Two thoughts have long come unbidden to my mind whenever I hear people talking about doing their family trees, or, more recently, getting their DNA done. The first is of Bruce Willis’s character in Pulp Fiction, the boxer Butch Coolidge in the back of the taxi, who, when asked by his South American driver what his name means, replies, “I’m an American, baby, our names don’t mean shit.” The other is of Seneca, who wrote in his Moral Letters to Lucilius: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, -- that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”
To be an American is to bear a name with no historical resonance, or at least none worth looking into, to orient oneself in the world without regard for lineage. To be a philosopher is to know consciously what the American feels by instinct: that the reason lineages are not worth looking into is the same for all of us, namely, that we all derive from the same divine source.
But I am, or like to think of myself as, an American philosopher, and so of course I always scoffed when my late father --who did not share my sensibility, did not see being American in the same way-- used to come home with all sorts of vital-statistics records from Utah and Arkansas, with genealogical scrolls stretching back to Olde England. I always got a vague whiff of prejudice moreover from those family-history buffs more extreme than my father ever was, displaying with pride their ancestors’ tartan patterns above the fireplace, or hanging up a coat-of-arms and explaining with pride why the stag is rampant as opposed to statant, say, or offering an embroidered pillow with some implausible sentiment about Irish or Polish or Swedish superiority. No, I always thought, to hell with all that. I come from nowhere. I come from no one but the gods.
And yet, I am also among other things a scholar of the history of the concept of race, and I know full well that this is the same thing as the history of genealogy. To put it very succinctly, “race” in its Latinate variants first appeared in the sixteenth century in the context of animal husbandry: paying attention to which horse, pigeon, or dog should be coupled with which other of its own kind in order to artificially create a better “breed” (that is to say, in Italian, razza; in Spanish, raza; in French, race) of creature. Eventually, as Marx would later caustically point out, it came to be understood that “the key to aristocracy is zoology,” and by the mid-seventeenth century it was common to speak of the “race” of the Plantagenets, the “race” of the Carolingians, and so on.
The real revolution in the history of the concept came not with the virus-like leap from animals to monarchs, but from monarchs to the nations over which they reigned. G. W. Leibniz, who was in his professional capacity for many years the court genealogist to the Elector of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, came to understand that some of his methods for discovering the medieval marriages of the ancestors of his employer could be extended to the study of ethnohistory in general, and so from writing about the “race” of the Guelf-Este lineage he came to write about the “race” of the Germans, and how it slowly separated out into the Bavarians, the Dutch, the Danes, the Crimean Goths, and so on. And in 1686, in turn, François Bernier asked why we should stop at “nations”, and proposed that it might be more useful still to divide the entire world into a handful of supranational continent-spanning “races” of mankind. For good measure he proposed to colour-code them: the “black” people, the “white” people, and so on. We know the rest of the story. We're still living it.
So, given the strange balance between what I have said in the preceding paragraphs, the history of my thinking about ancestry took a strange twist when I recently began corresponding with Henry Louis Gates, who among other things hosts the PBS series, Finding Your Roots (and who knows from my books about my interest in genealogy and race as a topic of research, but had not previously known anything of my distaste for autogenealogy). When I mentioned to him that I am against DNA testing as a matter of principle (both because I am descended from no one but the gods, etc., but also because the companies spearheading it are engaged in a project of mass-data collection that makes Facebook’s surveillance methods look tame by comparison), he told me that I might be surprised at my emotional reaction if I were ever to give it a try, and that he’d be happy to have his producers send me a DNA test kit here in Brooklyn. You don’t just tell Skip Gates you have a principled opposition to discovering your ancestry, and expect that that will be that.
One thing I didn’t tell Skip is that I am at the outset in a very favoured position among roots-seekers, with or without DNA analysis: I am a Mormon. Well, sort of. My grandfather fled Utah in the 1930s and never spoke of it to his wife and children. But my father, who was born in 1940, found out anyway, and was able to take advantage of the tremendous resources the Latter Day Saints have made available for genealogical research. The Mormons, among other noteworthy points of dogma, believe that a person’s soul can be saved retroactively, and thus that one’s dead non-Mormon ancestors, once posthumously baptised, will suddenly undergo an unexpected promotion in the ranks of the afterlife. So they keep records, good records, and if you are, by their standards anyhow, one of them, they can tell you quite a bit about your roots without first collecting a saliva sample.
So the kit arrived, and I spit in it (if there’s anything to which I’m more committed than my principles, it’s seizing the opportunity to tell a good story) and mailed it off to the lab. I’m still waiting for the results, but in the meantime I found myself wondering what I could learn from the paper records of the LDS in advance of the history that was in the course of being unwoven from my DNA.
I had memories of a few of the things my father, who died in 2016, told me about his own discoveries when he was most intensely engaged in family history in, I believe, the late 1980s. And I had a living memory of my grandparents, and their stories of their parents, but little beyond that. I knew on my mother’s side (for which the Mormons have no records) that my grandfather was born in Minnesota to Norwegian immigrants, and my grandmother in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants.
I knew my paternal grandfather was a Mormon, as I have said, and that his grandfather had come from England at some time in the nineteenth century. As for my paternal grandmother, I knew she was from Arkansas, and I believed that her ancestors were forever lost in the dark abyss of time, too insignificant to leave even a trace in the vital-statistics records.
They were rumoured to be “part Cherokee”, as many Americans who don’t know their ancestors are. Partial absorption of Indigenous blood was thought necessary for the successful appropriation of the continent, as Thomas Jefferson already understood in his Notes on the State of Virginia, which also means that one of the unique traits of the American strain of white-supremacist ideology is that white identity is compatible with, even enhanced by, a certain degree of mestizaje, real or imagined. The mestizo component of my family lineage was always suspected, vaguely, to lie on the side of my paternal grandmother. That was also by far the most truly American segment at the family get-togethers, the ones with the Arkansas accents, the ones with the baked mac-and-cheese and candied yams, the ones with beat-up Chrysler Le Barons and tales of debt and downtroddenness that seemed to go all the way back to the Fall.
Within five minutes of searching on the LDS genealogy website, after entering the barest information on my grandfather (Von Harris Smith, born Sugar City, Idaho, 1912), I was led to this biographical-information page from the LDS Missionary Database on his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, James Smith (born 1838, Oakley, England, died 1922, Utah).
I confess Skip Gates’s prediction was correct: this discovery moved me. For one thing, I see the family resemblance between James Smith and me, which has the power to cut across time and create the appearance of familiarity. I recall the chapters on passing through Utah Territory in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, and all the bemused mockery of those strange frontier utopians that this voyage provided him. At the time James Smith was out there proselytising, the Mormons still hoped to prevail in a long and sometimes violent stand-off with the US army, which would have transformed Utah into a breakaway theocracy, the last and most radical strain of the wave of radical Protestant sects that emerged in England two hundred years earlier. James Smith made me feel, truly, a part of that legacy.
But that was just the beginning, and as it would turn out it was my paternal grandmother’s side that had the deeper and much more surprising connection to radical Protestantism. Through Bertie Mae Cruce (born in Monticello, Arkansas in 1918), I am a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster and his wife Mary, who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, as passengers on the Mayflower. (It’s all there on the LDS website, with every official document duly scanned, from Bertie’s birth certificate to the arrival logs of the Pilgrims’ ship, spanning nine generations in 298 years). The Brewsters had daughters named Patience and Fear, and sons named Wrestling and Love, but I am descended from the one called Jonathan. Elder William Brewster wrote a Treatise of the Ministery of the Church of England, which I’ve now read and will perhaps write about on another occasion. His motto was drawn from Psalms 39: Hebel est omnia Adam. There is an Elder William Brewster Society, open to all who can prove their descent from him. (I will not join.)
A few comments are in order about the special way in which this discovery hits me. A first is that one should not really be so surprised. An estimated 12% of Americans are directly descended from a Mayflower passenger, and the LDS records on my family, reaching back as far as the eighth century, attest to the presence of countless Lords and Ladies of Cornwall, Normandy, Brabant. Droit de seigneur and a host of complicated statistical factors I'm not sure I fully understand mean that virtually everyone is descended from nobility. A significant number of Americans are descended from Mayflower passengers, as I've said; it is just that much of the early formation of my identity and orientation in the world involved assuming that I could not have been one of them.
I can recall the lessons on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims in my elementary-school history classes, and I clearly remember thinking: this doesn’t concern me. My people were the little people, nés pour le petit pain, as the Québecois would say: the people whose ancestry does not raise them up, the people whose ancestry is not worth writing down. This is in particular a prejudice that I had formed largely from exposure to the Arkansas wing of my family, which included my grandmother and her siblings and some of their spouses. The irony, though, that she was the one linking me to a sort of American nobility without my realising it, also contains a lesson about American history: somewhere in the generations between the Plymouth Colony and my grandmother’s birth, at least one line of descent from Elder William Brewster experienced what we might call “indigenisation”. This is the same process that Henry David Thoreau observes of the Québecois: whether they are born of métissage or not, the French settlers, unlike the English, took to the forests and came to truly inhabit the continent.
My ancestors did not linger in Brewster, Massachusetts, practicing a strain of Protestantism that would come to be as “mainline” as the original Puritanism had been radical, thriving through hard work and Puritan virtue in prosperous and level-headed New England. They went south, became Baptists, impoverished themselves, learned to embrace desperation as a mode of being. They remained “white” (as far as I can tell from the scanned records, though perhaps the DNA results will confute this), but did so in a way that made them feel as if they must hypothesise an impurity of the blood somewhere in there, in order to make sense of the kind of Americans they were: white trash, to cautiously utter the slur I know I’m not supposed to use, but which seems necessary in order to get to the heart of the matter.
The existence of this class of people is part of America’s success and its tragic failure. It is through them that Jefferson’s hope was realised: the expropriation of the continent and the near-total annihilation of its Indigenous people. But this process also degraded the people who carried it out, and part of the degradation was a sort of forgetfulness, a loss of an orientation to the world through an idea of the ancestors that can ennoble a person even without proper nobility in the political and economic sense, a nobility the Americans rejected from the outset, even if they did not hesitate to set up societies for the descendants of the Mayflower, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and so on. And at the end of several generations, it yields up someone like me, who spends his life insisting he is descended from no one at all. This insistence is born of a sort of pride, and its results in their Senecan inflections are perhaps valuable, but it also conceals, and poorly, a history of violence (both enacted and received) and loss.
“But at least you get to be white,” will be the refrain from both the white-supremacists and the identitarians of the left. In the history lessons on the Pilgrims, it is true, my inchoate thought was not simply that this does not concern me, but that while it does not directly concern me I might at least get to be included among the descendants of the Mayflower par courtoisie. And this is where I think the lesson of the history of race, as it makes its leap from horses to kings to nations to “races” in the current sense of essentialised biogeographical populations, may be of particular value to our thinking about ancestry and identity in the American context. When Leibniz extends genealogy from families to nations, he is enfolding great masses of people, from different social classes, into the same dynasty, and so into the same great narrative of the origins of the body politic, even if only, again, par courtoisie. This surely served to delegitimise the hereditary forms of sovereignty his work was meant to glorify, and to tip early modern Europe that much closer to the republican revolutions that grounded sovereignty in the people. It also served, though he could not have seen this coming, to contribute to the racialisation of political communities, a process that would eventually mutate into such an absurd, contradictory, and destructive form as we still know in the United States today.
Race is, politically, a dead end. Courtesy is --literally, etymologically-- a courtly virtue, and is useless as the glue that binds democratic citizens together. For a ten-year-old American to feel, inchoately but surely, that it is only this courtesy that binds him to the Mayflower, but that this courtesy at the same time is one that is extended only on racial grounds, is the disgrace of American history in a single exemplum.
I suppose I’d rather be truly descended from the Mayflower than be enabled to behave as if I were on the basis of racial identity alone. But the discovery of true descent is not a simple one. I cannot claim any American simulacrum of nobility, as some of the Brewster descendants in New England seem to enjoy doing. The indigenisation process is irreversible: I am, in the sense already described, white trash. I certainly cannot buy into the form of political community that the public-school curriculum-setters hoped to install, which would have had me experience community with Elder William Brewster simply in virtue of our shared whiteness: to be white trash in the sense I have in mind is to be able to smell the artifice and lies that make the fiction of universal whiteness work in the service of power. Nor, finally, can I deny that I am moved, as Skip Gates predicted I would be, by the discovery of my descent from a Mayflower passenger.
I am moved, and then in my motion I am soon swung back around, and recalled to my former way of being American, the way that harmonises with Seneca’s vision of philosophy’s divine origins. We all share a genealogy, hidden in plain sight, that no church archive, no royal court, no DNA test, can ever discern.
Still, for the sake of the story, and to come good on my acceptance of Skip Gates's offer, it makes sense that I should divulge the results of the test, and my reaction to them, in a follow-up post, in due time...
Great essay. It brings to mind Townes Van Zandt's lyric:
I come from a long line:
high, low, and in between.
Same as you.
For my part, my surname came out of the Honolulu phone book in 1941 when my paternal grandfather, on shore leave, swapped it for the unpronounceable Kraut name his immigrant parents gave him. I like being able to tell people my impeccably WASPy name is Hawaiian and leaving it at that. Earlier than that and I'm descended from the same mix of slaves and slavemasters as everyone else.
Posted by: Matt Norwood | May 6, 2020 at 12:06 PM
I started working on my family tree because I was interested in finding out where my ancestors came from prior to Australia, plus I'd heard fragments of stories about particularly interesting great grandparents that I wanted to flesh out.
As it happens my paternal ancestry is Welsh, coinciding with many of the Mayflower pilgrims, including its captain. However brick walls of illegitimacy and uncertain paternity make it unlikely that I could ever connect my line with any certainty to those pilgrims.
Two hundred years ago most of my ancestors were basically peasant labourers and tradespeople. What is interesting is the way that education and mobility allowed some of them to flourish in ways they had been historically denied. To see them designing canals, setting up locomotive workshops in India, becoming outstanding sportswomen - that has been more rewarding than any named lines.
Watching my British ancestors move out of villages into the cities through the industrial revolution and form family enclaves in London neighbourhoods is like seeing a historical soap-opera unfold in birth and census records. More than that it demonstrates that they share the same story as communities making the transition to modernity in other countries in the present day. When family members make disparaging remarks about recent migrants, I remind them that they are the beneficiary of their own ancestors making the same journey a century earlier.
Re your DNA: I would take that with a grain of salt. The percentages given by DNA service providers are based on the self-selected spit donors of migrant populations, not source populations. The figures are also going to be different to what your siblings may get, because despite having the same ancestry we each get a unique set of genes and some are going to reflect one ancestral line more than another.
Posted by: Memeweaver | May 10, 2020 at 09:54 PM