Kinfolks
Authors: Lisa Alther
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Lisa Alther
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Doris Ulmann photograph
TwoMelungeon Boys
from
The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann
(Penland, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1971). Used with permission of the Doris Ulmann Foundation, Berea College, Kentucky.
Frontispiece: author's family tree, courtesy of author
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9 8 76 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-176-4
For my parents,
John Shelton and Alice Greene Reed,
and my grandparents,
William Henry and Hattie Elizabeth Reed,
with gratitude for all the love
and all the genes
Mine heritage
is
unto me
as
a speckled bird,
the birds round about
are
against her;
come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field,
come to devour.
âJeremiah 12:9
M
ANY PEOPLE ARE BORN
believing they know who they are. They're Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don't share that enviable luxury.
My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.
In my life since, I've often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I'm one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.
But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I've ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.
I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I'd inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.
Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.
Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They're said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.
Growing up, I'd heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent's showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father's family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.
For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I'd learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others â all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.
In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.
I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers â and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I'd been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.
For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I'd finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere â and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world.
The Virginia Club
M
Y YOUNGER BROTHER BILL
is clutching his teddy bear, the noose still knotted around its neck. My older brother John and I sit on a carpeted step in the front hallway as the gray-haired babysitter with crooked brown teeth informs us that the Melungeons will get us for having hung the bear from the upstairs landing, just out of Bill's reach in the downstairs hall.
“What's the Melungeons?” I ask.
“The Melungeons has got six fingers on each hand,” she says. “They grab mean little chilrun and carry them off to their caves in the cliffs outside of town.”
John and I glance at each other uneasily.
When my parents get home from their tea dance at the country club, John and I wait for Bill to tell on us, but he doesn't. He's a good kid. The Melungeons won't be interested in him when they arrive.
In her silvery cocktail dress and the spike heels that make her look like a toe dancer, my mother is very glamorous. The top of her head comes to my father's chest. He's the tallest man we know. He claims he has race-horse ankles. He's madly in love with my mother and is always coming up with corny new ways to tell her so.
Tonight, right in front of the babysitter, he says, “Kids, isn't your mother just as pretty as a carnival queen at a county fair? If I put her in a pageant, she'd win the four-hundred-pound hog. But how would I get it home?”
Her face freezes halfway between a smile and a frown as she tries to decide if this is a compliment. She was a model at the University of Rochester. In my favorite photo, she's wearing a satin evening gown, standing inside a giant wine bottle, her black hair bobbed. But at home she resembles Harriet Nelson more than Loretta Young because she hates to buy clothes. My parents share a horror of spending money. Having grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, they say you never know when the next ax will fall.
Since my mother is from upstate New York, she doesn't gush like normal mothers. She used to teach high school English, so she's always coaching us to pronounce “cow” in one syllable. Our friends look at us as though we're lunatics whenever we say “cow” as she recommends. But our cousins in New York still mock our southern accents when we visit them in the summer. They say southerners are stupid. Our Tennessee playmates say Yankees are rude. But I've met plenty of rude southerners and stupid Yankees.
My mother's hobby is curling up in an armchair with the library books from which she's always quoting. When she makes us take naps so she can read in peace, she announces, “I'll but lie down and bleed awhile and then rise up to fight again.”
Once at supper, as she was carving a chicken, she looked up and said, “Children, always remember to stab low and pull up.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That way you sever the aorta.” She illustrated this in the air with her knife.
In the car on the way home from dropping off the babysitter, my father, a doctor, confirms that some babies in East Tennessee are born with extra fingers, which are usually removed at birth. He indicates on my hand the joints from which they can sprout.
Before turning out my light that night, I look under the bed and in the closet for lurking Melungeons. I'm often bad, and apparently the Melungeons, like Santa, have their ways of finding out. At least I know how to stab low and pull up.