My most important Father's Day gifts are ones I appreciate every single day – two wonderful children whose relatively smooth transition to adulthood has been a joy to behold.
But that doesn’t mean a man can’t enjoy a little Daddy swag.
So my Father’s Day kicked off this year with one of my daughter Ashley’s omelette specials and a couple other gifts that were more than an adequate token of appreciation.
Then my wife told me to check my phone. She had texted me a confirmation that one last gift was on its way: An Ancestry.com kit would be arriving by mail in a few days.
“Ah man!” I said, smiling widely as my family looked on.
We have talked a great deal about where we are from. Which region, which nation or tribe bore our ancestors? Travel shows we watch on Saturday mornings have tantalized us. Do we have a connection to this place or to that place?
For many black families, those are questions that usually remain unanswered. Many of our ancestors were slaves, brought to the New World in bondage, bought, sold and rarely recorded in any way more meaningful than as part of a white household’s goods. And even then, that recording was typically a first name or a description.
Today, our last names are often those taken from people who owned our ancestors.
I have looked on with some wistfulness as white friends or acquaintances celebrate their ancestral heritage with knowledge of “the old country,” a county, town or village in a specific nation where their ancestors lived.
There is no such knowledge for me or for many other black Americans.
I have not felt deprived in any significant way. It is enough to know those rugged ancestors survived their trials, persevered through hardships I couldn’t begin to comprehend and would be happy (I believe) to see their descendants living happily and freely in a nation they helped shape.
Still, I have wondered.
My relatives and I grew up in Charleston County, South Carolina, the port of entry for anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of slaves imported into the United States before importation was outlawed in 1807.
Many of those slaves came from west Africa, a location readily accessible to traders sailing from both Europe and the New World.
Armed with knowledge of that Charleston connection and with a historical understanding of where that city got her slaves, I've always assumed my ancestry stretched back to west Africa. But was I right? And if so, where in west Africa?
That $99 kit coming in the mail held out the possibility of an answer.
***
The Saturday before the kit came, my family and I pulled up a series of videos on YouTube showing black Americans viewing their results.
We were interested in black southerners, black South Carolinians in particular.
Many of those we watched grew emotional as they learned, for the first time, which nations contributed to their ancestry.
A black woman in Chicago found out that Ivory Coast contributed a big chunk to her ancestry. A black man in South Carolina found that Togo and Ghana made up big parts of his ancestry.
We tried to guess which country contributed the most to my ancestry, a question that became became something of an obsession.
I read that many slaves in Charleston had been taken from Angola, and so my son and I went on the web and looked to see if we bear any physical resemblance to the peoples of Angola.
It was a silly exercise. Angola is a nation of 26 million people, and there’d be no way to determine a link even if my features resembled some of the Angolans we saw on the web.
We watched more videos and laughed throughout an old interview the comedian George Lopez conducted with Snoop Dogg and Charles Barkley, who used DNA testing to determine which man is "more black."
The next week, when the ancestry kit came in the mail, I didn’t open it right away.
Instead, my family and I talked some more about what the results might show.
I had convinced myself that I was of Angolan ancestry, but the Snoop-Barkley video clip had made me wonder what percent black I was.
I thought, too, about how I’d handle learning that I was, say, 20 percent European. I had assumed that, because my complexion isn’t as dark as some of those who recently immigrated from Africa, my ancestry would be more mixed.
My line, I figured, wasn’t all black.
I knew well that white slave owners had frequently raped their female slaves and that that played a role in the mixed ancestry of many black Americans. Even these many years later, the thought repulsed and angered me.
The next day, as my daughter and I read through the kit’s instructions, I decided I’d embrace whatever the results showed. I knew I couldn’t change the past, and I didn’t want anger or resentment to cloud the present.
Who knows, I thought, maybe I’d have a reason other than a love of beer to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
The instructions weren’t complicated — spit in a vial, mix in a stabilizing solution — but my daughter, who has a degree in microbiology, was geeking out on the kit. She took some pictures for family posterity.
I dropped the package off at a post office and waited. The wait was to be four to six weeks. I heard some people had to wait even longer.
I figured if I got my results in early September, that’d turn my Father’s Day gift into a birthday gift, as I turned 50 on September 2.
But I didn’t have to wait that long.
***
Ancestry.com had been sending me emails from the moment I registered my sample, looking to entice me into buying different products. I came to think each email would be the results and was bummed when I learned they were simply product pitches.
Then in early August I got an email that said Ancestry.com had found “DNA matches” for me. I clicked on the link and saw that one of my uncles had gotten his DNA tested. He was at the top of a 53-page long list of people with whom I share some DNA connection.
There were last names I recognized from my childhood. One name was a big surprise. It was of a woman whose little sister I had a crush on when I was in middle school. Turns out, they’re my third cousins.
Good thing that crush was in no way reciprocated.
There was a second cousin who looked like other relatives but who was utterly unknown to me. I scrolled through the pages. Many of the names had pictures next to them. And some of those pictures were of white people.
I have several fourth cousins who are white. I have fifth cousins and more distant white relatives, too.
I texted my wife and kids.
“We’ve got white people in our family,” I told them.
When I clicked on a name, the link gave me some of their biographical profile. One of my white fourth cousins is of Scandinavian ancestry. I relayed that to my wife and kids.
“So that’s why we like Bjork!” my daughter texted.
I laughed hard and then began to wonder if these matches weren’t another product pitch but part of my actual results. I checked to see if more information was available. There was. I texted my wife and children and told them I’d read the full results when I got home from work.
My daughter couldn’t be there because she works at a lab and doesn’t get off until late at night. My son Wayne agreed to get a few pictures as I got answers to questions we had been asking for years.
When I got home, I jumped on my computer and pulled up the results. I FaceTimed my daughter as I read them.
The first thing I saw was a series of circles indicating geographic “ethnicity” zones that contributed to my ancestry. In the United States, the circles were concentrated in the South. No surprise there. Both sides of my family are from South Carolina.
Then, I looked across the ocean and saw circles concentrated in west Africa. Again, not a surprise. I figured my ancestors hailed from that region.
But the national breakdown was a surprise. Neither Ivory Coast or Ghana or Angola had contributed the most to my ancestry. The nation that contributed the most was…Nigeria.
My DNA breakdown was as follows: 34 percent Nigeria; 18 percent Mali; 16 percent Ivory Coast/Ghana; 12 percent Benin/Togo; 9 percent Senegal; 3 percent Cameroon/Congo; 3 percent Africa Southeastern Bantu; 1 percent Ireland; less than 1 percent Iberian Peninsula and European Jewish; 1 percent Native American; less than 1 percent Melanesia, a South Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Results showed my ancestry is 95 percent African. In case you were wondering, I’m much, much blacker than Snoop Dogg or Charles Barkley!
***
We were astonished by what we learned. I hadn’t even thought of Nigeria, despite the fact that it is the most populous country in Africa.
After sharing the news with my daughter, I called my brothers.
My oldest brother, Vernon, has long been fascinated with Africa. An accomplished water color painter, he has painted vivid scenes of African wildlife but has never been to sub-Saharan Africa.
Now, I had the pleasure of telling both brothers where in Africa we’re from.
I got them both on the phone and told them I had my results. My middle brother, Rodney, has always had lots of pride in being black.
When I told them the results say my ancestry – and theirs – is 95 percent African, they were thrilled.
“I knew we were straight African, straight Zulu from the motherland!” Rodney said, as we all laughed.
“That’s why I can’t stop painting Africa,” Vernon chimed in.
(We are, by the way, only distantly related to the Zulu, a Bantu ethnic group that lives in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. But my brother’s pride in our African-ness was again well noted.)
I told Rodney about the middle school crush who was our third cousin, and we laughed about that, too.
They were curious about the family connections. I told them about our white cousins, about the black second cousin none of us knows.
Our father never knew his father, and we’ve always been curious about him. Perhaps my results will be a starting point in finding people connected to him.
After ending my call to the guys, I let it all sink in. Nigeria.
It dawned on me that my ignorance of the country, of Africa, is as vast as the continent.
I spent the rest of the evening learning what I could about Nigeria. I learned that its capital is Abuja and not Lagos, its most populous city. I thought back to those school girls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram, a terrorist group operating in Nigeria.
I felt sad when I read that, because of the threat of terrorism, the U.S. State Department has warned against all but essential travel to northern portions of the country.
I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to Nigeria, though getting there would be wonderful. Finding a new place to travel to wasn’t what my search was all about.
That search was about filling in some of the blanks, illuminating historic ties slavery obscured but couldn’t sever.
My son printed out the DNA results and put them on the fridge.
As the evening ended, I scanned blank wall space in our house.
“Where in here,” I asked my wife, “can I hang my Nigerian flag? You know I’ll be getting one.”
“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes and laughing.
Wayne Washington’s DNA breakdown
Nigeria, 34 percent
Mali, 18 percent
Ivory Coast/Ghana, 16 percent
Benin/Togo 12 percent
Senegal, 9 percent
Cameroon/Congo, 3 percent
Africa Southeastern Bantu, 3 percent
Ireland, 1 percent
Native American, 1 percent
Melanesia, less than 1 percent
Iberian Peninsula, less than 1 percent
European Jewish, less than 1 percent
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