In First Lady's Roots, a Common Path From Slavery

That headline pretty much says it all.

But today the New York Times has "breaking" news about First Lady Michelle Obama's "complex" path from slavery. "In the annals of American slavery," the Times story says, "this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason." That, of course, is the fact that her family line made it all the way from the "Big House" to the White House. Gasp!

Except for the last part, isn't this the same story of almost any and every African American? As I said, the headline on this story says it all. African Americans in this country, by their PC definition, have been uprooted from one gene pool and then chained to another. So is it really a pearl-clutching moment to learn that the black woman in the White House has white ancestry?

Aided by the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak, the Times reports that Melvinia Shields, an illiterate slave from South Carolina, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama. The circumstances of their relationship are unknown, although one researcher is quoted saying, "But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex."

This is when I immediately thought of my grandmother, Frenchie. On Christmas Day last year, my great-grandmother died at 100 years of age. Her mother was a woman named Sally Mae Ward, who was of Cherokee, African and white descent (we think). Sally Mae bore several children to a white man whose last name, we think, was English (or he may have been English). Anyway, when one of my grandmother's first cousins called after the funeral to ask about their grandfather (our unknown white man), Frenchie was enraged, "Don't ever ask me about that son of a . . ." She told me later that in her mind any 19th-century liaison between a white man and a black woman was that of a "master and slave." Even though slavery ended almost a generation before my great-grandmother was born.

The point is, nearly every African American has a story like my great-great-grandmother's. Unearthing our American roots is important, sure. But it's rarely breaking news. And if we're really going to call them our American roots (sans hyphens), then why does all this heavy digging only apply to the famous blacks in this country? Why isn't anyone curious about who might have owned Michelle Obama's people? Probably because the story of the former slave's children's children's children making it to the biggest big house in the land is just better business.