I envy white people sometimes.
Like when I write about some historic hardship suffered by African-Americans and a guy dashes off a hot e-mail about his uncle who came here from the old country in such-and-such year and got treated like a dog. Or, when I'm chatting with a friend whose roots are in Ireland and he starts talking about some ancestor who suffered there, many generations removed.
It is in such moments that I feel this particular envy. And I invariably wonder: Does this guy know what a blessed thing it is to be able to trace family back through all those years? Does he understand that there's precious little I wouldn't give to be able to do that, to be able to point down through history and say, "This is where I am from."
I know that not every white American can say this. The point is, most African-Americans cannot. Our history, almost by definition, is one of dislocation, disconnection, disruption. From the time people were stolen from their parents on the west coast of Africa to the time they were separated from their children on the banks of the Mississippi, from the time a common-law husband went north to seek a better life to the time, just a heartbeat ago, that another fatherless black baby entered the world, blood ties for us have historically been ... tenuous things.
So you will understand, perhaps, why this week's news out of the Mormon Church strikes me so profoundly. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued on CD-ROM the records of the Freedman's Bank, an institution created for newly freed slaves right after the Civil War. The 480,000 depositors were required to identify their places of residence and former owners and to list all members of their families including those who had been sold away. All of which makes this an invaluable resource indeed, a godsend for African-Americans searching out their family histories.
The new CD-ROM is not the only good news lately for African-Americans who seek their roots. Last year came the stunning word that competing researchers are working to compile DNA databases of Africans and American blacks. The geneticists say they will soon be able, by the expedient of a blood or saliva test, to determine from which ancient African state and conceivably which ancient African people a given black person's ancestors come. They will be able to restore families the slave trade tore asunder to return you, metaphorically speaking, home.
In a word: Wow. Is this a great time to be alive, or what? Technology promises to fix what once seemed unfixable, to make possible reunions that once seemed the stuff of dreams.
We talk so much about the physical toll of the African odyssey about whippings and lynchings and toil. We talk about the emotional toll, too the emasculation, the denigration, the internalized loathing. But ultimately, the most enduring toll may have been born of this loss of names, families and personal histories. If you don't know where you're from, you cannot, in a very real sense, know who you are. You're left groping for answers.
That's where many of us stand as African-American women and men. It's why Afrocentricity exerts such a powerful pull on the African-American psyche, why some of us yearn so mightily toward a romanticized past of queenships and kingships on the grassy plains of the motherland. Because there's this rupture in our history. There is this break.
Maybe this is where the break begins to heal. I hope so.
Because I look beyond my own grandparents and there is, for the most part, only mystery. A whispered name here, an old family story there, that's all I have. And emotionally speaking, it leaves me ... out there. Leaves me incomplete, bereft of knowledge that might tell me who I am. Leaves me wandering in the darkness of mystery.
Today, I am one step closer to home.
The Freedman's Bank disc costs $6.50 and can be ordered by calling 1-800-537-5971. When you reach the options menu, press number four and ask the operator for item 50120. You can also purchase the disc online at www.familysearch.org.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
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