To Dine For with Kate Sullivan

KATE SULLIVAN: It is a spectacular day in Santa Monica, and a little Italian restaurant is buzzing with excitement.

This afternoon, the guest that's arriving is a respected Harvard professor.

KATE: Dr. Gates, I presume.

KATE: Dr. Henry Louis Gates, professor, literary critic, and host of Finding Your Roots is taking me to one of his favorite restaurants to eat what he loves and find out why he loves it.

DR. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR: Mhmm, that's good.

KATE: It's delicious.

DR. GATES: Mm-hmm.

KATE: And then, we're diving into his trailblazing journey in academia.

And how a midnight trip to the bathroom inspired a revolutionary program.

DR. GATES: I stood there, Mary Catherine, tears running down my face, in the bathroom.

All of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning, I had an epiphany.

KATE: Finding Your Roots is a journey to discover who we really are and what do we do when we find it.

DR. GATES: That's the, the magic of genetics.

You actually inherit some DNA from every ancestor on your family tree back a couple hundred years.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: And that is astonishing.

KATE: What's better in life than a bottle of wine, great food and an amazing conversation?

My name is Kate Sullivan and I am the host of To Dine For .

I'm a journalist, a foodie, a traveler, with an appetite for the stories of people who are hungry for more.

Dreamers.

Visionaries.

Artists.

Those who hustle hard in the direction they love.

I travel with them to their favorite restaurant, to hear how they did it.

This show is a toast to them and their American dream.

To Dine For with Kate Sullivan is made possible by... ANNOUNCER: At American National, we honor the "do"-ers and the dreamers: the people who get things done and keep the world moving.

Our local agents are honored to serve your community because it's their community too.

American National.

KATE: Today, I'm in Santa Monica, California on my way into Italian restaurant, Caff Delfini.

I am meeting a lifelong academic, a Harvard professor, who has been on a journey to find out where we're from and why it matters.

I can't wait for you to meet Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

Dr. Gates, I presume.

DR. GATES: Mary Catherine.

[laughs] KATE: It is so wonderful to meet you.

DR. GATES: You are as Catholic as a Pope.

[laughs] KATE: I am thrilled to meet you and I can't wait to dine.

DR. GATES: Mary Catherine, Elizabeth, and Notre Dame.

KATE: You did your research.

DR. GATES: I did.

KATE: I would expect nothing less.

KATE: Dr. Gates has done his homework on me, and I have done my homework on him.

He is a trailblazing academic turned television host who has a story to tell.

And today, at this charming and cozy Italian restaurant, I am going to hear the full story of how a professor and literary critic has become a conduit to understanding our genealogy and why it is so important.

But first, we must eat.

And there's no place better for authentic Italian cuisine than Caff Delfini, where they've been dishing up classics for more than 30 years.

RICCARDO MENICHETTI: This is an authentic Italian restaurant, a hundred percent authentic.

We don't do anything fancy, you know, we are with the, with the tradition, meaning that we do our carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, tortellini pomodoro, these kind of things, but at their best.

KATE: And, we're about to enjoy some of those authentic dishes today, starting with lightly fried calamari that Henry requested, especially for our meal.

Plus, crispy garlic bread, followed by a Roman classic cacio e pepe made with Pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper.

A simple pasta dish that is incredibly hard to master.

RICCARDO: Like any simple recipe, it needs to be done perfectly.

So to make that sauce and having it with the special flavor like it is with the Pecorino Romano and the pepper, it's all about timing and it's all about flavors.

KATE: Riccardo Menichetti, one of Caff Delfini's new co-owners, says the food is just part of the experience here.

From its laid back ambiance to the cozy layout to the artwork hanging on the walls, each element compliments the others to keep this restaurant humming.

RICCARDO: It's like a showroom, right?

We use the restaurant to show and to display arts, and we change that every like six, nine months with different artists and different feeling, different vibe, different colors, so that even the restaurant is kind of changing, but not too much.

KATE: The feeling of home coupled with delicious food and genial hosts, keeps Henry coming back to Caff Delfini, especially when he's on the road working on one of his many projects.

You know, you could have chosen anywhere.

Why did you choose Caff Delfini?

DR. GATES: We're out here filming and our AirBnB's in Pacific Palisades.

KATE: Okay.

DR. GATES: So I wanted a place close.

That I really liked.

I love Italian food.

I love these guys.

So here we are.

KATE: Sometimes it's not about the food, but it's how a restaurant makes you feel.

DR. GATES: Mm-Hmm.

KATE: And whether you're comfortable and whether you can really be yourself.

DR. GATES: I'm from a small town and...

Thanks.

KATE: Thank you.

DR. GATES: Irish-Italian paper mill town, and I'm just a little homely country boy.

And uh, I like regularity.

KATE: Yes, consistency.

DR. GATES: If something tastes good, then I go back for it.

KATE: You're a loyalist.

DR. GATES: I am.

KATE: You grew up in West Virginia.

DR. GATES: Piedmont, West Virginia.

Eastern West Virginia.

Halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington in the Allegheny Mountains on the Potomac River, and my family has lived there on both my father's side and my mother's side for 200 years.

KATE: Ooh, talking about finding your roots.

DR. GATES: In a 30 mile radius.

My fourth great grandparents who were uh, three sets of fourth great grandparents were free by 1823.

And you know, 90% of the members of the Black community were not free until the end of the Civil War, but they were free by 1823 and they all lived in the same county, Hardy County, Virginia, now West Virginia, 30 miles from where I was born.

KATE: Mm.

DR. GATES: That's highly unusual for anybody, you can't think of a person who has a similar amount of stability and, uh, genealogical continuity, I don't think.

KATE: And that set up the stage for what would be your career.

However, I'm just wondering, when you're in high school in West Virginia, who did you wanna be and what did you wanna do?

DR. GATES: Look, and for my mother in heaven, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and a medical doctor.

[Kate laughs] DR. GATES: Being a doctor is as close to God as you could get.

The idea that I would get a BA in history and a PhD in English, it was just a joke, you know, not even possible.

Um, I was going to be a doctor.

KATE: And what were the unwritten rules of your mom and dad?

Like what did it mean being a child in their household?

DR. GATES: Well, one of the, the, um, benefits was, uh, warmth and security.

You know, I never had an insecure day.

KATE: Mm.

Wow, what a gift!

DR. GATES: Yeah.

That was the most amazing gift.

KATE: Ooh!

DR. GATES: Oh man, that's great!

Fried calamari, that's my, my special request!

KATE: Riccardo, this looks marvelous!

DR. GATES: Thank you!

KATE: Thank you!

KATE: Becoming a medical doctor was not in the cards for this Harvard professor, but many other prestigious titles were, including a history degree from Yale, a PhD in English from the University of Cambridge, and a host of honorary degrees.

Getting there was a winding road for a small town kid with big dreams, but it proved to be just the beginning of a storied career in the world of academia and beyond.

KATE: I think your story is really inspiring because, many kids when they're in college and trying to figure out the road, take many twists and turns.

DR. GATES: Mm-hmm.

KATE: And your story shows that.

Whether it's how you got to Yale, whether it's pre-med, then pre-law, then African-American studies and how that happened.

DR. GATES: Mm-hmm.

KATE: The road to finding out who you're meant to be is not linear.

DR. GATES: No.

KATE: Ooh, the cacio e pepe!

DR. GATES: Oh man, look at that.

It's just simple, and oh, with pepperoncini.

KATE: A star.

RICCARDO: Parmigiano Reggiano?

A little bit?

DR. GATES: Yeah, a little bit.

KATE: Of course, how can we say no?

DR. GATES: Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge.

KATE: Yes.

DR. GATES: So I was gonna be a doctor, but I wanted to be at the top universities of the world.

KATE: Yeah.

That was a goal and that was an intention, to be at the top universities of the world.

DR. GATES: Yes, because my father's first cousin a Gates, uh, had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949.

KATE: Right.

So it was possible to you- DR. GATES: So that was already in my family.

KATE: Yes!

Which is important!

'Cause you gotta see it and you gotta know, you gotta feel it.

DR. GATES: Right.

KATE: Henry continues that tradition of academic excellence to this day, teaching and running the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.

As a professor, literary critic, filmmaker, and author, he's penned several books and documentaries, including an anthology of African American literature that's helped create a reference point for other scholars.

But it was a letter from a geneticist at Howard University that would change the trajectory of his life and career.

DR. GATES: Let me see.

KATE: Mm!

DR. GATES: Mm, it's good!

KATE: It's delicious.

DR. GATES: Mm-hmm.

In the year 2000, I got a letter from a Black geneticist named Dr. Rick Kittles at Howard University, and he told me, "Dear Dr. Gates, have you ever seen Roots?"

And I think, what kind of idiot does this guy think I am?

KATE: Right, come on.

DR. GATES: He said, "We can now do what Alex Haley purported to do and attest to."

KATE: To find out your genealogy?

DR. GATES: He said, we can tell you what ethnic group, the old word was tribe, that you were descended from in Africa on your mother's, mother's, mother's line through mitochondrial DNA.

And this was, remember I had a science background anyway.

KATE: Right.

DR. GATES: So I was not science-phobic and I'd been all over my own genealogy since I was nine years old, because we knew we had a mysterious white, great-grandfather on the Gates line, and nobody knew who he was.

Right?

KATE: Interesting!

So there was a family mystery.

DR. GATES: Oh yeah!

So I took the test.

Right after that, I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and I'm in the bathroom, and all of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning, I had an epiphany that I could... do a TV show.

By this time, I'd started to make documentaries on PBS.

That I could get eight prominent African Americans, and I would trace their genealogy back to slavery, the abyss of slavery when all of our records disappear, it's a tomb.

And when they, at that point, I would swab their cheeks, do their DNA and see, tell 'em where they were from in Africa.

KATE: So this happened right after you had your own test done?

DR. GATES: Yes.

I stood there, Mary Catherine, tears running down my face in the bathroom.

KATE: And why, what was that emotion?

DR. GATES: 'Cause I knew it was gold.

I knew it was an epiphany.

I knew this was a brilliant idea.

But I didn't know if I could pull it off.

I had to raise $6 million.

And nobody, PBS wasn't giving me any money, nobody was giving me any money.

And I just, we, Black people say, ought to humble, you know, since this was my idea.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: And so I knew that I had to get some prominent Afr- two prominent African Americans.

The next day I called my friend, Quincy Jones, who had scored the music for Roots.

KATE: I, I just said, who you gonna get?

And you, here it is.

Quincy Jones.

DR. GATES: That's right.

Well, he had scored the music for Roots and had introduced me to Alex.

KATE: Okay, Alex Haley.

DR. GATES: And he really liked me and I liked him, so I figured that was an easy get.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: But I wanted Quincy because he's Quincy.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: But do you know who Quincy's best friend is?

KATE: No.

DR. GATES: Take a wild guess.

KATE: Mmmmm....Oprah?

DR. GATES: My girl!

[Laughs] Quincy has a mansion and one wing is just for Oprah.

It's a room, it's a suite, only Oprah can go.

KATE: I bet she loved that idea.

DR. GATES: I said, "Quincy, what if I could do for you what Alex did to himself, through analyzing your DNA?

Would you be in this series if I could raise the money?"

And you know what he said?

"Does it hurt?"

[laughs] The thing was, yes 'cause at the time they had to take blood.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: I go, "no."

And he said, "could you do that?"

And I go, "yeah" I've never got to.

And then I waited around for, you know, 60 seconds and I said, "Q, would you ask Oprah if she would be in?"

And he goes, "no."

That's how you keep your friends, by not hustling them.

So then he said, "listen, I'm gonna do you a favor," but I didn't think it was a favor.

He said, "I'm gonna give you Oprah's secret name and address."

And I go, "well, what am I supposed to do with that?"

KATE: So not her phone number, not her email, but her address.

DR. GATES: No, he said, "write her a snail mail letter."

KATE: Okay, I can see this.

DR. GATES: And you know, when I hung up, I wrote it all down.

I hung it up and I said, this is an idea that is not meant to happen because I just got the coldest brush off from my friend Quincy Jones.

And I went to bed and I go, I'm not gonna do this, it's just not gonna work.

KATE: But the power of a letter.

DR. GATES: The next day I woke up, I sat down, I wrote that snail mail letter.

I took it to Harvard Square Post Office.

Put it in myself.

Six months, come and go.

Nothing.

So I'm watching NFL on Sunday, grading papers, cell phone rings, it's Quincy.

And I go, "Q, what's up?"

And a deep woman's voice said, "Dr. Gates, this is Oprah Winfrey," and I went "thank you Jesus!"

KATE: Oh!

[Laugh] DR. GATES: And I knew, I tell my students, when I tell 'em the story, I knew the answer was yes.

Because rich people don't call you with bad news.

[laughs] KATE: She, she was in.

DR. GATES: She was in.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: And, um, that was called African American Lives.

I got my Yale classmate, Dr. Ben Carson.

KATE: Mm-hmm.

DR. GATES: Bishop T.D.

Jakes.

KATE: Yes.

DR. GATES: Chris Tucker.

Um, and it was a big hit.

And then PBS, all of a sudden, it got attention.

They asked me to do a sequel.

I got Maya Angelou, a very good friend of Oprah's, of mine.

Um, Morgan Freeman.

Anybody who plays God and the President, you gotta do his DNA.

Tina Turner!

I've had a crush on Tina Turner my whole life.

The ratings were off the charts.

So PBS called an emergency meeting.

They said, "we have something very delicate to talk to you about."

I go, "what's that?"

They go, "this show of yours, African American Lives it's too big for Black people.

[laugh] We have to let white people in on this.

[laughs] We have to let everybody in."

KATE: And how did you feel about that?

Because that was not your intention.

Your intention really was to study African American roots.

DR. GATES: That's my brand!

My brand is Black studies, right, Black people.

KATE: So, so what did you think?

DR. GATES: Well, I thought, can I change the brand?

KATE: And that's exactly what Henry Louis Gates did.

He expanded his brand to include all people, all ethnicities, races, religious affiliations, and created the PBS show Faces of America.

Some well-known faces included Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Malcolm Gladwell.

It's popularity soared, helping give birth to the critically acclaimed PBS series, Finding Your Roots, where Henry and his team take a deep dive into people's family history, tracing their lineages through genealogical research and DNA testing.

KATE: What is it like to sit there and unveil in front of someone their roots, and to see them in real time, process it, and have an epiphany?

DR. GATES: It's, um, indescribably moving.

It makes you feel that you're, uh, you're giving someone the greatest gift that they could ever receive, you're just a vehicle.

KATE: And what does it do for someone to understand where they came from?

DR. GATES: I think that knowing your ancestors is key to knowing yourself.

Stephen Hawking, is one of my heroes, a great physicist from my alma mater, the University of Cambridge, said, "It is the past that tells us who we are.

Without knowledge of the past, we have no identity."

And I think that's true.

He was talking about the universe and black holes, and something that happened 8 billion years ago, but I think it's true for Mary Catherine and Henry Louis as well, the biggest misconception there.

I thought only Black people, because of the heinous nature of slavery, that only Black people were ignorant of their family tree.

KATE: Really?

DR. GATES: Frederick Douglass in 1855 wrote, uh, famously that "genealogical trees did not grow into slavery."

But you know what?

Nobody, now I've done hundreds of people, they sit across from me just like you, I say, "how much do you know about your family?"

And they go, "well, my grandparents..." And that's it.

KATE: But what did it do for you to find out who you are?

DR. GATES: Oh, well, first of all, when I'm on this side of the table, it makes me feel like Santa Claus.

When I'm on that side of the table, the receiving end, my father looked white.

He could have passed.

My grandfather was so white, he looked like, we called him "Casper" behind his back [laugh].

But to find out that, if we had an ideally populated family tree of mine going back 500 years, half the people on that tree would be white, half the people on that tree would be Black.

KATE: Mm.

DR. GATES: I was raised knowing that my great-grandfather was a white man.

Um, and when they did the first DNA test, Y-DNA, goes straight to Ireland.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: I have the U Nill haplotype.

I have identical Y-DNA with about 10% of the men in Dublin.

KATE: And not just Irish, you're, you're descendant of an Irish king, correct?

DR. GATES: That's right.

Niall of the Nine Hostages.

That fits my sense of myself.

That's what I'm talking about.

[Laughter] If you gotta be white, you might as well go to the big house, right?

KATE: But did it shock you that you were 50 percent- DR. GATES: Absolutely!

KATE: And 50 percent white?

DR. GATES: Yeah, the Chairman of the Department of African American Studies at Harvard is half a white man.

You know?

That's hilarious.

KATE: Yeah, it is and it isn't.

Because that's our country.

DR. GATES: Yeah, it is.

KATE: We're all, we are a true, no one really knows unless they do this work exactly what's in their ancestry and they might be shocked.

DR. GATES: When I did, um, Morgan Freeman's family tree.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: We were able to, to establish through the paper trail that his great, great grandmother, an enslaved Black woman, had been impregnated by the white overseer on a plantation in Mississippi.

The only conclusion that, that's reasonable is that's it's rape.

Right?

Turns out, I said, "please turn the page."

I showed him their headstones.

They lived together after the Civil War as Common Law couple.

They had a zillion children together, and they were buried next to each other, all those years later.

They fell in love!

This is... KATE: Who would've thunk?

DR. GATES: Yeah, who've thunk it.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: This is a narrative that, all of our narratives about race in America are melodramatic.

They're Black and white.

There's no nuance.

But when you do these histories, you realize that they're nothing but nuance.

KATE: Finding the nuance is what Finding Your Roots is all about.

This year, they're celebrating their 10th season with influential personalities like Dionne Warwick, LaVar Burton, Bob Odenkirk, and Alanis Morissette and for the first time, non-celebrities will be included too.

But the effects of giving people sensitive information about their ancestry can be profound.

Something that Henry experienced firsthand with actress Kerry Washington, a complicated story that is still unfolding.

DR. GATES: She had reached out, asked to be in the series.

KATE: Oh!

DR. GATES: So I said, "oh, I'm so excited."

And she goes, "my parents don't want me to be in your show."

KATE: Mm, oh.

DR. GATES: "Because there's something embarrassing in our family, an aunt had an affair."

I go, "don't worry about it.

Connect me and I'll walk 'em through it, and it'll be fine."

She goes, "okay."

So her parents are very gracious and I'm on the phone with her parents.

And essentially as she tells the story, her father said, "if you give me a DNA test and Kerry a DNA test, if I'm not her biological father, would that be revealed?"

And I go, "Uh-huh."

[laughs] And they tell me that- KATE: And they've never told her.

DR. GATES: Mrs. Washington was artificially inseminated.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: And I just did.

Listen, what was my idea when I was standing in the bathroom?

I was just taking some Black people and telling 'em where they're from in Africa.

I had no idea, I'd be talking about who's your daddy and who's your mama?

KATE: Right.

DR. GATES: So they said, "we need your advice.

What should we do?"

And I said, "you need to hang up and call your daughter and arrange a meeting.

And you need to tell her."

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: And subsequently, they, they, they did tell her.

They were just gonna leave her a letter in the safe deposit box after they were gone, you know?

And she was gonna find that.

KATE: But this is such an interesting story for people all over this country, because this is a scenario many times over.

DR. GATES: Yeah.

KATE: You've done such a great job of articulating why it's important to find out who we are.

But what if you may never find out who you are?

You're adopted, and for whatever reason it's impossible, because there's a lot of people out there.

What would you say to someone who just won't be able to find out who their roots are?

DR. GATES: First of all, I would say keep looking, keep searching.

KATE: Okay.

DR. GATES: Spit in every test tube for every available database 'cause that's the only way you're gonna find out.

Because you find out right away, if you share long identical segments of DNA with anybody in this room, you have a common ancestor.

It is not random.

KATE: It's kind of frightening.

DR. GATES: It's scary.

KATE: It is a little scary.

DR. GATES: That's how all those people who were artificially inseminated,... KATE: Oh, I know.

DR. GATES: Who were born from one doctor, they found out they, they had 300, um, siblings.

KATE: And do you worry about the ethics of it all and how people are incarcerated because of this information and, and how they find that out?

DR. GATES: Well, we only use DNA companies that don't turn over, um, their results without the consent of the person who, whose DNA it is.

So I believe in, um, um, the seriousness of consent.

KATE: It's important to know who we are, but it's also important to realize we are not our ancestors in the sense that we have agency over our own life.

DR. GATES: Absolutely.

KATE: And no matter how unscrupulous or whatever ancestors did in the past, we have a chance to pave a new path.

DR. GATES: Yeah.

Genealogy is not destiny.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: Biology is not destiny.

KATE: You have spent your life, um, studying African American literature.

You're a literary critic, and now you have sort of championed people finding their roots.

What have you learned personally through that journey about who we are?

DR. GATES: Despite our apparent differences, we are exactly the same.

KATE: Mm-hmm.

DR. GATES: No matter what your religion, no matter what your color, we are all structured exactly alike.

DR. GATES: That we all have deep passions and loves and fears and anxieties and aspirations.

And, uh, we could be as equally mean and terrible to each other.

And we can be so remarkably generous to each other.

Whether it is in Nepal or in Nebraska, you know, [laughs].

It's just, people are just the same.

KATE: And it's also like, you can see your place in the cosmos.

Like, 'cause you, when you look at the, the genealogy, it's like you're able to expand in space and time to the whole universe.

DR. GATES: Yeah.

KATE: Right?

DR. GATES: Yeah.

KATE: And to see your place in it.

DR. GATES: 50,000 years ago, everybody was, all of our ancestors walking around in East Africa, right?

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: So we could say we're all related that way.

KATE: Right.

DR. GATES: But that is so abstract.

I mean, who cares?

KATE: Right.

DR. GATES: But to be able to name the people on your family tree back 500 years.

That's very powerful.

KATE: Yeah, it is.

DR. GATES: Because you have DNA from all those people.

KATE: Of course.

DR. GATES: So all these people are still living in your genome.

That's the, the magic of genetics.

You inherit, you actually inherit some DNA from, uh, every ancestor on your family tree back a couple hundred years and that is astonishing to think about.

KATE: It is astonishing.

DR. GATES: That they are there in your DNA.

KATE: Yeah.

DR. GATES: Still alive!

They say you die two times.

One: when your mortal life is over.

And two: when people stop saying your name.

And when you retrieve an ancestor and put her or him on your family tree, their name will always be, be said again.

When you frame it and you pass it on to the next gener, they'll never be lost again.

I think that's beautiful.

KATE: Yeah, I think that is so beautiful.

And I think it's beautiful that you had this idea specifically for African Americans, but the universe had a bigger idea.

DR. GATES: Yeah.

KATE: For you.

DR. GATES: It's true.

KATE: Yeah, it's true.

DR. GATES: The universe had bigger plans with it.

KATE: Thank you for this amazing meal and thank you for sharing your fascinating journey, really.

DR. GATES: Thank you.

KATE: It has been an absolute pleasure.

DR. GATES: Thank you.

KATE: It really has.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates is a study in ambition and intellect.

He is walking, talking, living history, not only his own story of growing up in West Virginia and blazing a trail in academia, but the African American stories he's worked a lifetime to excavate and amplify.

A professor of the highest order, who somewhere along the way, started to dedicate part of his journey to finding out where people come from, their lineage, and what a precious gift that has been for so many people and a testament to what the universe can do with one good idea and a man in search of his own American dream.

KATE: If you would like to know more about the guests, the restaurants, and the inspiring stories of success, please visit todinefortv.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram at To Dine For TV.

We also have a podcast, To Dine For the podcast is available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To Dine For with Kate Sullivan is made possible by... ANNOUNCER: At American National, we honor the "do"-ers and the dreamers: the people who get things done and keep the world moving.

Our local agents are honored to serve your community because it's their community too.

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