She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (23 page)

Roger Goodspeed's stories probably all took place within a few miles of his birthplace in Wingrave, since people in earlier generations had rarely moved far from their home villages. To travel more than three thousand miles from home in the 1630s, as Roger did, was a radical dislocation. It dropped the Atlantic between him and the wellspring of his stories. In later years, as the Goodspeed family tree branched across the colonies, those old stories grew blurry. Cousins were forgotten, myths took over.

By the 1700s, some American families were already trying to anchor their genealogy back to Europe. In 1771, Thomas Jefferson wrote to an
acquaintance preparing to sail for London, asking if he could research the Jefferson coat of arms. “I have
what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not,” Jefferson complained. Another Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, traveled in 1758 to the English village of Ecton, where the Franklin family had lived for centuries. Determined to uncover his genealogy, he perused the parish registers, inspected the moss-covered gravestones of his ancestors, and chatted with the rector's wife about the Franklin family. The rector later sent him a hand-drawn family tree stretching back to 1563.

“
I am the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations,” Franklin wrote to a cousin, “whereby I find that had there originally been any Estate in the Family none could have stood a worse Chance of it.” Yet Franklin also came away from his research convinced that he inherited the temperament of his ancestors, “for which double Blessing I desire to be ever thankful.”

Franklin and Jefferson helped forge a new country that rejected the ancient power of heredity. “
One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of the hereditary rights of kings is that nature disproves it,” Thomas Paine declared in
Common Sense
. Kings often turned out unfit to rule, Paine observed, as if nature produced an ass instead of a lion.

Yet the Revolutionary War did not destroy heredity's allure. Old colonial families tried to cling to
their high status in the new republic by flaunting their European origins. They put coats of arms on their silverware, their hearses, and their gravestones. Newly rich bourgeois families used genealogy to buy some respectability of their own. Some spent time and money doing research or hiring one of America's new professional genealogists to do their work for them, uncovering connections to aristocracy and supplying coats of arms, even if their newfound heraldry often turned out to be fake.

Families of lesser means kept track of their families as well, sewing needlepoint genealogical trees and writing names in family Bibles. If they couldn't prove they inherited noble blood, at the very least they could feel some pride in virtuous blood. In the early 1800s, a Massachusetts woman named
Electa Fidelia Jones investigated her roots, celebrating the Puritan
blood that ran through her like a “magnetic wire,” vibrating two centuries later with a message for anyone who could appreciate it. She was thrilled to discover some of her fourth cousins through her research; the find was a better inheritance than any ancient fortune, she said.

But other kin did not please Jones. She uncovered a female relative and her husband from the 1750s who were “so near idiocy that it was said at the time of their marriage that laws
ought
to be enacted to prevent the marriage of those so unfit to sustain the relations which they assumed.” Among the children this unfit couple had, Jones complained, some were “so low in the scale of being that I do not wish to make their acquaintance so far as to ask after their name & age.”

As she drew her family tree, Jones left those branches hidden. Undistracted by her disreputable kin, she could spend her time dreaming of visiting her Puritan ancestors. “I love to go back in imagination to those old firesides,” she said.

While Americans eliminated embarrassing relatives from their genealogies, they also tried to link themselves to famous figures.
John Randolph, an early US senator from Virginia, boasted that he was a direct descendant of Pocahontas. Shortly before he died in 1833, he regaled a visitor with a detailed account of his genealogy that took him all the way back to William the Conqueror. Tracing his ancestry to a king didn't mean Randolph could inherit the throne of England. But it did let him enjoy a little rubbed-off glory.

Randolph's obsession endures today. Every April, a few dozen people gather in a Washington, DC, club for the annual dinner and meeting of the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States of America. To be invited to dinner, people must prove that they are direct descendants of the eighth-century ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. To make the task easier for Charlemagne's descendants, the order will be satisfied if you can just link your genealogy to someone on their list of “Gateway Ancestors,” such as James Claypoole of Philadelphia and Agatha Wormeley of Virginia. On its website, charlemagne.org, the order declares that its objective is “to maintain and promote
the traditions of chivalry and knighthood.”

By the mid-1800s, the search for celebrity, nobility, and virtue had
turned American genealogy into a full-blown industry. Guilds formed, publishing official journals of their research. Ralph Waldo Emerson found the new enterprise decidedly un-American. It was a turn to the past in a country that should have been looking toward the future.

“
When I talk to a genealogist,” Emerson wrote in his journal in 1855, “I seem to sit up with a corpse.”

Some of the ships that sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s were delivering settlers from England, including my own ancestor Roger Goodspeed. But in 1638 a ship called the
Desire
arrived from the West Indies carrying passengers from another land. The governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, recorded the ship's contents: “
some cotton and tobacco, and negroes, etc.”

The
Desire
delivered the first recorded shipment of African slaves to New England. Unlike Roger Goodspeed, the men and women stowed in the
Desire
would not pass down their goods to their children, or even their names. In their new home, American slaves sustained their genealogies as best they could by telling their children about their ancestors, but much was lost. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, born in 1818, lived his first seven years with his maternal grandparents. He never learned much more about his ancestry. Without any records of families, marriages, births, or deaths, such knowledge was impossible to gain.

“Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves,” Douglass later wrote.

As some slaves gained their freedom, they began to sketch trees. Henry Highland Garnet's family escaped from slavery when he was nine; he went on to become a prominent abolitionist minister and served as US minister to Liberia. Garnet's ancestors had been slaves for generations, but he once said that “his great grandfather was
the son of an African Chief, stolen from his native country in his youth and sold into Slavery on the shores of Maryland.”

Garnet was part of an elite layer of nineteenth-century African American society, made up of college-educated professionals—ministers, doctors,
government workers—who developed
an interest in genealogy as keen as that of their white counterparts. They also used it to celebrate their superiority. The poet Langston Hughes first encountered this obsession when he moved to Washington, DC, in 1924 at age twenty-two. He lived there with his cousins, “who belonged to
the more intellectual and high-class branch of our family,” Hughes wrote. Hughes's cousins introduced him to “the best colored society,” and in those circles, Hughes was both exasperated and amused to hear people boast that they descended from the leading Southern white families “on the colored side.” Which, Hughes observed, “of course meant the
illegitimate
side.”

Eventually, Hughes got so sick of high society that he began spending most of his time on Seventh Street, “where the ordinary Negroes hang out, folks with practically no family tree at all.”

But just because the people on Seventh Street didn't have a family tree didn't mean they didn't want one. And as the civil rights movement gained strength over the course of the twentieth century, some African Americans tried to reclaim their ancestry with genealogy. They had to travel a far rougher trail than their white counterparts. Slaves did not leave wills; they were listed in them, alongside oxen and pewter. Some of the branches of African American family trees led to white planters who raped their female slaves, usually without acknowledging their paternity. The erasure of African genealogy reached down all the way to their names. In 1679, a New York mariner named John Leggett bequeathed to his son “
a negro boy . . . known by the name of ‘You-Boy.'”

When the journalist Alex Haley was growing up in 1920s Tennessee, he would listen to his older female relatives talk about their slave ancestors. As they spat tobacco off their porch, they told him stories that reached all the way back to Haley's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, whom his grandmother simply called “the African.”

The African was captured and shipped to the American colonies, where he was sold to a Virginia planter and renamed Toby. But he demanded to be called Kin-tay. The old women would sometimes recite a few African words to Haley that Kin-tay had taught the family, their meaning now lost.

Playing with his friends—both black and white—Haley would recount the stories. When the parents of his white friends got wind of his tales of whippings and beatings, they disappeared. Those stories stayed with Haley for years, through college and a career in the Coast Guard, and into the early 1960s as he became a reporter. On a trip to London in 1964, Haley stopped in at the British Museum and saw the Rosetta stone. He thought back to the impenetrable words of the African. The next year, he was in Washington, DC, and visited the National Archives. There he found the names of his emancipated slave ancestors in North Carolina, just as his relatives had recounted. Haley decided to use genealogy to find the African and then write a book about the experience.

“In America, I think, there has not been such a book,” Haley told his editor. “‘
Rooting' a Negro family, all the way back.”

Haley's research led him to conclude that the African in his past had been brought from the Gambia. He flew there and made inquiries, which ultimately led him to a traditional historian known as a
griot
. The
griot
looked Haley over and said he resembled a people called the Kinte. To Haley, the name sounded suspiciously like Kin-tay. The
griot
told him about one man from that group, named Kunta Kinte. His biography seemed to fit what Haley knew of the African.

Haley declared that he had discovered his kin. The news that an American cousin had returned raced through the Kinte villages. When Haley drove to see them, children shouted to him in greeting, “Meester Kinte!”

In 1976, Haley published an account of his ancestry, called
Roots: The Saga of an American Family.
It opened with Kunta Kinte's life in Africa, and then followed him to the American colonies, where he became a slave and started the family line that would lead to Alex Haley himself.
Roots
was something that African Americans had never encountered before: Haley was excavating hidden cables that connected living African Americans to their slave ancestors and all the way back to particular people on the mother continent. And it was irresistible—not just to black audiences but to white ones as well.
Roots
sold 1.5 million copies in hardback in its first eighteen months and was turned into a television miniseries that drew an estimated 130 million viewers.

The emotional power of
Roots
was impossible to deny, but when the
historian Willie Lee Rose read the book, something didn't seem quite right. Or, rather, many little things seemed wrong. Haley wrote that Kunta Kinte picked cotton in northern Virginia in the 1760s. Cotton was never grown so far north. Kunta Kinte supposedly put up wire fencing on his plantation. Wire fencing only came into general use a century later.

“These anachronisms are petty only in that they are details,” Rose wrote in the
New York Review of Books
in 1976
.
She worried that they were symptoms of a more profound flaw running through the entire book. “They are too numerous and chip away at the verisimilitude of central matters in which it is important to have full faith,” Rose warned.

At first, Haley shirked off such criticisms, but the questions didn't stop. He tried to defend
Roots
by describing the many years of research he had put into it. And
sometimes he dodged the questions by calling
Roots
“faction.”

But his opponents only grew more persistent. Two novelists took Haley to court, accusing him of lifting long passages of their work. Haley settled one case,
paying out $650,000. Even worse than the plagiarism, however, was the emerging realization that the genealogical bonds at the heart of the book didn't hold up to scrutiny.
An expert on African oral history tracked down the
griot
Haley had met and concluded that he had no way of knowing the details of an eighteenth-century Kinte boy's life. The
griot
had simply told Haley what he wanted to hear. Professional genealogists presented
a catalog of errors, cherry-picking, and wishful thinking. They concluded there was no evidence that Kunta Kinte was Toby, or that Toby was Alex Haley's ancestor.

Yet the power in the story brought out many defenders
.
The fact checkers, they argued, were ignoring what the book meant to readers, how it changed their relationship to the past. “
Suddenly, white Americans were tuning in to the horrors of a period too many schoolbooks had tried to sugarcoat,” said Clarence Page, an African American journalist. “Suddenly, black Americans were asking their elders relentless questions about a past too many elders had been reluctant to talk about and that too many of us, their children, were reluctant to hear.”