing what tomorrow is going to bring. I imagine they were pretty frightened.”
Searching for records about Dennis and Julia, we uncovered some rather unusual stories. When Dennis died in 1895, Julia applied for a widow’s pension, believing that her husband had served in the ranks of the U.S. Colored Troops. But Dennis didn’t actually fight in the Civil War. Records tell us that while trying to enlist as a young man, Dennis fell ill and was sent home. So he attempted to enlist but was not accepted into the army. Still, his wife’s mistaken recollection—no doubt instilled in her by her husband and perhaps embellished through the years—provided us with a very valuable paper trail to a most unusual story.
In her request for her widow’s-pension payment, Julia included a document signed by her friends and family that vouched for her marriage to Dennis. This document states that Dennis and Julia were married “about the year 1864 by Reverend George Downey at the house of William Bryan in Fayette County, Kentucky.” This is extraordinarily unusual, because in 1864 Dennis and Julia were slaves and thus legally forbidden to marry. Yet despite the fact that their marriage would not have been recognized by the state or the federal government, they still felt strongly enough about their bond that they held a kind of symbolic wedding in front of their family and friends. Even more unusual is that they were married by an African American minister in the home of a white man named William Bryan, whom we suspect to have been Dennis’s slave owner. This means that their master was hosting a wedding of his slaves! I have rarely encountered evidence of this.
We also found another statement filed by Julia Jackson as part of her resolute effort to obtain her husband’s nonexistent pension. In this statement one of her friends asserts that Dennis and Julia were married a second time at a courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky, sometime around June of 1874. Second weddings such as this were not uncommon for former slaves and were a legal necessity. They knew that marriages made during the slave era were not valid before the law—no matter what the circumstances. So, as free people, nine years out of slavery, Julia and Dennis reenacted their wedding ceremony and made their relationship legal.
Hearing this, Kathleen began to cry. The desire of these two people, her long-dead ancestors, to stick together and remain a family even in the face of all that slavery had done to them was almost too much for her to bear. There is something so powerful about the will to persevere that our ancestors possessed, the will to build lives for themselves in spite of the worst form of human existence possible, human slavery. We are the beneficiaries of their determination and their will to survive, but so many of us don’t know it or don’t comprehend its significance. Seeing that story written so plainly in these dusty documents—documents in which so many of our ancestors’ lives are trapped, as if in amber—never fails to affect me.
Turning back to Dennis Jackson and his wife, Julia Mason, we tried to identify either of their parents. We could find no evidence that they survived slavery, which rendered this an extremely difficult task. But once again we were very lucky. In 1865 the federal government set up a savings bank for the benefit of newly freed African Americans, called the Freedman’s Bank. Among its records we found a file for Isaiah Mason, the brother of Kathleen’s great-great-grandmother Julia Mason. The file tells us quite a lot about Isaiah. It says that on April 1, 1873, when Isaiah opened his account, he was twenty-six years old, with a medium-brown complexion, and was working as a “hackler” for a man named Jack Pullman. (A hackler was a worker in the linen industry who used a special kind of tool—a hackle—to comb out the coarse flax.) The file indicates that Isaiah was married with two children. It also lists the names of his eight siblings (including Julia) and his parents, George and Caroline Mason. George and Caroline Mason are, therefore, Kathleen’s great-great-great-grandparents.
Marriages made under slavery were not legal before the law, so Kathleen’s ancestors Dennis and Julia Jackson were remarried after the Civil War.
Digging deeper, we also found Isaiah’s enlistment record from the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War. Unlike his brother-in-law, Dennis Jackson, Isaiah Mason really did serve in the army. He was mustered in at Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, Kentucky, which was the largest training ground for African American soldiers in the entire Civil War. Many slaves, particularly those from nearby counties in Kentucky, fled to Camp Nelson with their families to find freedom. In fact, one of my own ancestors—J. R. Clifford—served at the very same place. So Kathleen’s ancestor and my ancestor may have met one another there. As we shall see, this is not the only ancestral coincidence that Kathleen and I would have.
Isaiah’s enlistment records contain one further significant detail: They list Isaiah’s former slave owner as being a man named William Van Meter. Now, given that he owned Isaiah, it’s very likely, of course, that William Van Meter would also have owned the rest of Isaiah’s family, including Kathleen’s great-great-grandmother Julia. But we wanted proof. So we looked in the census records and found that William Van Meter was living in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1860. The slave schedule for that county in that year indicates that William Van Meter owned three slaves. One of them fits the profile of Isaiah Mason, but none matches Julia or their parents. However, living next to William Van Meter was his father, Abraham Van Meter, who owned twenty-one slaves. An estate inventory from 1863, made just before Abraham died, contains a list of his slaves. In it we found George, fifty-six years of age, valued at $300; Caroline, thirty-eight years of age, valued at $400; and Julia, eleven years of age, valued at $450. These are Kathleen’s ancestors—her great-great-grandmother Julia and Julia’s parents, George and Caroline.
“Julia commands a good price,” said Kathleen with a sad, ironic laugh.
I explained to Kathleen that Julia was valued so highly at age eleven because of what she was expected to bring her owners as she grew older: new slaves in the form of her children. (Our ancestors were baby machines, in effect: The 388,000 Africans shipped to these shores between 1619 and 1820 directly from the African continent, plus another 60,000 or so shipped via the Caribbean, became 4.5 million by 1860.)
“It’s just so disgusting even to have to talk like this,” said Kathleen. “I’m amazed. I just wish my father was still alive. The whole family there—it’s incredible. And all because a man decided to make an inventory of his property.”
I agree. It is disgusting. Though, obviously, I also think that it is terribly important to understand these things. This is our history, after all. And commenting on this, I then showed Kathleen a picture of Abraham Van Meter, the man who owned those two generations of her family.
“Oh, geezy,” she said. “There’s a part of me that wants to smile, and then there’s a part of me that’s like—he doesn’t look like a very nice man.”
Abraham Van Meter, the man who owned two generations of Kathleen’s family.
Van Meter’s twenty-one slaves in 1860 was a fairly large number for that time in Kentucky. He was, it seemed to me at first, a very conventional white slave owner. But further research revealed that he was more interesting than I initially thought. We found an article published in 1849 in Van Meter’s local newspaper, the Lexington Observer and Reporter. It describes “a large and enthusiastic meeting of the opponents of perpetual slavery in Kentucky and those in favor of a safe and gradual plan of emancipation.” The first speaker at this meeting and, seemingly, its organizer was Abraham Van Meter. He owned slaves, but apparently he believed in gradual emancipation, perhaps starting after he had died.
“He obviously didn’t believe that they should be free in his lifetime,” Kathleen reflected, laughing. “Not right now, you know? Maybe after I’m gone. Take care of my needs first. It’s all about me.”
Kathleen is right, of course. Van Meter’s views, whatever they may have been, did little to help his own slaves, her ancestors. But his views are illustrative of a moral ambivalence over slavery, nonetheless.
Moreover, Abraham Van Meter provides a remarkable link between Kathleen’s family and my own. I have two ancestors—Joe and Sarah Bruce, my fourth great-grandparents on my father’s mother’s side—who were owned by a man named Abraham Van Meter, who freed them in 1823, long before the Civil War. But my ancestors lived in Hardy County, Virginia—not Kentucky. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder about the connection. So we traced back the family trees of the Abraham Van Meter who owned Kathleen’s ancestors and the Abraham Van Meter who owned mine. And we found that they were cousins! Both started out in Hardy County, Virginia. But while the one who owned my ancestors stayed, Kathleen’s Abraham left Virginia for Kentucky in 1838, taking twenty-one slaves with him. This means it is possible that Kathleen’s ancestors George and Caroline Mason were born in Hardy County, Virginia, near my ancestors and were then taken to Kentucky by Abraham Van Meter. Kathleen and I both find this an incredible, tantalizing possibility.
Unfortunately, we could not find any records to substantiate the theory. We were also unable to trace Kathleen’s paternal line back any further. The paper trail ended with George and Caroline.
Turning to the maternal line of Kathleen’s family tree, we found a number of other revealing narratives. Her mother’s parents, Kathleen’s maternal grandparents, were Charles Reilly Doster and Seda Ruth Pullam. Both were born in Smithville, Georgia—Charles on March 21, 1914, and Seda on February 16, 1917. Kathleen did not know Charles, because he and Seda separated long before she was born. But she knew a great deal about their marriage, because she had just recently found her grandmother’s diary. It contains a deeply sad account of a troubled family.
“There are some really poignant moments in the diary,” said Kathleen. “She talks about the birth and the death of her first child that she had with Charles Doster. What’s really touching is that she calls the baby by name in one entry, and the baby’s name was Charlie Mae. And then each day after that she just says ‘the baby,’ you know? Since the baby has died. She never calls the child by name again. It is really heart-tugging.”
After the death of her first child, Seda was sent north to live with her husband’s family while Charles attended Fort Valley State College in Georgia. The trip proved disastrous to her marriage. “Charlie’s mother never thought anybody was good enough for him,” said Kathleen. “And she really kinda carried on. My grandmother was one of those kind of funny people who was very superstitious. Seda swore that Charlie’s mother put a hex or something on her, and that’s the reason the baby died. And things were going very bad, but then Charlie writes to her and convinces her to come down to Fort Valley for some kind of party. So she goes, and it’s there that my mother is conceived. Then my grandmother comes back north and is pregnant. So, supposedly, Charlie’s mother, she takes a train to see her son, goes down and brings him some papers to sign, because the family had a little property. And in the stack of papers was a divorce or a dissolution paper. Of course, you know, when your mother gives you something to sign, you just do what she tells you to do. So Charlie signed the papers, and that is how my grandmother learns that this marriage has ended. It was a real kind of heartbreak. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk about Charlie when I was growing up. But there were still the pictures that were around, tucked away and hidden.”
The story may have elements of family lore, but we were unable to contradict it, and I believe that it may well be true. Regardless, it is an interesting story, and it has a good coda. Seda remarried twice more, eventually settling down very well with a man named Moses Martin, whom Kathleen loved and grew up believing was her maternal grandfather. So in the end Seda found happiness.
Seda’s mother was Estella Woodbridge, born in June of 1894 in Lee County, Georgia. Her last name raised an intriguing problem for our researchers. Kathleen has heard many family stories about the origin of the name Woodbridge. “We were told,” she said, “that when Papa—and I’m not certain who Papa was—but we all heard at family gatherings that when this man Papa, who was a slave, when emancipation happened and he left his master, he didn’t want to carry his master’s name anymore. And so when he left from the plantation, he walked—you know, depending on who tells it, the story gets grander—but he walked away, and he decided he was going to rename himself. And the first thing he came across was a wooden bridge. So he was like, ‘Hmm, I’ll change my name to Woodbridge.’ ”
Family stories like this are always appealing to me, and I wanted to see if this one had even a kernel of truth to it. Research shows that Kathleen’s great-great-great-grandfather on her maternal line was Dudley Woodbridge, born about 1827 in Georgia. He is the first Woodbridge in her family and thus could be the “Papa” in the story. We found a slave schedule from 1860 for a man named Grafton Dudley Woodbridge, who lived in Glynn County, Georgia. There is no definite proof that Grafton Dudley Woodbridge owned Kathleen’s ancestor Dudley Woodbridge, but given the geography and the similarity of name, it seems likely. So I told Kathleen that it appeared to me that Dudley Woodbridge took his favorite parts of his master’s name rather than invent a name for himself.
“That makes sense,” said Kathleen, with a smile indicating that she never fully believed the family legend. “I think we’ll save the other one for late nights around the campfire. It’s a good story, you know? It kept me interested for a long time.”
At this point our paper trail along Kathleen’s maternal line had ended. We could go back no further than Dudley Woodbridge. Turning to her DNA testing, I told her that her admixture test reflected that she was 79 percent sub-Saharan African, 18 percent European, and 3 percent Native American, as are Tom Joyner and Ben Carson, while Quincy Jones and Bliss Broyard have about 5 percent Native American ancestry.
Kathleen was very excited by these results. She had heard family stories of Native American ancestry from her grandmother, like many of the other people I’ve interviewed. But her family stories turned out to have a bit of truth. This makes her one of the few people in this book (Oprah, Chris Tucker, and Mae Jemison have a significant amount) who actually has even a small amount of measurable Native American ancestry. (As we have seen, only one out of twenty black people has a significant Indian ancestral heritage [12.5 percent], though most of us think otherwise.)
Primarily, however, Kathleen was thrilled to hear about her African results. “I always use the adjective ‘African-American,’ ” she said. “And I’m always really focusing in on that hyphen, because we are African and we are American. And this shows that hyphen. I’m informed and shaped by the American experience. Yet here in these Americas, I’m fully shaped and formed by that 79 percent of the African. So I’m the hyphen.”
We did a second admixture test, which indicated that 39 percent of Kathleen’s African ancestors came from eastern Nigeria, 31 percent came from Congo Angola, and 30 percent from the region called Upper Guinea, which stretches from Liberia to Senegal. Kathleen’s African ancestors were thus almost equally divided among the three main regions that sent slaves to the United States. This, she thought, was welcome news, because she wanted to be connected to as much of Africa as possible.
Our testing of her mitochondrial DNA yielded exact matches with the Mende people of Sierra Leone, the Fula and Balanta people of Guinea-Bissau, and the Mandinka people of Senegal. Based on their knowledge of the slave trade and of Kathleen’s family tree, the historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood felt that these results indicated that Kathleen’s original enslaved female ancestor came from the Mandinka people. The Mandinka lived near and traded with and fought all the other groups identified in Kathleen’s mitochondrial result, but the Mandinka are the group that is best represented among enslaved African Americans brought through South Carolina’s ports in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. This is significant because many slaves who were brought to Lee County, Georgia, when it was settled in the 1820s—and where Kathleen’s oldest known matrilineal ancestor was born—were descendants of slaves who were originally imported into the United States through Charleston and Savannah.
When I told Kathleen that we believed her female ancestor on her direct maternal line most likely was Mandinka from the country now called Senegal, she smiled broadly. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I don’t think Senegal was ever in my mind. I’ve always wanted to go to Africa. I’ve always identified with Africa. But I never thought about Senegal. And I think about the students that I’ve worked with at the University of Dayton who are international students, and, of course, in my head I’m thinking, who did I work with from Senegal? There are a few, and now I can find them and say, ‘Guess what? We’re related.’ I mean, it just opens up the door.”
Kathleen seems as happy as anyone involved in this project to learn her roots. “It’s very comforting,” she said. “It’s so very comforting to finally know where. I always wanted to know what tribe I’m from. I think all African Americans do. Because that was stolen from us. And ours being such an oral tradition, you only have the language or those stories that are told. Well, somewhere along the line through slavery, those stories were interrupted. And so there is a real desire to find that connectedness.”
At the end I asked Kathleen to think back to her father. He died in 1995. I would like to have met him, and I wanted to know what he would have made of this new knowledge. Would he have said, “We are an African people living in America”? Or would he have said, “We are an American people who happen to be descended in part from Africans”? The difference is crucial.
“I think my father,” Kathleen replied, “would join me in saying that it’s not an either/or. It is both. We are African and African American.”
At this she began to cry, which was one of the most moving moments of this project for me. But after a moment she wiped her eyes and said something that completely surprised me, summing up our work in a way I never could have anticipated—in a way that was important to her sense of what American culture is to her.
“The tears come, thinking about my father and his people,” she said. “They just come from thinking about how moved they would have been to know this. It affirms things. I think everybody should do this. Not only African Americans. I think anyone who lives in these United States needs to know this stuff. I mean, when you think about this country being settled and at one point being this wonderful melting pot, well, thank God that we were black, that we didn’t quite melt. So we kept some connection back to some country. And it’s funny. Because once I started to share this with the people at work, you know, frequently white people would say that they knew their culture and their ancestry, that their culture is hot dogs and apple pie. And I’d say, ‘Well, actually, you know, that’s not your culture. Apple pie comes out of a slave tradition with cobbler. That’s black people. That ain’t you. Would your ancestors be happy to know that you have become so melted into this country that you don’t know who they are or don’t know anything about who they are?’ That’s my question for them. But for black people, I think the beauty is because we didn’t melt, we got to hold on to some of these cultural pieces. And it’s hard, but at least we can understand them now. And you know, this information and knowledge, it’s priceless. No one can take it away from me. No one will be able to take this experience away from me, no one.”