Bravo, PBS!

Migrant Worker Huts, Okanogan, WA Aline Lesage ©2003

It’s a common saying: you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from. Considering the research tools now available, exploring one’s roots is no longer an unusually challenging feat. For many Americans of European descent who choose to initiate a search for their ancestry, the ambition to build a family tree is, in fact, a doable feat (for the beginner, the records at Ellis Island remain a well-documented and trustworthy source). All it requires is a healthy measure of patience along with a willingness to connect with a number of organizations, internet sites and/or distant family members having already gathered parts of the information. For many, as it turns out, assembling their family tree has become an entertaining and usually rewarding experience. But for many, many more, it is not so. In a series entitled African American Lives, the first of two parts which was aired on PBS last Wednesday night, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the masterly teller of this different story. With compassion, humour and superior skill, Mr. Gates leads us to an enlightening experience. Surely these tales of economic migrations, harrowing family separations and discontinuity are only too familiar, yet here they acquire an existential dimension not usually found in history books. In this impressive documentary, the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg become models to demonstrate that a search of any African American’s ancestry is, at best, a startling, if not heroic endeavor. Thanks to the advancement of genetic sciences and genealogy however, this might be about to change. In the first episode of African American Lives, the stories of nine contemporary African Americans are traced to the nineteenth century, before emancipation. With the second episode to be aired next Wednesday, the excitement grows as it offers the promise of revelations that, for nine people at least, could bridge the crucial and appalling gap between two continents. It’s a sad enough truth that the ancestors of most African Americans never freely choose to immigrate to America. But, as this PBS series aptly demonstrates, their contemporaries are now being offered a small consolation. Finally, they may be given the extraordinary tools to learn, specifically, where it all happened, how it happened, and who they are.