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.