The blonde girl's face squinted up at me from the bottom of a bedside table's drawer, looking as if she were as surprised to be found as I was to unearth her. My mother and I were decluttering her bedroom down to its cracks and corners. That meant emptying the places where she'd stuffed items that she didn't want to lose but may have been comfortable forgetting for a while. Objects like this faded photo, its scalloped edges framing the figure of a child I'd never seen before, standing in some yard I had never visited and grinning into the sunshine.
I asked my mother who it was, and she stopped whatever she was doing to peer at the picture. "That's your cousin," she said, blithely as she would have identified an obsolete utensil – that goes there, you can throw that out – as opposed to a whole flesh-and-blood relative I'd never met.
She tried to resume her busy work, but I pressed her for an explanation. To the best of what I can recall, here's what she said. Sometime in the 1950s or '60s, a family member moved to another state and passed for white. This was his kid. "Finding Your Roots" host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. might call her a page on my book of life.
That was all she saw fit to disclose, and if I were better at reading my mother's hesitation, I would have recognized this to be a sensitive topic. But I was either a clueless teenager or in my thoughtless early 20s, and reduced it to its potential as material, as if life were an "In Living Color" sketch. When I floated the fantasy of what would happen if I tracked her whereabouts, my mother sternly shut that down. "Don't be cruel," she said. "Can you imagine what that would do to her life?"
This conversation happened long before the advent of consumer-friendly DNA testing kits and genealogy websites. Finding her would have required public document requests, phone calls, plane trips and physical effort. But my mother's message was crystal shard-sharp: these histories must be handled with all the care you can muster.
When answers to the broadest questions of who we are and where we come from seem as simple as a trip to the mailbox, people forget that.
The viral video clip from Tuesday's episode of "Finding Your Roots," showing Angela Davis' incredulity at hearing she is a Mayflower descendant, should be a reminder that the weight of hereditary discovery lands heavier on some than others.
For a lot of people, it was. The excerpt from "And Still I Rise" prompted Black folks and other people of color to share their 23AndMe results on social media and commiserate over the high percentage of European ancestry in their breakdowns.
Other replies predictably reflected the careless truculence that fuels most Internet discourse: Cheap jokes from white supremacist half-wits trolling for attention or elated to have a small piece of information they can twist out of context to discredit Davis' legacy of anti-racism. Fury toward Gates for appearing to present this information incautiously or for referring to the Mayflower's passengers – colonizers – as "people who laid the foundation for this country." Also, anger and honest confusion at Davis for being upset.
“Do you know what you’re looking at? That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower.”
— Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGates) February 22, 2023
Our researchers discovered #AngelaDavis’s ancestors traveled to the US on the Mayflower and here is her reaction. #FindingYourRoots pic.twitter.com/G2HhA9BSrT
"No. I can't believe this. No," Davis says, laughing with dumbfounded disbelief as she recoils. "My ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower. No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no." Gates assures her that yes, one of her ancestors was on that ship.
With a deep inhale, her smile dissolves. "Oof. That's a little bit too much to deal with right now."
Bear in mind that this provocative tease is within 49 seconds at the end of a 52-minute, 11-second episode. The same installment also uncovers former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson's ancestry, and those findings, along with much more about Davis' history, are equally stunning.
Together their histories tell us much about the complex, messy manuscript that is the American story. The level of passion incited by less than a minute of it demonstrates why that story is constantly being edited and contested.
Davis is a living, breathing page of American history. This episode only affirms that.
Provided you're familiar with Angela Davis' biography, the news may have smacked you sideways too. A few Twitter and Instagram users blasted PBS and Gates for airing this episode during Black History Month. The counter to this is that Davis is a living, breathing page of American history. This episode only affirms that while illustrating the ways that a single life can represent the nation's labyrinthine identity.
Gates introduces Davis as a living legend, philosopher, feminist and civil rights activist, as well as a "tireless advocate for social justice, crisscrossing the globe to write and speak on behalf of the oppressed." All this is factually accurate, but it doesn't quite cover what she means to people or what her Mayflower connection triggers in those taking it in.
Davis an icon of resistance to some and a Communist devil to others. A fair share of "Finding Your Roots" viewers probably learned about her for the first time by watching this episode, making it somewhat simpler to comprehend the bewilderment at Davis' reaction. For some genealogical hobbyists, a DNA-certified tie to the Pilgrims is the equivalent of winning Family Tree Powerball.
To Davis that information is laden with implications people of color understand immediately and viscerally, but also only in part, when they see Davis pushing back against the information – as in physically, palms pressed against the invisible force of it.
"Can you imagine what that would do to her life?" echoed in my ears as I viewed that. Watching the full episode in the wake of that dissolves that imagination into possibility and appreciation.
This is a good place to step back and point out that any guests of color who agree to participate in "Finding Your Roots" are generously subjecting themselves to a type of psychological and emotional vulnerability to which white guests and viewers can never fully relate. This is especially true of Gates' Black subjects, for reasons explained plainly in his 2019 book "In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past" and excerpted on this site:
For the African American community, then, our DNA tells a story about the history of slavery that our ancestors might have preferred not to discuss: the fact that rape was a frequent, quite violent, and dehumanizing aspect of human bondage, and we all carry the genetic evidence of it in our skin tones, in the shape of our features, in our hair textures, but not often in what we in the United States call our heritage.
Gates is a firm evangelist of genealogical research, believing it to be the best way to tell a new American story. "It's the real American history," he says to Johnson as he contemplates similar data about one of his relatives. "It's the real history of race. That's why I want everybody to do their family trees."
Not everyone receives the "Finding Your Roots" treatment, however – only the famous and notable. This makes it simpler to consume the series' intimate revelations as pure entertainment instead of placing the episode's findings into our broader history.
Combine that spirit with the prevalent mainstreaming of DNA testing as a self-expression device in a culture where large numbers of people publicly diarize their every move and opinion.
Genealogy products and services market to that obsession primarily through a white perspective – sure, you have European ancestry, but from which culture? Memorable commercials have dangled the potential to find non-white genetic markers as if they're spicy fun, as a 2017 AncestryDNA ad does through a woman named Kim, whose glory at discovering her 26% Native American heritage is conveyed by the pottery displayed nearby. Then there was this ad from 2019.
ooooh my god LMAOOO who approved this ancestry commercial??? pic.twitter.com/Isy0k4HTMA
— manny (@mannyfidel) April 18, 2019
Genealogy has a way of steering into sinister places. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ancestral verification was an upper-class sorting mechanism designed to preserve their definition of whiteness, excluding recently arrived European immigrants.
That view shifted after Alex Haley's 1976 novel "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" became a bestseller and its 1977 miniseries adaptation a historic phenomenon, drawing an audience of 100 million for its finale. In the book's epilogue Haley discusses his research methods and ruminates on the impact of that inquest.
"Roots" inspired an across-the-board rise in genealogical exploration – especially among white people. Defining oneself as a descendant of recently arrived immigrants provides a bridge to cultures and places long venerated in U.S. culture.
The Mayflower news is quite the lure, but ultimately it isn't what elevates this episode.
Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson points out in his book "Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America" that such quests also relieved millions from the psychic burden imposed by slavery's central role in our history. The aggressive efforts to censor Black history and criminalize a clear-eyed teaching of it is one of the myriad ramifications of this.
Others are simple irritations, as Black folks are expressing on social media. "Every time I get a message from a distant cousin on MyAncestry, they're asking how we're related. It boggles my mind," tweeted @prntgdcolonized. "TF you think Susan?!"
So. When "Finding Your Roots" guests such as Questlove, Viola Davis, Regina King or Niecy Nash are transfixed by photographs of forebears whose existences they're learning of for the first time, understand the fullness of what you're witnessing. There is awe and joy, but you're also watching a personal reckoning with a vestige of a relative who survived violence and trauma for them to be here.
This facet also accentuates what makes Davis' "Finding Your Roots" discoveries extraordinary. Her heritage extends through the bloodlines of enslaved ancestors and those who abused and exploited their bodies, confirming what Gates says about the story pressed into the DNA of Black folk. And there are other interracial relationships whose nature isn't entirely clear, including that of a white paternal grandfather and Black paternal grandmother who were, on paper, neighbors.
The public has glommed on to the cosmic irony of Davis, a Black radical, being descended from a group of people whom elitists view as a top determinant of social legitimacy. The Mayflower news is quite the lure, but ultimately it isn't what elevates this episode – and, again, it marks the hour's end. Instead, it's the level at which Davis and Gates, both respected academics, engage with this information that proves to be both remarkable and instructional.
Those who accuse Gates of recklessness with Davis' emotions may find upon watching the full hour that it's the inverse; their conversation is a model of extreme care. Her journey begins with a curiosity about her mother, Sallye Bell, who grew up in a foster home.
The series' researchers don't find any information on her maternal grandmother, but they pinpoint her mother's father as a white Alabama lawyer named John Austin Darden. Gates shares a local paper's obituary listing his achievements as a state legislator, publisher and senator.
A prominent member of his community, Gates says. Quite accomplished. Very well-educated.
"Well, was he a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Or the White Citizens' Council? That's something that I would also want to know," Davis asks in response. "Because in those days, in order to achieve that power, one had to thoroughly embrace white supremacy." Perspective and facts are vital historical filters.
But there's a marvel, too, in the way we witness Davis process this and other parts of her history, acknowledging the breadth of emotions as she does so.
"I'm remembering that so many people have called those of us who try to fight against racism and who have visions of a more radical Democracy as un-American," she says at one point. "I've always insisted that the best way to pay tribute to this country is to try to change it and allow it to develop into the kind of place where anyone can be free and equal and happy. So there's a sense in which I identify with the identity of the patriot, but it has to be a radical identification."
Genealogy search registries can repair sundered ancestral bonds, reuniting relatives yearning for kinship. This is how I met a previously unknown cousin from my father's side, and I'm grateful I did. You can also tell we're related by looking at us.
The person whose Blackness was intentionally obscured, and whose picture my mother forgot she'd been sleeping next to for years, remains a stranger. She also belongs to my lineage. If she's still alive she's at least a grandmother, living her own book. Whether she's aware of the passages written in invisible ink in the margins and paragraph breaks is not for me to know or decode for my entertainment. That's for her to figure out, determining how that fits with what she's learned about our larger story.
The "Finding Your Roots" episode "And Still I Rise" is streaming on the PBS app and at PBS.org through Tuesday, March 21.
