Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own - Hardcover

Gates Jr., Henry Louis

 
9780307382382: Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307382389 ISBN 13: 9780307382382
Verlag: Crown, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Finding Oprah’s Roots will not only endow readers with a new appreciation for the key contributions made by history’s unsung but also equip them with the tools to connect to pivotal figures in their own past. A roadmap through the intricacies of public documents and online databases, the book also highlights genetic testing resources that can make it possible to know one’s distant tribal roots in Africa.

For Oprah, the path back to the past was emotion-filled and profoundly illuminating, connecting the narrative of her family to the larger American narrative and “anchoring” her in a way not previously possible. For the reader, Finding Oprah’s Roots offers the possibility of an equally rewarding experience.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. As well as being the author of several award-winning works of literary criticism, he penned the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

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Chapter 1

Have you ever been to Ellis Island? It is a remarkably moving tourist site, the repository of so very many historical memories. But when I observed the muffled whispers of the pilgrims who visit there and when I felt their emotions, I realized that it was more of a shrine than it is a venue for tourists, just another stop in a crowded day of “doing” Manhattan. For millions of immigrants, it was the gateway not only to the New World, but to a veritable new world of identity, an identity as an American citizen. People come to Ellis Island every day, especially white Americans, hoping to find a connection to history by uncovering or reexperiencing their ancestors’ past. I have to confess that I envy my friends who can go there and discover their family’s journey from Europe to the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. All they have to do is know the name of one of their ancestors who immigrated to this country, type that name into a computer, and, like magic, they can access a record of the day on which that person arrived here! They can even pay a hundred dollars to get a copy of that record and to have their ancestor’s name inscribed outside, on a wall of immigrants, a veritable Who’s Who of European immigration to this country in the early quarter of the last century. I wish it were so for all Americans.

Unfortunately, there is no Ellis Island for those of us who are descendants of survivors of the African slave trade. Our ancestors were brought to this country against their will. When they arrived, they were stripped of their history, their family ties, and their cultural and linguistic identities. And we, their ancestors, have been unable to learn much about our African heritage until very, very recently.

This fact has shaped me as a person and as a scholar. I have been obsessed with my family tree since I was a boy. I regretted the fact that the slave past had robbed me of so much knowledge of my ancestors—of the privilege of knowing even their names. I remember when my grandfather Edward Gates died in 1960. I was ten years old. Following his burial, my father showed me my grandfather’s scrapbooks. And there, buried in those yellowing pages of newsprint, was an obituary—the obituary, to my astonishment, of the oldest known Gates ancestor, our matriarch, an ex-slave named Jane Gates. “An estimable colored woman,” the obituary said, also mentioning that she had been a midwife. I wanted to know how I got here from there, from the mysterious and shadowy preserve of slavery in the depths of the black past. I became obsessed with my family tree and peppered my father with questions about the names and dates of my ancestors, which, ever so dutifully, I wrote down in a notebook.

I knew I had white ancestors. My father, his six brothers, and their sister were clearly part white. “Light and bright and damned near white,” my dad used to joke. I wanted to learn the names of both my black and my white ancestors. As I got older, I especially wanted to learn the name of our white patriarch, the white man who impregnated my great-great-grandmother Jane Gates. I wanted to see my white ancestors’ coat of arms! I remember as a child, we used to look at ads in the back of magazines encouraging the reader to send in his or her name and receive by return mail, for twenty dollars or so, one of those colorful European coats of arms, the sort one would see hanging on the wall of a castle in England. I thought about ordering one for the Gates family. I knew it wouldn’t have anything to do with me, necessarily, but who knew for sure? Perhaps I was related to these white Gates people, someone such as the Revolutionary War general Horatio Gates. Slavery had robbed “the means of knowing,” as the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass once put it, from most black people who were descended from a white ancestor.

I even allowed myself to dream about learning the name of the very tribe we had come from in Africa. (I have to confess to certain delusions of grandeur: I was hoping that we were descended from African chiefs, not just any old Africans! And who wouldn’t want to be? If not an African chief, then most certainly an Indian chief!) When Alex Haley’s Roots came along in 1976, I had one serious case of roots envy. I became an historian, in part, I think, out of this desire to know myself more fully, which, of course, over time became a desire to understand others as well, to learn about the past of my people, my black kinsmen, and, through their stories, to learn about the past of the African American people, and, ultimately, the past of my nation—at least my own genealogical tributary of this nation. Finding my own roots has been my lifelong quest ever since my grandfather’s funeral. And the passion to learn the names of my ancestors was never very far beneath the surface of my motivation to become a scholar. When I was an undergraduate student at Yale, I determined that one day I would know—at least I would work hard at knowing—who, and what, “my people” had been.

After decades of being frustrated by my inability to trace my family back beyond slavery—back to one maternal ancestor in the Gates family line—I decided to do something about it. So I invited eight prominent African Americans to allow their family histories to be researched for a documentary film series for PBS. We traced their families, combing over every anecdote we heard and every little scrap of paper we could find—and when the paper trail would end, inevitably, in the abyss of slavery, we would then try to find their African roots through the science of DNA. It was a risky experiment—no one had tried this before—but it turned out to be a remarkably rewarding experience. I called upon scholarly colleagues from various disciplines—professional genealogists, state-of-the-art DNA researchers, top-notch historians—and invited them to help me. They joined this quest willingly, even eagerly.

I learned one thing very quickly: sifting through the detritus of African American genealogical history is a complex task, one that can challenge the expertise of even the most patient and well-trained expert. So many of the most interesting and compelling family stories about our ancestors passed down over Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, or at family reunions, turn out to be more wishful thinking than fact, sometimes containing a kernel of truth, but many times not! In the process, working with these experts, I learned a great deal—about African American history, about American history, but primarily about myself, deepening my understanding of the African and African American past, certainly, but even more, deepening my understanding of myself, of who I am as a person. I believe that this was true for the eight other subjects in my television series African American Lives (which aired in February 2006), including Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Tucker, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Dr. Ben Carson, Dr. Mae Jemison, and Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot.

But a PBS documentary goes by in a flash. It’s a few hours long and then—bam—it’s over. And there was so much more that I learned and wanted to talk about that I couldn’t fit into the series. So many people, black and white, have come up to me on the street or in airports since the series aired, asking important questions. The most common question is this: “How can I do this myself; how can I trace my own roots?” To help them answer this question, I decided to produce another PBS documentary, titled “Oprah’s Roots,” and, more important, to write this book to show how to construct a family...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307382389
ISBN 13 
9780307382382
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
CROWN
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/

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