How African Am I?

I always knew I was 100% African.  Always.  Every African I ever met knew it -- from the Nigerians I used to babysit for when I was a kid, to the Senegalese, Kenyan, Moroccan and Egyptian co-eds  I hung out with in college, to the South Africans I befriended when I came to the city, to the tailors from Ghana that made my wedding dress.  I have yet to meet any African that doesn't look at me in genuine astonishment as they recognize themselves or their mothers or sisters in me, and embrace me and all my African ways that never cease to amaze them and freak them all the way out. The food that I cook. The way that I dance. The gap in my teeth. My cheekbones. All of it.

Oh, some of them may want to exclude me because I'm American -- but my African face won't be denied.  And apparently, neither will the blood of my ancestors.  The blood, as Andre Crouch sang, will never lose its power. DNA doesn't lie.  And so it goes. 

As it turns out, according to AncestryDNA, I"m not 100% African. I'm 96% African. (Ha.)  And to think -- all those Five Percenters yelling at me in the street, calling me Nubia. They were right!  (Thanks, Brother-Men.)

Here's the breakdown:

Main Regions: "In order to be considered for this category, a region must have enough evidence that you actually have the region as part of your genetic ethnicity."

Cameroon/Congo =  29%
Senegal =  22%
Benin/Togo = 15%
Ivory Coast/Ghana = `14%
Nigeria =  5%

Trace Regions: "There is only a small amount of evidence supporting these regions as part of your genetic ethnicity. Because both the estimated amount and the range of the estimate are small, it is possible that these regions appear by chance and are not actually part of your genetic ethnicity."

Africa/Southeastern Bantu =  6%
Mali =  3%
Africa/South-Central Hunter-Gatherers = 1%
Africa North = 1%

Are you curious about that other 4%?  I'm not -- because it's so scant, they're probably showing up at random. (See Trace Regions.) 

I love all Africans everywhere -- from the Nigerians who squabble over which tribe I belong to ("Look at her! She's Igbo!") to the Haitians that assume at least one of my parents are from the West Indies (they are not); from the Parisians from the Ivory Coast and Senegal and Morocco and Egypt and the Sudan who call me "Soeur!" like that's my name to the stunning Cameroonian sisters who wave me down on 125th Street, friendly and out of breath and blurting French, asking for help, for directions probably, and genuinely flummoxed when I explain that I'm from America.  We hug each other and somehow I help them anyway.  And they leave me in the street, waving back at me, like we are family. Because we are.



I don't know what happened to us, as a people.  Well. We all know what happened, don't we.  Somewhere in the 80s, we became enthralled with a particular segment within a popular genre of music that was intrinsically divisive, glorified violence, denigrated black women with abandon and pandered to society's lowest common denominator to make a buck.  Eventually, that niche caught on with the white folks, became a garish caricature of itself in order to continue selling itself to the highest bidder and made a lot of white label executives a lot of money.

There. I said it.

When I was a kid, it was an ordinary every day thing that we called each other brother and sister -- and meant it.  Interestingly enough, it's a part of Chinese culture (many Asian and African cultures, actually) to address everyone this way. An older woman is aunt or mother, an older man is uncle or brother, someone your age is sister or brother or cousin. In this way, everyone is family and there is a unity inherent in the way you are spoken to that binds you to each other.   When we lost this simple unifying element, we lost each other.  And when we lost each other, we lost everything.

Well. At least now I know why my face has drawn all of the African diaspora to my heart. 

"Is there any more mac and cheese?"

I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well. -- Julia Child

Never one to leave an interesting tidbit alone, I dug further into that delicious bowl of macaroni and cheese and found all kinds of yummy factual goodness about its origins. As one story goes, Thomas Jefferson brought back a pasta machine from a lengthy sojourn in Rome. This is why his daughter Martha Randolph -- the hostess of the house after his wife died -- is credited with creating the dish by combining macaroni and parmesan cheese.

That doesn't make any sense to me. Why would Martha Randolph -- or any other white woman with money and status -- even think to toil over a hot stove to "create" anything?  You and I both know that if that was the scenario, she threw that pasta maker at some anonymous slave, they came up with mac and cheese and she put her name on it because it was served at her dinner parties.  The End.

And why do historians continue to openly ignore Sally Hemings and the (at least) six children she had with Thomas Jefferson after his spouse -- her half sister Martha -- passed away? The DNA evidence is irrefutable. What's especially rich is that none of Jefferson's white heirs have ever had to prove that they are related to him. Saying so is enough.

Interestingly, I tripped up over this book -- Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America, by Thomas J. Craughwell -- that was a real foodie curiousity.  Apparently, it was Jefferson that brought French cuisine to America, not Julia Child. Who knew? James Hemings -- his deceased wife Martha's 19 year old half-brother -- was promised his freedom if he stayed in France long enough to learn how to cook and bake Jefferson's favorite things. He was then required to teach another chef how to make them. It took Jefferson 11 years to make good on that promise. (Hm. I don't suppose I'd be so giddy to let my freshly trained chef waltz out of my life, either.)

Jefferson was in Paris for several years as US Ambassador to France.  He was also learning important things like how to grow grapes to make his favorite wines. From what I've read, he really loved his bordeaux.  Here's a colorful aside: a 14 year old Sally Hemings was there, too -- as a handmaid to Jefferson's youngest daughter Mary. (Yes, that would make his kid Sally's niece, for those of you keeping score at home.)  While she was in France, Sally wound up pregnant with Jefferson's baby. (Insert *gasp* here.) And now you know the rest of the story. Or do you?

The good news is that once the smoke cleared, Mr. Hemings started his own catering business. The bad news? Five years after he was freed, he committed suicide at the age of 36, in Baltimore Maryland.

All that, so Jefferson could drink delicious wine and eat in high style -- and thanks to a well-cultivated vineyard and all those chefs James Hemings trained, he most certainly did, even after he was completely bereft of funds.

Something to think about, the next time you tuck into a bowl of mac & cheese.