MY GRANDFATHER died in 1960. I was ten years old. I didn’t know my grandfather well, but I was endlessly fascinated by him—or, more correctly, by the way he looked. He looked like a tall white man to me, a white man with straight white hair, slender as a rail, with pencil thin lips, a white man’s lips, the sort of lips that you paint onto a cartoon face with a single red line. I loved him, I suppose, insofar as you can “love” a person whom you never got to know. I loved him in the way that you love a grandparent with whom you have not had the opportunity to exchange intimacies, or to create them. I loved him because I was supposed to, formally, by contract, because my daddy did. I don’t know what his relationship with his other grandchildren might have been, but “Pop” Gates, born in 1879, was not exactly big on carrying on conversations with his seventh son’s second son. He’d pat me on my wooly, basketball-round head and give me a gracious and inviting smile, possibly bemused, I have since suspected many times, at how this nappy-headed milk chocolate-colored boy could have sprung from his light and bright and damned near white youngest son’s loins. Standing next to my father at Pop Gates’s open casket, just before the funeral director shut it forever, signaling the start of the service, I thought that my grandfather looked as if he had been turned to stone, an alabaster mask unexpectedly covering the blue-veined face of what had so shortly before been a flesh-and-blood human being, even if that flesh had been almost translucently white.
I thought he looked, well, hilarious, a ghostly white papier-mâché mummy, and so I began to laugh. At the same time, it seemed, my father began to laugh as well. My dad has a deliciously wicked sense of humor, and part of getting to know him—of overcoming my older brother’s advantage of the firstborn son who had bonded so deeply with our father over sports—was recognizing and responding to his wit. I was ahead of him on this one, I remember thinking. Pop Gates looked just plain ridiculous lying in that purple-velvet-lined casket like an albino mannequin, I thought, and Pop apparently felt the same way. Too much talcum powder, perhaps? As I turned my face upward to share the joke with Daddy, I realized to my horror that not only was my father not laughing, he had begun to cry. Not only was he crying, he was weeping loudly, howling almost, big tears running down his own scarcely black face. I was so startled, so surprised, so taken aback that I had misread the entire situation, that I began to weep almost as loudly as my father. “I appreciated that, boy,” he said to me as we headed back to our seat in the front row of family mourners. “Don’t be ashamed, don’t hold back. Just let it flow.” Glancing around at the congregation through a sheet of sheer terror, afraid that I had embarrassed myself, and my father, by my inappropriate laughter, only then did I realize that no one had seen me, all souls in the Kight Funeral Home having been riveted, as I was, on the fact that my father, the funniest man I know, had, apparently for the first time in forty years, when a milk-truck had run over his foot while he’d been sitting on a curb watching the results of a New York Giants baseball game on one of those 1920 state-of-the-art electric scoreboards, actually allowed himself to cry in front of somebody. And not just somebody—in this case in front of the whole town, or at least that segment of the colored people in town who mattered. It took me a long time to stop crying, so certain was I that someone had seen how foolishly I’d acted, and in front of my own grandfather’s porcelain dead body.
Following Pop Gates’s burial at the Rose Hill Cemetery, where our people were among the very few Negroes allowed, well dead, to disturb the eternal sleep of Cumberland, Maryland’s, elite white Episcopal citizenry (the Episcopal churches had been segregated since 1890), my father took us back to the Gates family home on Greene Street, where Gateses had been living for almost a century. My brother and I followed my dad upstairs, to Pop’s and Nan’s bedroom. I had never been upstairs in my grandparents’ home before, I remember thinking as I sheepishly followed my dad’s footsteps.
Pop Gates had two hobbies, for the first of which he was quite well known in and around Cumberland: He could grow tulips like nobody’s business—“like a Dutchman,” people often said. As we followed my father, I couldn’t help but notice that the walls of my grandparents’ living room were lined with framed sets of red, yellow, and blue ribbons. I wondered why tulips? Without saying a word, my father opened an old trunk, like something I’d recently seen in a Disney movie about pirates. He pulled out dozens of musty leather books, partially used bank ledgers (Pop was a janitor at the bank), books with green and red lined pages, pages bound together with string when the glue had failed. As he slowly turned the pages, I realized that he was showing me scrapbooks, very ancient and disintegrating scrapbooks. The scrapbooks’ pages were covered completely, front and back, and were very stiff from the glue. So Pop Gates had kept scrapbooks; that was his second hobby. The articles that Pop Gates had clipped covered various news stories about World War II, local and national crime, accidents, and human interest items. There were hundreds and hundreds of news clips, mainly, all sorts of random headlines about births and deaths, especially murders and fatal accidents. Weddings and funeral notices. Funeral programs and that most curious genre, those laminated bookmarks noting the passing of the dead, complete with a bit of religious verse, a passage of the Bible, birth and death dates, and sometimes even a photograph of the deceased.
But above all else Pop was into obituaries. He had collected hundreds of obituaries; those scrapbooks were like an archive, decade by decade, of Cumberland’s colored dead. And apparently not just colored people either; some dead white people (unless they were just light, like Pop) poked their pale visages out of those pages as well, fighting for air among clips of all those Negroes, probably more Negroes than they had ever been close to in their entire lives. Daddy wasn’t saying anything to anybody, just silently turning those pages, page after page after oversize page. It was Pop Gates’s cabinet of wonders, his mortuary of the Negro dead, with a couple of white folks thrown in for spice or good measure, I guess. I felt as if those scrapbooks were some sort of two-dimensional time machine, a black cardboard portal onto a world I would never know. Old-school Negroes, long dead. Clean, too: three-piece suits and white starched collars, hair slicked down or pressed. After a while it dawned on me that the white people and the colored people were dressed the same way: the sartorial equality of the recently departed, stemmed from the shared aesthetic of Olin Mills’s photography parlor. Who were these Negroes? I found myself beginning to wonder. Were these people Pop’s friends?
“Look here, boy,” Daddy said, startling me as he broke the silence. There, deep in those yellowing pages of newsprint, was an obituary—the obituary, to my astonishment, of one of my ancestors, our matriarch, an ex-slave named Jane Gates. “An estimable colored woman,” the obituary said, and a midwife. Next to the obituary, my grandfather had glued this woman’s picture to the page. “That is the color people call ‘sepia,’ ” Daddy said. “That woman was Pop’s grandmother. She is your great-great-grandmother. And she is the oldest Gates.” I stared at that photograph for what seemed like a very long time, not knowing what I was supposed to say. I would stare at it until I had that face memorized, an image of the oldest colored woman I’d ever seen, etched indelibly into my ten-year-old head. Eventually Daddy shut the album and slowly stood up. By the time we made our way back downstairs, the house was crowded with family I knew and family I’d never seen before and would never see again. Enough food to start a restaurant had miraculously been crowded onto their oak dining table with big clawed feet. I headed for the fried chicken and the potato salad, hungry all of a sudden, but not sure what had taken place upstairs, in the room where my grandfather apparently had archived the lives and times of the Potomac Valley’s sepiaed dead.
That same year, in the fifth grade, I developed an obsession with my family tree. I peppered my mother and my father with questions about the names of their ancestors, their birthplaces and birthdays, their occupations, when they had died and where. Ever so dutifully I began to write it all down, in a brown spiral notebook. Sometimes I would grow bored and put the notebook away; then, for no apparent reason, I would be seized with the desire to learn more. Eventually, as glossy magazines began to advertise that they could send you your family’s “coat of arms,” I grew ever more desirous of possessing the knowledge that would allow me to claim, legitimately, one of these—not for the generic “Gates” family but for my own, complete with a chart of the branches of my family tree, each limb of which neatly filled with the births and deaths of my ancestors, the Gateses on one side, and the Colemans, my mother’s family, on the other.
Looking back, it seems obvious to me that my career as a historian began that afternoon in 1960, upstairs in my grandparents’ home, on the day that my grandfather died. I can still recall the scene vividly—and the passion that consumed me after seeing Jane Gates’s obituary, the sense of wonderment that the picture of an actual slave, one from whom I had descended, instilled in me. I was searching not just for the names of my ancestors but for stories about them, the secrets of the dark past of Negroes in America. Each new name that I was able to find and print in my notebook—almost always recalled by my mom or dad—was an enigma for me, a conundrum of the colored past that had produced, by fits and starts but also, somehow, inevitably, the person I had become and was becoming.
But I can remember, too, that searching for my ancestry was always a fraught process, always a mix of joy, frustration, and outrage, as the reconstruction of their history—individually and collectively—must always be for any African American. I knew I had white ancestors. My father was clearly part white, and his father looked like a not-so-friendly version of Casper’s grandfather. My cousin Bud had nicknamed Mary, one of our cousins on the Redman side of our family (my father’s mother’s side) “Casper,” because her skin was so terribly white as to appear invisible. Casper the Friendly Cousin. I wanted to learn the names of both my black and white ancestors. Eventually—but certainly not in 1960—I even allowed myself to dream about learning the name of the tribe we had come from in Africa. But there was always a problem with making progress in this search. If you’re black, and have tried to trace your roots, surely you know it well: The problem was slavery; the institution of slavery—more correctly, the people who created it so perversely, designed it to destroy any possibility of maintaining the family ties necessary to tracing one’s ancestry, through the deviously brilliant act of obliterating our family names, our surnames. Such a simple, devastating but efficient act of erasure! Given all the ways in which a human being could be belittled or dehumanized, how big a deal could the lack of a surname really be? After all, surnames are a fairly recent phenomenon for many of the world’s people; indeed, when I first visited Mongolia in 1992, I was startled to learn that the people there had acquired surnames only with the fall of Communism, following soon on the fall of the Berlin Wall. But denying African slaves the right to own and pass down their true names, at least before the law, reinscribed over and over, decade by decade, a permanent state of fragmented identity that slavery, as an organization, depended upon to maintain control as surely as it depended upon the threat—and practice—of violence and violation. This seemingly simple act of naming—or not-naming—interrupted the continuity of family that last names ensure; surnames signifying, as they do, common bonds of blood and tradition and heritage, as veritable links in a chain, a traceable familial chain of being. For us, for those of us descended from the 455,000 Africans who arrived in this country directly from Africa and indirectly from the Caribbean as slaves—80 percent of whom had arrived here by 1800, 99.7 percent by 1820—it was this “trace-ability,” as it were, that the evil genius of slavery sought to take away from us on both sides of the Atlantic, making us fragmented and not whole, isolated, discrete parts, not pieces of fabric stitched together in a grand pattern, like some living, breathing, mocha-colored quilt. That is what slavery attempted to do, and as any of us knows who has attempted to restore the branches on our family tree, slavery was, in all too many cases, devastatingly effective in this attempt. But not entirely.
Slavery—the lives and times of the human beings who were slaves—remains the great abyss in African American genealogical history. In spite of an avalanche of scholarship since the late 1960s, the lives of individual slaves—almost four million by 1860—remain something of a historical void. Why? The “great man” and “great woman” theory of history has ensured the survival of heroes of the race such as Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. Du Bois. Social history, reacting against this trend to construct historical narrative around the inevitability of the emergence of supremely gifted agents such as these women and men, reconstituted the narratives of large groups of nameless individuals—especially social subordinates such as women, people of color, laborers, and so on. But neither school of historiography has systematically restored the narratives of these individual, and still largely anonymous, actors on the grand historical stage, who emerged in the 1870 federal census with two names, full-blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. And who might these people be? Your slave ancestors and mine, the very folks we seek to resurrect when we pursue our own genealogy, when we reconstruct our own family trees. These are the people who made American history, decision by decision, day by day. Properly understood, in an ideal world, the narrative of African American history would consist of stories and themes generalized from the rediscovered experiences of our very own ancestors. Collectively, their experiences would become the rule, and not the exception. But historians have not been able to generalize from these myriad experiences created by our ancestors, because their stories remain to be discovered, buried in dusty archives, seemingly unimportant to anyone but a distant family member.
The overwhelming percentage of our ancestors consisted of anonymous, decent, overly hardworking people whose lives have yet to be chronicled. Until their stories are reconstructed and told, these ancestors of ours will not exist as human beings, as agents, as actors in the great drama that is American history because under slavery our ancestors had no names; or no names that the law was bound to honor. Before the law—if not in their hearts and homes, if not in their relationships with other black and white human beings—black slaves were property, complex pieces of property, property that could think and feel, but property nonetheless. You might view slavery as that alchemical institution that strove mightily to transform human beings into things, and surnames were American slavery’s Philosopher’s Stone. (Harriet Beecher Stowe subtitled the serialized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin “The Man That Was a Thing.”) Inevitably, it succeeded in this dehumanizing process, most certainly to some extent in their daily lives and absolutely before the law. And how could it not, given all the mechanisms of the state over which it had control? Vested interests used the forces of ideology, religion, mythology, and social norms to reinforce the dishumanity of the slave, day in and day out. I am convinced that this 250-year process of systematic dehumanization continues to have an impact upon a significant sector of African Americans today, crippling our ability to know ourselves and understand our past, to defer gratification, to believe in the future as an extension of a noble and admirable collective past of which most of us remain painfully unaware. For many African Americans, not knowing our own history—not knowing our individual histories, the narratives of our own ancestors who triumphed, by surviving and propagating against tremendous odds—continues to serve as a profound limitation on what we can achieve, on the history each of us can make. We’ve internalized generations’ worth of doubts and fears about who we are as a people, and therefore as individuals, and about what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. And we continue to pay a terrible price for our uncertainty, for this willed ignorance of our past.
With just a little effort, surprisingly, most African Americans can trace their families back several generations. Indeed, the vast majority of us can trace at least one line of our family back to the 1870 census, which was the first census taken after the Civil War and is thus the first census in which all our ancestors appear as people, as citizens with two names, as opposed to property, with no names. The 1870 census lists all black people for the first time with their full names, birthdays, the names of their parents, their children’s names, and their occupations. Coming as it does out of the depths of a seemingly lost black past, this census is like a miracle, a godsend to African American history and genealogy. And because it often lists the names of two generations of people who had been slaves, the 1870 census is the bridge between slavery and freedom, between the early nineteenth century and the twentieth. It is the salient mnemonic device enabling us to remember a nameless, faceless past, enabling us to resurrect the secrets of the darkest narrative in the American past.
But what about our ancestors who didn’t make it to 1870? What about the ones who didn’t live to see freedom? And what, especially, about the very first generation of Africans in our families, the people born on the Mother Continent, thrown into slave ships against their will and brought here to their doom—will we ever know anything about them? Slavery stole their traditional African ethnic identities, then erased their religions and their names. Of course, the slave ships kept very detailed records, including manifests that listed every piece of “human cargo” on board every ship. But with very few exceptions—some records kept by the Portuguese in Angola, for example—the manifests contain only head counts of the slaves who were brought to America, not their names. And so there is no way to know what happened to those people once they stepped onto and off the boat. They went to an auction where they were sold, or to a master who had already paid for them. They had African names before they came here, but they were often stripped of those—and stripped, too, of their family ties and cultural bonds. Some new arrivals would give their children an African first name such as Cudjoe or Cuffee, or a baptized Christian name, such as Patrick, along with a name denoting place of origin, like “Angola.” Inevitably, slowly, all those traces of Africa went away. Fragments survived: expressions from African languages, fragments of song, maybe even an African name such as Cud-joe or Kwame here and there; but the obliteration of a conscious knowledge of the African past in the daily life of the African in America was achieved almost totally, with the genius of military precision, by a brutal process of “Americanization” that characterized the plantation system. Africanisms—traces of Africa—survived, of course, but generally unconsciously, in mediated forms.
And without these remnants of a complex cultural past written down, you have no records, and with no written records you have no trail to trace. The roots of African American family trees extend only so far as the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. No farther. That’s what the absence of a paper trail was designed to accomplish. And it succeeded, with devastating effectiveness and, unfortunately, with equally devastating social and psychological consequences.
Nevertheless, against the odds, the descendants of the African slaves in this country have searched and searched, despite knowing how fruitless that search was destined to be, as if helplessly trapped in an endless cycle of false starts and false turns, blind people caught in a labyrinth, black explorers hopelessly embarked on a fool’s errand. Even before Alex Haley’s Roots aired in 1977, many generations of African Americans had longed to learn where their ancestors came from in Africa. What languages did they speak? What was their music like? Their religion? Their culture? What gods did they worship? And, most of all, what were their families’ names? From what tribe do I descend? These are questions that generations of us have asked and longed to have answered, frustrated by the belief that the answers are long lost in the depths of the dreaded Middle Passage, among the bones of the 15 percent whose journey to America on board European slave ships ended at the bottom of the sea.
Lost until recently, that is. In the past decade, remarkable developments in DNA testing and the retrieval and digitization of archival records have made it possible for us to begin to trace our families back further through American history and, then, ultimately, across the Atlantic. For the first time since the seventeenth century, we are able, symbolically at least, to reverse the Middle Passage. Our ancestors brought something with them that not even the slave trade could take away: their own distinctive strands of DNA. And because their DNA has been passed down to us, their direct descendants, it can serve as a key to unlocking our African past. With cells collected from the insides of our mouths, geneticists can extract small sections of our DNA. The bases of the acids within them form distinctive sequences known as haplotypes, which can then be compared to DNA samples taken from other people around the world. A match means that we’ve found someone with whom we share a common ancestor. And back in Africa, scientists have spent several decades gathering such samples from tens of thousands of Africans. So an exact match between an American’s DNA and an African’s DNA reveals a shared ancestor, and possibly a shared ethnic identity, that has been lost for centuries.
When I first heard this, I was overjoyed. After years of being frustrated by my inability to trace my family back beyond slavery, I now saw a way of doing something about it. My excitement coalesced into an idea—an ambitious idea, I admit, but nothing seemed too big for this subject—and I ended up inviting eight prominent African Americans to allow their family histories to be researched for a documentary film series for PBS. Some were friends of mine, some were strangers who became friends. Together we journeyed back through our family trees, chasing down every scrap of paper we could find, every census record, every family Bible, trying to verify every little story and legend. And when the paper trail would end, as it inevitably did, in the horrid darkness of slavery, we traced our African roots through our DNA. We were successful, in some measure, in every case. And the series had such an enthusiastic response that we were able to film a sequel, with eleven new subjects, employing even newer and more accurate DNA tests.
Thus, I have now spent more than three years conducting genealogical research on some of the world’s most compelling African Americans. It has been a magical experience for me—indeed, one of the most intensely enjoyable experiences that I have had as a scholar. I was able to reveal to each of these fascinating people, sometimes in astonishing detail, stories about the ancestors on their family trees, demonstrating how they were shaped, consciously or not, by their family members’ experiences—often family members whom they had never even heard of! In so doing I invariably ended up talking with them about a host of related subjects—what it means to grow up black in America, what African Americans think of Africa, how we feel about our slave past. These are the issues that I have devoted my professional life to pursuing, the issues I care about the most. I have spent countless hours contemplating them from a variety of vantage points and through an equally wide variety of media. I have to say that it has been a genuine privilege to be allowed to explore these issues so intimately—family matters, after all, no more and no less—with such an interesting group of people. And as time has passed, I have realized how much the experience changed me—how much the individual stories drawn from each family tree changed the way I perceive African American history as a whole, from the ground up, as it were, from the particular to the general: for example, from Oprah Winfrey’s great-great-grandfather Constantine to the broad contours of the Reconstruction period. You won’t find Constantine Winfrey’s story in any American history book, and that’s because it has been hidden on the bare branches of Oprah’s family tree. Until now. And that is what genealogy can do, especially for black people: Restoring the stories of the lives of the members of our extended families can directly transform the way that historians reassemble the larger narrative of the history of our people. African American history is still a very young discipline, a discipline still very much in process; restoring the branches of even one black family tree can profoundly change the ways that we understand the larger story of who the African American people really are. By telling and retelling the stories of our own ancestors, history can move from our kitchens or our parlors into the textbooks, ultimately changing the official narrative of American history itself.
This book is about those changes. It is a record, in words and images, of what I learned while tracing nineteen family trees from the present, back through the abyss of slavery, and then across the ocean to Africa. Each chapter looks at one of these family trees in detail, focusing on the stories I found especially compelling and meaningful. This is a book about journeys, not destinations; perhaps the surprising secret of African American genealogy is that every aspect of every family story, no matter how seemingly trivial or insignificant, can be a revelation that reshapes how we understand the entire sweep of the black experience in America. As more African Americans trace their family trees, both African American and American history will have to be rewritten. While learning the name of the tribe from whom your African American ancestors descended back in Africa is astonishingly satisfying and, candidly, something of a miracle—learning the names of your ancestors who were slaves and then freedmen and women, and learning the names of the white people who owned your ancestors, and from whom you are descended, can be just as exciting as well. Judging by the emotional impact upon the individuals interviewed in this book, learning the names of one’s kinsmen on this side of the Atlantic carries even more emotional weight than learning about one’s more remote African ancestry. Frankly, I was initially surprised by this.
Ultimately, this is a book about how the experiences of the individuals in our families allow us to reconfigure our nation’s collective past, in a relationship of part for whole.
After all, history should be the narrative of the sum of the experiences of its actors, our ancestors, not just a few of them. How does the fact that Constantine Winfrey managed to barter twelve hundred pounds of cotton for eighty acres of prime bottom land, in the dreadfully racist state of Mississippi in the dreadful year of 1876, the year that Reconstruction ended—how does this affect our understanding of the historical period of Reconstruction itself? Re-creating the history of the individuals in our families is not only a rewarding activity personally; it also allows us a glimpse into that which has been stolen, hidden, or lost, in the collective history of the African American people. So much of the history of our people has been determined by the racial context in which we found ourselves: first by slavery (1619–1865), of course; then by the Civil War (1861–65), followed by the all-too-few years of Reconstruction (1866–76), Jim Crow (1876–1965), and its antidote, the Civil Rights movement, which we can date from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 to Dr. King’s death in 1968. So very many black people were trapped by these supra-forces—pulled down by the sheer weight of racism like an apple pulled to the ground by the force of gravity. Racism was the ether in which our ancestors lived and breathed and moved. Many of our ancestors didn’t have a lot of choice over the major decisions in their lives; rather, their choices were delimited by the larger political contexts in which they found themselves. But all too often we let this obscure the fact that our ancestors lived their lives, too. They had daily struggles—ordinary struggles—and I think that much of our “official” history misses that. We can never forget that there are many large trends in black history, but at the same time we must remember that normal, regular black people went about their business each and every day. They loved and hated, worshipped and sinned, worried and aspired. They were defeated in a shockingly depressing number of ways, yet they triumphed as individuals, as families, as a people. Together they created a culture, one of the world’s great cultures; a culture with its own language, its own sacred and profane institutions, its own art and music and literature and dancing, its own ways of walking and thinking, shucking and jiving, dissipating and aspiring, its own ways of struggling to survive, enduring, and transcending.
Here, then, are the stories of my friends’ families, which vividly bring that struggle to life. They are stories for which I have been searching, in retrospect—a story, in my own case, which I have been writing without knowing it—since I was ten years old, since the day I attended the funeral of my grandfather, Edward Lawrence Gates Jr., after which my father silently led me up a narrow stairway to a scrapbook, an obituary, and a brown-tinted photograph. (When I was twenty-five, I dragged my father down to the microfilm archives of the Cumberland Evening Times, in Maryland, specifically to find that obituary, long lost along with all but one of Pop Gates’s scrapbooks, from our family’s collective archives.) Searching for my own family’s story has led me to the stories of other African Americans. And these are the stories that I was able to reveal in the two PBS series entitled African American Lives—the stories of the famous and the obscure, janitors and movie stars, doctors and turpentine collectors. These stories are African American history at its most essential, the building blocks of any people’s collective narrative. These tiny fragments of human lives illuminate both our selves and our society, who we are as individuals, who we are as families, who we are as a people and as a country. Collectively, their stories make up a new, richer and fuller narrative of America, of the people who created America and the people whom America created. These stories show how we got through slavery, how we survived, how we overcame odds too stark to calculate, to emerge as a people: the African American people.
I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing them. And I hope that you will trace the roots and branches of your own family tree and tell the story of your ancestors yourself.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts
August 16, 2008