The Librarian's Discovery: What DNA Can't Tell Us About Family

In a hushed library in Charleston, a journalist squinted at microfilm for hours, searching through the archaic handwriting of South Carolina's Free Negro Book. Then, in the 1851 edition, he found what he'd been looking for: Henry Fordham, his great-great-grandfather.

The shout that shattered the library's silence—"Yesssss!"—marked the end of a 22-year search for a single piece of truth. How did Harry, a boy sold into slavery, become Henry, a free man?

The $1,080 Transaction That Changed Everything

On March 27, 1829, wealthy white planter Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from Isabella Perman in Charleston—the port of entry for an estimated 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to America. Among them was a boy called Harry, bought for $1,080 total.

Harry spent 19 years as Fordham's property, proving quick-minded and skilled with his hands. He mastered blacksmithing at the Chalmers Street Forge, eventually becoming Fordham's right-hand man. In 1848, Fordham sold "a Negro man named Henry" to Otis Mills and Co. for $2,000—nearly double his original price.

The price increase tells its own story. Over two decades, Harry had developed valuable skills and experience. But every improvement in his abilities only increased his value as someone else's property.

The Man Who Bought Himself

Family lore held that Henry had somehow learned to read despite South Carolina's strict laws against educating the enslaved. He'd become deeply religious and heard the call to preach. Most remarkably, he'd eventually purchased his own freedom.

But when exactly had this happened? Journalist Eugene Robinson knew Henry was free by 1861—the Charleston census listed him as "f.p.c." (free person of color) and showed he already owned two wooden houses. Building such assets would have taken years.

The answer lay in the Free Negro Book, a yearly registry of free African Americans who'd paid the state's poll tax. Henry's name was absent from the 1850 edition but appeared in 1851. Somewhere in that single year, Harry the enslaved boy had become Henry the free man.

The Systematic Erasure of Memory

Robinson's search wasn't driven by mere curiosity. His family home in Orangeburg contained an extraordinary archive: the house built by Henry's son John Hammond Fordham in 1903, complete with documents, photographs, and rich oral history preserved in a cartoon-safe-looking vault.

But everything before Henry had vanished. Robinson describes feeling this absence "the way an amputee suffers phantom pain in a missing limb." His first African ancestor had a name, a clan, a language, a culture, a faith. All of it was deliberately stolen.

Slave owners in English colonies went to extraordinary lengths to sever captives' ties with their past and each other. When 20, 40, 60 Black bodies were crammed into slave quarters while maybe a dozen white family members lived in the big house, control depended on preventing the enslaved from recognizing their numerical strength.

What DNA Reveals—and Conceals

In 2022, Robinson submitted a DNA sample with modest expectations. The results showed 34 percent Nigerian, 20 percent Malian, and 26 percent other West African ancestry. The remaining 20 percent came mostly from Germany and Britain.

This matched typical African American genetics: studies show an average of 75-80 percent West African and 20-25 percent European ancestry. But DNA couldn't narrow things down meaningfully. Someday, perhaps, the collective human genome will be mapped sufficiently to trace ancestry to specific villages. Not yet.

More importantly, race has never been biological fact—it's always been social construct. This elaborate fiction gave Richard Fordham the "right" to purchase Robinson's great-great-grandfather and required Henry to purchase his own freedom.

The Fragments That Remain

Occasionally, glimpses of the stolen past surface. As a child, Robinson remembered visitors from Charleston speaking rapid-fire Gullah—a creole language blending English with West African vocabulary and grammar. If you've ever called peanuts "goobers," you're using a Gullah word from the Kikongo term nguba.

Gullah evolved as a lingua franca among enslaved Africans from different cultures, allowing communication across language barriers. Henry would have understood every word those visitors spoke.

Somewhere in Africa exists a place where Henry Fordham's ancestors lived for hundreds or thousands of years, where Robinson's distant relatives walk the streets today. That place exists, but he knows he'll never find it.

This article was adapted from Eugene Robinson's book, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America.