For the descendants of the survivors of the transatlantic slave trade, our family histories are cruelly locked away in a vault of time through no fault of our own. Just five generations ago, African families were torn apart in the name of hatred and greed. Their seeds were scattered throughout the world indiscriminately, leaving souls homeless and hungry for roots they were forced to leave behind. As a Black American, I carry the weight of cultural genocide in my bones every day, wondering what my life would be like if my stolen history, traditions, and rituals were known from birth. Holidays like Juneteenth, which commemorates the day blacks in Texas were notified of their freedom two years after Emancipation Proclamation signed, are designed to do just that: give everyone a chance to pay respect to one of the most brutal pieces of American history. But instead, it looks like everyone is just enjoying the day off.
If it were up to me, Juneteenth would be a day of national mourning mixed with charity work aimed at the betterment of Black Americans. But I digress. I personally use the day to honor the untold stories of our ancestors, a passion I share with one of my best friends, fellow journalist Amber Smith. Amber and I met in our dorm rooms as arty, bright-eyed, teenage jocks at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles about 16 years ago. I was immediately at home with her warm aura and angelic demeanor. Our shared passion for the arts, comedy, and healing gave our friendship its foundation, but obviously, our mutual Blackness was a strong anchor of sisterhood in a sea of whiteness at our college.
As we’ve evolved from our teenage years into our mid-thirties and gotten to know each other more deeply, I’ve begun to observe all the unique synchronicities we share. For example, Amber’s closest first cousin has the same name as me and spells it basically the same way (with an extra R). We both have deep roots in the South, her family hailing from Louisiana and mine from Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina. And even astrologically we are a match made in heaven. I am a Leo with a Scorpio rising and she is a Scorpio with a Leo rising. We share a Scorpio moon (intense senses). We both also share a deep, insatiable longing to learn more about our roots. After all, how can you really know a friend if you don’t know their origin story?
If it were up to me, June 10th would be a day of national mourning mixed with charitable work aimed at the betterment of Black Americans… I use the day to honor the untold stories of our ancestors.
A few months ago, I got lost down a rabbit hole of friendship and natural selection. A 2014 paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencess, found that people tend to choose friends who are genetically similar to them, as if they were third or fourth cousins. The study’s lead co-authors, Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, describe work buddies as a type of “functional kin.” Christakis, author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society.”said in an interview with Unbothered that friendship is “a long-term, non-sexual relationship with a non-relative fellow of our species,” which is an extremely rare behavior when looking at the animal kingdom as a whole. .
Christakis said that while most of us are familiar with the rare phenomenon of “love at first sight,” “like at first sight” is much more common and something we can experience with our friends. “That first-look feeling is probably also shaped by natural selection,” Christakis said.
“When we call our friend, brother or sister, it’s a kind of ancient trend,” according to Christakis. “You choose as your friend someone who could be your sister, could be your third cousin, your female cousin,” even if they’re not. After reviewing the data, I began to wonder about my friendship with Amber, wondering if our “functional kinship” extended to actual kinship, given our shared histories.
So I asked for his help Ancestry.com genealogist Nicka Sewell-Smith to find out. I had taken a DNA test on the site a few years before, so we sent a kit to Amber’s house for her to do a swab as well. After weeks of anxiously waiting for the results, they came back and Amber and I held hands in anticipation, glued to the couch as Sewell-Smith shared the secret story of our friendship with us via Zoom.
What we discovered is that while Amber and I are not genetically related (Amber was actually related to Sewell-Smith, ironically), we are from similar African countries like Nigeria, Cameroon, and Mali. Now, this is not surprising since the The majority of slaves in the US were captured from West African countries. However, I think the fact that we are both journalists is a holy nod to us West African griot heritagewhich is based on an oral storytelling tradition that keeps African legacies alive.
Although we are not genetically related, we discovered that our ancestry converges in a dark, tiny southern town: Washington County, Mississippi. In my family, Washington County, Mississippi (which would later split off and become part of Sharkey County), has been part of my bloodline since birth, as my great-grandmother Eliza Lightfoot was born there in 1911. For Amber, The county is overshadowed by its own family tragedy. Her great-grandfather Wilbert George and his son were tragically killed in a car accident in the same county in 1962.
By the time of George’s death, my great-grandmother had already left the horrors of Mississippi behind to live up North in Ohio. When my great-grandmother was alive (she died aged 103), she often talked about picking cotton under the heat for pennies and described the horror of seeing lynched black men hanging from trees in her local town of Cary. The poignant stories my great-grandmother told me as a child about her decades in the South explain why Nina Simone’s 1964 Civil Rights anthem was aptly titled “Mississippi Goddam.” The lyrics say, “Alabama has got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my cool. And everybody knows about Mississippi, my God.”
While living in Mississippi, Eliza was a sharecropper, a dehumanizing labor system implemented after slavery was abolished in the South. When my grandmother, Willa Mae, was born in 1932, my great-grandmother said she would pick cotton with her newborn baby on her back. We discovered that Eliza was working less than 200 miles north of East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where Amber’s great-grandfather Wilbert George also worked as a farmer, according to 1930s census records I obtained from Ancestry.com.
So that’s where our stories converge, in the swamps of the Deep South along the Mississippi River, where cotton was king and racial violence was common. Two generations later, our family lines would meet again regionally, at a beautiful Los Angeles university. Ancestors, alive once more, to great-grandchildren who could go to college and never be forced to plow and harvest.
I look at my and Amber’s shared history with pride, knowing that we both have ancestors who at one point called the lowland wetlands of the south home. And maybe that’s why we can dive deep together as friends. Our ancestral familiarity with what it’s like to walk through a swamp and survive to tell the tale comes with a side of corn, red beans and rice. We share soul food, literally and figuratively.
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