DNA Testing -- Not for the Racially Prejudiced!

I have seen overt prejudice against people of color decrease significantly over the generations in my mostly Southern family.  But if you still have those feelings – and you’re thinking about doing a DNA test through ancestry.com or its equivalents – be ready to deal with your feelings about race when you look in the mirror.

I was fortunate to have parents who chose not to bring me up as a racist.  Yet, racism was all around us, those feelings and expressions, and to some extent it was in even our house.  I remember my mother explaining to me that my friend from the Lumbee tribe had nothing to be ashamed of because she was mixed white and Native American, and as a result I defended her at school by shouting to the bullies “She is not black!  She’s Indian!”  So racism was there, even where we tried to keep it out.  If you were Southern, racism was like a wind that whistles around the house and it would sneak in like a bug through the tiniest crack in the structure. 

But in comparison to most of the people around us, my parents were quietly progressive, although they were by no means in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.  Still they taught me that people are people and that it is only society that discriminates.  Lucky me!  For I have just discovered that I am not completely 100 percent white, and my nonwhite percent isn’t Native American.

It is just a drop of African descent which I possess, one percent for me, three percent for my father.  But I can remember when “one drop” was significant, and it is significant to me--as in Significantly Interesting.  I wanted to know more.  How could it be that out of those tediously monochromatic ancestors of mine that there was, somewhere, a person of color?  And when did that line of ancestors turn white?

The first clue was an ancestor named Cornelius Davis who was listed as a “free colored person” along with his household in the 1840 census in Brunswick County NC, as were his closest neighbors.  But on the 1850 census, Cornelius, along with his household, was identified as white while his neighbors remained colorful, and that was his story, and he stuck to it through all the census taking to come over the next forty years. 

I was curious how Cornelius achieved this precarious freedom while still classified as a person of color in the antebellum South, and I believe I have made the connection that tells the story. 

I have tentatively connected Cornelius “Neal” Davis on the basis of location and time, surnames of neighbors, and recorded ethnicity to Richard Davis, a “mulatto” who was an artilleryman in the Revolutionary War.  Richard and his mother, Grace, were freed in the late 1700s by a slave holder named John Davis.  In the words of the 1791 petition filed by Richard and Grace Davis to the state of North Carolina upon the death of John Davis, they were determined to “continue to enjoy all the rights of a free Woman and the Privilege of a Freeman.”  

What a story those few documents tell!  And oh, the secrets we kept and took to our graves, burying the bones, burying the skin tones for what seemed to be forever! Until a new age comes when people are learning to embrace all their ethnicity and coincidentally we have the ability to raise those buried secrets from the DNA of our ancestors.  I belong to this new era, and I celebrate the African American history in me.

DNA Research: Prepare to Shake Up Your Family Tree

I haven't written much about my father's side of the family, partly because much was unknown, and partly because much was of a sensitive nature, but now and then I return to the story of my Grandma Annie, as I did several years ago when I blogged about lying to a genealogist in "The Facts Ma'am, Just the Facts."  There, my mother lied about my lineage because Grandma Annie was still living at that time and was still telling people that my father was her brother instead of her son.

Now, all these years later, we have a new page of the saga:

Grandma Annie was fifteen years old, unmarried and pregnant in a rural Southern community where everyone knew everyone else. I don’t think she ever dealt with what happened straight-on, so the only thing we know for sure is that she tried to reinvent her past by leaving everything behind and marrying a young man in South Carolina that she had known for about a week. She chose well that time. Roy Turner eventually learned that her little brother in North Carolina was her son, and when I came along he loved me as though I was his own grandchild. But Annie was always a haunted person.

I had always been told that a certain person was my biological grandfather. I knew who he was and where he lived, and sometimes I saw him sitting on his shady front porch when we drove past his house on the highway. I knew he didn’t claim me as his grandchild. My mother explained everything to me when I was about six years old and was asking the wrong questions. I learned that there are truths that you live as though they are not so.

The writer in me found it interesting to be part of a scandal that everyone knew about and didn’t mention. I was always very curious about this grandfather and his daughters who were supposedly my aunts; and they seemed curious about me, also. It seemed that everyone in the old neighborhood looked at me in a special way. I can remember walking into Matt Dale’s country store, and hearing people murmur, “Mason’s girl...” People speculated about which of the aunts I resembled. They said I had the wide-open eyes that are characteristic of that family. All this made me feel like sort of a celebrity.

In the later years of Grandma Annie’s life, she denied that the man with the shady front porch was my grandfather. Several possibilities came up and she flatly denied that one fellow in particular was my father’s father – which in hindsight, was significant. By now my father and I were both old enough that our characters were pretty well formed, so we told ourselves it didn’t matter who the missing father/grandfather was. But it did matter. And it wasn’t just our mystery. It belonged to the whole community, a generations-old story that is still talked about.

So to make a long ramble a little shorter, my father sent his DNA through ancestry.com. 
Of course it turns out to be the man that Grandma Annie said it most certainly was NOT. This new grandfather – we never knew him or his other family, and I never even saw his front porch. He was long gone from the area fairly young and may have never known he left a son behind much less a writerly granddaughter.

So now I’m in sort of mourning – because I had developed a life-long fondness for that old rascal on his shady front porch and I thought he was mine even though he never acknowledged me. I’m going to miss him in the shady area of my family tree.

Photo: Grandma Annie and my father