The Family Tree

For most of his life, Wilson Coleman had not given his surname a second thought. In Puerto Plata, where he grew up, it was simply his name, pronounced the Spanish way, with the stress on the last syllable, and there were Colemans enough on his street that nobody found it strange. It was only in Boston, where he had been driving a taxi for eleven years, that passengers began to ask. "Coleman?" they would say, reading the license on the back of his seat. "That's not a Spanish name. Where's that from?" Wilson would shrug. "From my father," he would say. "And his father."

It was his daughter, Yaneisy, who finally made him find out. She was fourteen and doing a school project on family history, and she came home one evening and announced that her teacher had told her that a surname was a kind of map. "So where does ours go?" she asked. Wilson, who had just finished a twelve-hour shift, said he would look into it. He meant it as a way of ending the conversation. It turned out to be the beginning of one that would last nearly a year.

He started with what he knew. His grandmother, who had died when he was nine, used to sit on the porch in the evenings and say that the family had come from the sea. She would never explain what she meant. On Sundays she would sing hymns in a language that, he realized only now, must have been English, although she spoke no other word of it. As a boy he had assumed it was some kind of church language, like Latin. Nobody had ever told him otherwise.

On his days off, Wilson began going to the public library in Copley Square, where a volunteer named Harold showed him how to search old records. Dominican civil registers took him back to the 1880s, to a great-great-grandfather called Samuel Coleman, a carpenter in Puerto Plata. Before that, the trail went cold. Harold, who had been tracing his own Irish ancestors for thirty years, was unsurprised. "This is where most people give up," he said cheerfully. "Have you ever heard of the emigration of 1824?"

Wilson had not. Harold explained what historians have pieced together. In the mid-1820s, the government in Port-au-Prince, which then ruled the whole island, invited free Black Americans to settle there, offering land and passage. Several thousand are thought to have accepted, sailing mostly from Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Many soon returned, disappointed, but others stayed, and some of those settled on the north coast, around Samana and Puerto Plata. Their descendants, Harold said, had kept English surnames, Protestant churches and, in some places, English hymns, for generations.

Wilson drove home that night without turning on the radio. He was thinking about his grandmother on the porch, singing in a language she did not speak.

The records from that period were patchy, and for weeks they found nothing. Then Harold found an 1820 census return from Philadelphia. In those years, only the head of each household was listed by name; the others were merely counted. But there, in faded handwriting, under a heading for free colored persons, was an entry for one Isaac Coleman, with a wife and three children. It was a common name, Harold warned. It might be nobody at all.

The answer came from Puerto Plata. Wilson called his cousin Altagracia, who still lived in the old family house, and asked whether anything had been kept from those days. She was silent for a moment. Then she said that there was a Bible in a box under their grandmother's bed, and that nobody had opened it in thirty years because it was in English. She sent him photographs the next morning. On the inside cover, in brown ink, someone had written a list of names and dates. The first line read: Isaac Coleman, born Philadelphia 1791. Below it: Sailed with wife and children, the brig Charlotte, September 1824.

Wilson read the inscription so many times that he could recite it with his eyes closed. Isaac had been thirty-three when he left. He had been a free man in a country where freedom for a Black man was fragile, and he had sailed south with his family towards an island he had never seen and a life he could only imagine. He could not have known that he would never see Philadelphia again, or that his great-great-great-great-grandson would end up driving a taxi some three hundred miles from where he had started. He was to die in Puerto Plata in 1850, according to the next line, and his son was to become the carpenter Samuel's father.

Yaneisy's project got the highest mark in her class. She called it The Map in Our Name, and it included a copy of the census entry, the photographs of the Bible and a drawing of a ship that looked, Wilson thought, much too cheerful. Her teacher asked whether Wilson would come in and talk to the class, and to his own surprise he said yes.

In the spring, he and Yaneisy drove down to Philadelphia. They did not find Isaac's house; the street had changed beyond recognition, and the records did not say exactly where he had lived. But they walked along the river, near where the ships would have left, and stood there for a while in the wind. "So we did come from the sea," Yaneisy said. Wilson nodded. It was, he thought, exactly what his grandmother would have said.

These days, when a passenger reads his license and asks where Coleman is from, Wilson no longer shrugs. He tells them. It takes about twenty minutes, which, in Boston traffic, is usually just long enough.