Who Am I?

…Shit, who am I?
It’s not important
But they call me Brother to the Night…

— Darius Lovehall in Love Jones

It’s funny the things people do when they start to fear for their own mortality.  Some people switch (or find) religions.  Many people look at their bucket list and begin crossing things off in a grocery-shopping-item-in-the-buggy fashion.  Others give up the whereabouts of suspected terrorists right before being waterboarded again.  Folks like myself, well, we drop perfectly healthy careers in pursuit of other dreams and passions all in the name of “Because.”  There is an even smaller population of people that actually want to get answers to hard to find truths.  Like who the F#$% am I really and where are the rest of my peoples at?

I’ve always been one to seek information about knowledge of self, but I never took the extra step of doing the hard work of tracing back my roots.  Partly inspired by the television series put on by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and overwhelmingly inspired by the courage and experiences of Ms. Dana Saxon, whom I swear is my long lost soulmate(that’s another blog), I set out to solve one of my life’s biggest mysteries.

Why, for as long as I could remember, have I resonated with so many things Africa… particularly of the Sudan and Egypt?  Was all my good hair (when I could grow it) attributed to my Korean heritage, or was there some good hair’d-ed Native Americans in the family tree?

Last August, in what began as an ordinary day of me just surfing the net, bored at work, turned into a bit of an information gold mine.  There it was in big, bold, digital headlines, “Foxx Learns His African Roots“.  The Foxx here being Mayor Anthony Foxx; Charlotte’s second African-American mayor since the world famous Harvey Gantt ruled almost two decades ago.

It turned out that African-Ancestry had come to town the day before for their travelling, “We Are Africa” road tour and chose our mayor to be their test subject.  If you didn’t know already, African Ancestry is a company that specializes in genetic genealogy of black Americans.  

“WTF?!”  How did I miss the note that they were in town?!  I was going out of my mind that I had missed the opportunity to visit them locally!  After reading the article on our Mayor, I frantically checked their website to see if there was going to be another session that I could attend.  Luckily, I sighed a breath of relief as I read that they would be taking their road tour to Raleigh the next day.  I wasn’t going to miss the presentation twice, so my good friend Anne and I left 4 hours early to make sure we’d be able to get to talk to the presenters.

After talking with a few other artists and business folk peddling their Africentric wares, the time for the main event had finally arrived.  The President of AA, Gina Paige, who I would visually describe as a younger, prettier, smaller version of Jill Scott, began sharing her personal genealogical background quest and how she came about starting the company.  She spent about 15 minutes to present her business model, but I already knew that I wouldn’t be denied my DNA kit after driving a couple of hours to see this.  Even though  I was dead set on purchasing a DNA test, there were a few moments of hesitation on my part.

I mean, I already knew that my mother was full-blooded, Pusan-born South Korean so that ruled out half of the tests that I could take.  However, what made me nervous was the statistical success rate of linking my paternal lineage to Africa.  In fact, the rate was a staggering 65% success rate for people that took the paternal test to trace back to Africa.  Why so low you ask?  Because all of those damn slavemasters that were creeping up in the cabins making mulatto babies!  The maternal lineage success rate was much, much higher at 92%.  Taking all things into consideration, the price of NOT knowing was far greater than the asking fee for the test, so I purchased my test, submitted my DNA sample and waited on pins and needles for the next 2 months.

So what about those dreams of Pyramids and Ancient Sudanese empires?  Well, geographically, my father’s father’s father’s father’s father was a hybrid like me.  Only his people were from Liberia and Guinea-Bissau.  My DNA has a 100% sequence similarity match of two Ethnic groups today — the Djola people of Guinea-Bissau and the Kpelle people of Liberia.

While I can’t quite trace my roots to Egyptian glory just yet, I have been excited to find out that the Kpelle people, whom now reside predominantly in Liberia, migrated from the Sudan during the sixteenth century to escape internal conflicts between warring tribes.  It’s also been well documented on how Egyptians invaded and conquered Sudan, so I can still hope, that somewhere a Kpelle ancestor bred with an Egyptian.

In future blogs, I’ll try and share some of the interesting characteristics and traits that I have found out about both tribes and how I seem to naturally parallel with them.