AT THE URGING OF a friend, I spat into a plastic tube and mailed the spittle off to 23andMe, a company that analyzes DNA. Until recently I had not been that interested in my genealogy. One reason for my lack of interest is because I knew that my great-grandfather on my paternal grandmother’s side fought in the Confederacy. This would be Robert Harrison Poynter who later became a Methodist minister. I also had information from my Mom’s side of the family that we had relatives there who also had been in the Confederacy.
I’ve not-so-jokingly told friends I was the white sheep of my family. Both sides of my extended family had an over-abundance of piety, bigotry, militarism, and an abiding love for the losing side in the War Between the States. I saw my share of Confederate flags growing up. I scandalized my family by rejecting nearly everything they believed in and prayed to. I openly disavowed the Confederacy and told my relatives I would have fought on the Union side, which is true. Not only was slavery an abomination, but for dirt farmers of the South to take up arms against their country to fight at the behest of profiteering plantation owners to me is the height of patriotic misdirection and proof of the effectiveness of propaganda when it is drilled into the masses.
My relatives were not amused.
Not all of them disowned me, however. My cousin Rick Graves, the one who became a Lutheran chaplain and major in the U.S. Army, against the tide of Confederacy sympathies among the Graves family joined the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. He had discovered that some of our direct descendants left the South to join the Union side. Rick and his father, my Uncle Richard, dug deeper into our genealogy than any of my other relatives. As I report elsewhere in this book they discovered our ancestors included a Captain Thomas Graves who was an early settler in the Jamestown, Virginia colony. I suppose that there is some prestige associated with knowing your ancestors were among the first to settle this great land, like those glitterati who claim their forebears came over on the Mayflower, but I can’t say that much of that sparkle ever rubbed off on me.
As I stated earlier, Cousin Rick also helped dispel the notion that we, the Graveses, were Scots-Irish. Our genealogy indicates we were solidly British.
And that was that. Until the DNA results arrived.
There are two plans available from 23andMe. One is simply the percentages of your ancestry—where your people are from. The other plan gets into your medical history and whether or not you may be predisposed to certain diseases and so forth. Now I don’t know about you, but I would be terrified to learn that I had an 80% chance of getting some dread disease based on me spitting in a tube. I would spend the rest of my life sleeping with one eye open, keeping watch for the grim reaper to come swinging his scythe. No thank you.
So I opened the report online and looked at the long list of ethnic groups and the check marks next to the ones that pertained to me. I assumed everyone in the U.S., no matter their background, would be a Heinz 57 of races. That we all had traces of Asian, Latino, American Indian, South Pacific, Jewish, and African. After all, in the Humanities classes I teach at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis there it is right there in the textbook that we all, everyone on Earth, are related to Lucy, otherwise known as AL 288-1, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The world’s granny.
My DNA analysis showed that 99.6% of me comes from a small part of Western Europe. I am nearly all British with a smattering of Irish and Scottish thrown in. There is about a 15% mixture of German and French, which is common among British-descended people. Shockingly, I have no trace of East European, Hispanic, American Indian, Asian, South Pacific, Jewish, or any other ethnicity. Except way down the list one thing more stood out. I am 0.4% West African.
I knew it. Like Billy Bob Thornton says in that movie Primary Colors when he tells the Hotchkiss-educated black guy, “I’m blacker than you are … I can feel it.” One African wife and one African-American girlfriend used to tell me they thought I had some black in me. We’d laugh about it. And now I know it’s true. If I were made up of 200 jigsaw puzzle pieces, 199 would be European, but one stand-out piece would be African. I can hear my Dad and my Granddad Graves spinning. What would they say had they known this? Would it have in any way altered their racist underpinnings? What would my Granddad’s Klansmen brethren have said knowing that at least one drop of Negro was in John Graves’ blood? Of course, I’d be willing to bet every single one of those Arkansas Klansmen also had a drop or two or three.
So how do I feel knowing that a small part of Africa is in me? I find it hilarious. I’m wondering how I can bring this up with my students at LeMoyne-Owen College. How will they react if I tell them I’m one two-hundredth African? As one of my friends jokingly put it, “Tom, you still a honky.”
Does this explain why I’ve had this long-time appreciation for the special beauty of black women? Does it explain why I went to Africa and married a Senegalese woman? Does it explain this weird attraction I’ve had to Africa my whole life and why I want to go back there and continue my travels? Does it explain me writing a biography of bluesman Robert Johnson? Does it explain why I’m reading an epic biography of Ethel Waters as I write this? Does it explain why I’m writing up my application to get a Fulbright teaching grant to teach in Swaziland?
Don’t know. But today I have a much sharper image of just who I am. The hundred dollars I paid to spit in that tube? Worth every penny.