Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Building a Mystery



Just a few days ago my little Godbrother Adjani was talking to his mother and trying to describe me to her because of something I had said or done. I can't remember. But he couldn't remember my name so I was "the half-Japanese guy who's always on the bike."

Nearly the second question that comes out of folks mouths when they meet me for the first time is whether or not I'm biracial. This has been going on ever since I was a kid.

So yesterday I go into the health food store to pick up something and when the guy scans my discount card he remarks that he's only met three Jaspers in his life, and the last one is an Asian guy here in Brooklyn who comes into the store regularly. Things that make you go hmmm...

A few weeks back I get a Facebook add by a sista with my last name and very similar features to my own. She actually reminds me of my little sister Annia all grown up. She tells me that her family, though seemingly directly unrelated to mine, happens to be from the same part of Virgina, Powhatan, as my mother's mother (Jasper is of course my father's family name). My Dad had been able to trace our family back to a plantation in Virginia. But as slaves end up with slavemaster's names, that was the dead end.

Then last night I get a Facebook add from an older woman with the last name Jasper in Texas who asks me if we might be related. Though miles away from the DC family I have who have moved down there, she says that she's rarely run into other people with the name either. The only guy outside of my clan that I had known with it was Chris Jasper from the group Isley Jasper Isley.

As my father's day of in-depth investigation are over, it's going to fall on me to unravel this particular mystery. Not unlike most African American, the struggle to assemble some sense of one's heritage is tricky to say the least. But if there is a link between myself and these two women I'm determined to find it. Knowing how determined I can be, I most likely will. But now I gotta go and get this money. Out.

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