It had always seemed strange to me that an Irishman could show up at Ellis Island in 1912, or a Hungarian Jewish family could show up in 1940, or an Afrikaner could arrive in 2006, and before the next census was taken they could all just check white and the newspaper would call them, simply, Americans. But somehow, some relative of mine could be kidnapped from Africa four hundred years ago, kept in America for all that time, stripped of name and gods and family, forced to work and build the land, and I—who had hardly been to Oklahoma, let alone to Africa—was given this hyphenated title, this
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