Bantu Native

Growing up in the patrician township of Wyckoff, New Jersey in the 60s, I had the coolest bike, by far.

I just didn't KNOW it was the coolest.  Not all the time.  

My dad had bought the bike from the want ads, finding it at a cheap price at the house of some Wyckoffian across town somewhere.  

The bike was small and green.  We, my dad and I, added a cool red banana seat (the latest thing) and stingray handle bars.   Now it was the coolest bike, for sure. 

There was one glaring oddity about it, something that, in retrospect, I should have been way proud of.  I was KINDA proud, but also very self-conscious about my bike's red rubber tires.  My dad, as it turned out, had bought some kind of weird-sized European bike or something, and the only kind of tires you could get for it were, yes, red!  

So, I rode around the tree-lined streets of Wyckoff with a combination of pride in the uniqueness of my bike, but ready to cave instantly in self-conscious self-pity if anyone dared to COMMENT on them.  To make fun of them.  

In the mean time, I loved that bike.  I loved skidding around on it, doing (mildly) daredevil stunts on it.  

I invented one stunt that I especially liked.  It required a grassy hill, preferably a wet one.   So it was great to do if it had just rained or if the grassy hill in question had just been watered, say, by the automatic sprinklers.

I'd stop at the top of the hill to get ready, to steel myself for my little adventure.  

Then I'd zoom down the slippery wet slope, and at the bottom simultaneously turn the handle bars in one direction and jam on the brakes!  The little green bike with the red banana seat would stop, that is the front (red) tire stopped, but the whole rest of the bike, with me on it, slewed around in a delicious arc, slipping on the wet grass!  

I liked this move so much that not only did I share it with my brother, Roger, and our mutual friend, Chris, but I gave it a name.

(I had a short history of giving things wacky but to me perfectly appropriate names.  A throwing knife I had I named Corpuscle because I thought that that was the full version of the shortened word "corpse."  A stuffed lamb I carried at quite an advanced age became Kindling, a word that seemed cute to me, and which was somehow related to childhood, as in Kindergarten. . .)

My daredevil wet grass bike skid I called a Bantu Native.

I had no clear idea what a Bantu was, except that they came, I thought, from Africa.  But no matter.  The term had exactly the right dash and wildness.  

Fast forward fifty years.

A few weeks ago I got online the results of my dna analysis from Ancestry.com.

Back in January I had diligently spit in a small plastic tube and mailed the kit back to Ancestry.

Part of what you get back--and the first thing most people focus on--is a neat breakdown of the strains of your ethnicity based on your particular dna mixture.  They give you percentages, so you can say I am such-and-so percent this and such-and-so percent that.  

Having done some genealogy work over the years, I was pretty clear that a majority of my ancestry came, at least at one time, from Latvia and northwest Russia.  So I wasn't surprised when my Ancestry dna sample confirmed this.   The online figures told me I was 79% Eastern European and 12% from Finland and Northwest Russia.  

Those were the majority figures, with fractions of this and that from here and there in Europe: 2% from Ireland/Scotland/Wales, with Western Europe contributing 2% as well.

But further down the page was the inexplicable figure that astonished me, the figure that is not shared by any of my close dna matches, even when they share my Eastern European and Russian blood.  There in black-and-white from the laboratories at Ancestry.com was the confirmation of my 11-year old New Jersey upbringing, the figure that makes absolutely no sense and which thrills my heart.  There it is:

2%  Africa Southeastern Bantu.