My parents’ results gave them the concrete proof of their ancestry that they’d always been denied. My father, a former member of the Black Panther party, proudly claimed his Native American heritage by registering with the Choctaw tribe of Slidell, Louisiana. My mother could at last make educated guesses about the parentage of her great grandparents. It was as if 23andMe had taught them to read the language of their family histories, enabling them to finally understand the incomprehensible book of their ancestral pasts: to read what had been gibberish.
Yet I found my own results both surprising and troubling. I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers. My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties. My father was run out of segregated Pass Christian’s beaches and the local park. I was the only black girl at my private high school in Pass Christian, the target of my classmates’ backwards ideas about race. Despite my parents’ sense of their mixed roots, I had thought that my genetic makeup would confirm the identity that I’d grown up with—one that located Africa as my ancestors’ primary point of origin, and that allowed me to claim a legacy of black resistance and strength.
So it was discomfiting to find that my ancestry was forty per cent European—a mixture of British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Iberian, Italian, and Ashkenazi—thirty-two per cent sub-Saharan African, a quarter Native American, and less than one per cent North African. For a few days after I received my results, I looked into the mirror and didn’t know how to understand myself. I tried to understand my heritage through my features, to assign each one a place, but I couldn’t. All I could see was my hair: hair that grows up and out instead of falling flat, like my father’s; hair that refuses to be as smooth and tidy as my mother’s but instead bushes and tangles and curls in all directions at once. Mine is a mane that bears the strongest imprint of my African ancestors, hair that my hairstylist combed out into a voluminous Afro during one of my visits to New York City, so that I walked the streets with a ten-inch halo that repelled the rain and spoke of Africa to everyone who saw it.