Family history by a hair

GENEALOGY, writes Edward Ball, is “practiced by millions of middle-aged and middle-class Americans, for whom it has traditionally been a way to snatch a bit of glory or a helping of fantasy from the past.” The pursuit of “good genes,” posits the author, can be nothing more complicated than the pursuit of purity, or whiteness. Ball is perfectly aware that vast swaths of contemporary middle-class Americans build family trees in order to figure out where they came from before Ellis Island -- or some version thereof -- but he is a Southern boy of genteel background and particularly sensitive to the pursuit of glory. He’s stuck on the point. “[A]s a child, I knew we were white and pure,” he writes. “It was like a good smell.”

“The Genetic Strand,” Ball’s second book about his family, is, like the first one, a challenge to its mythology and part of his ongoing mission to finally dissipate the smell. His obsession with his roots was clear in his 1998 National Book Award-winning “Slaves in the Family,” which traced the legacy of slave-owning in his family and drew a parallel lineage -- of families born of illegitimate unions between owner and slave, the mixed-race offspring of his great uncles. The insinuations were provocative: The black branch of the family turned out to be more charismatic, talented, relevant; the very fact of their existence made his own family much more interesting. In his new book, he takes these issues to a deeper level -- a molecular level.

Part “scientific travelogue” and part family history, “The Genetic Strand” is about a small collection of ancient hair that Ball found hidden away in the secret drawer of a battered desk that once belonged to his father’s family. The nine locks of hair, each wrapped in a tiny package and labeled with the name and date of a distant relative (the oldest, dating to 1824, belonged to Ball’s father’s great-grandfather), become a morbid temptation, rather too alluring for the designated family historian to ignore. Struck by the notion of being physically related to these relics, Ball conceives of an amateur genetics project. He will have the hair analyzed, exploring this new and sophisticated science for its applications to heredity, while counting on his extensive knowledge of his family’s history to put the science in context.

Hair is fragile, and its DNA, on samples this old, is frequently too decrepit to study -- one early obstacle to Ball’s research. Analysis on hair is also limited to the maternal lineage, because of the type of DNA -- mitochondrial -- that can be extracted from it. After extraction, the DNA is sequenced, meaning that the order of its nucleotides is detailed. Those sequences are read, and variations in clusters that determine traits and ancestry are identified. The information is interpreted and cross-checked against the huge genetic databanks that constitute what we know about the molecular order of the living world. For the racial typing Ball is interested in, patterns or common variations are assembled into “haplogroups,” tracing populations, rather than races, as we typically think of race, to their geographical origins.

Ball pursues a number of analytical approaches with a variety of scientific institutions -- including a Canadian “wildlife forensics” laboratory and an African heritage center in Washington, D.C. Prestigious geneticists -- pioneers in highly specialized research -- function as commentators and umpires throughout the process. Ball is roaming, discursive, seemingly intentionally inefficient in his quest, in an effort to provide his readers with an expansive landscape of the esoteric, jargon-laden field.

Ultimately dissatisfied with the scant information available from the few viable strands of DNA extracted from the hair, Ball has a genetic test done on himself (opting for the more comprehensive “buccal swab” instead of hair analysis) and also on a first cousin. He rounds out his research by ordering toxicity analysis on several of the hair samples, which proves interesting. No opiates are found, although he was convinced there would be, extract of opium being the balm of choice among the upper classes in 19th century America. But there were extraordinarily high levels of lead in two of his ancestors, one of whom nonetheless lived to a ripe old age.

In fact, there is rather little information to be gleaned from his genetic inheritance; he fills in most of the blanks with the straightforward sort of historical research he’d conducted for “Slaves in the Family.” The bulk of his “investigation” is into a methodology to some extent of his own invention. The project is a bizarre kind of flop.

As in his earlier book, Ball is intent on challenging his family’s narrative of “purity” and honor: “A case could be made that some of us in the family . . . have at times been mesmerized by our so-called pedigree (a word once used without irony in the South). Our whiteness is a subject so settled that to question it is preposterous.” Yet that preposterous question is at the heart of his inquiry. He’s intrigued when one of his analyses turns up the possibility that he’s 13% Native American. He spends chapters exploring the various permutations of “intragression” (“a euphemism in genetics for blending of populations, what others call interracial mixing”) that he suspects of complicating his genetic makeup. And he does succeed in settling the lingering mystery of whether his father’s grandmother had West African ancestors (apparently not).

Ball’s prose is mostly workmanlike. Although the geneticists and researchers are central to the book, his character sketches of them are for the most part pale. And the science is hard going (although explaining genetics to this reviewer might be a task better suited to a magician than a writer). On the other hand, the historical writing is fine, as are the excursions into reflective essay. Indeed, Ball almost does his own book a disservice in his fascinating conclusion. All at once, his amateur family genealogy project, with its ornate methodology, seems too paltry a subject to dramatize such a critical kind of knowledge. Correcting the revisionism of a vainglorious family of white Southerners seems the quaintest of goals, in light of the enormously ambitious agenda of genetics: the Human Genome Project, the atlas of evolution, the cure for cancer, the standard by which the convicted are to be exonerated or executed.

“The gap in empiricism,” he writes, “is at the center, in the author. Science makes no place, either in observation or results, for fantasy and desire. Reasoned observation is the most rare waking state, and yet it’s the only mind that science claims to possess.” More pointedly, “It’s regrettable that molecular biology can see messages where none are written, as though it’s hungry for status and thinks it can deliver a truth quota. . . . Genetics can’t support the desires people bring to it, yet the science of genes thinks it’s good public relations to portray itself as omniscient.”

Ball has created a new history for himself, one both more complete than what he had before and less sullied by speculation. But what he discovers is that history, as well as science, is not all that different from “whiteness.” It is provisional, filled with guesswork and individual interpretation. It changes through the years; evidence decays, narrators embellish, and what emerges exists only to be toppled, or at least questioned, by the generation that follows.