Kinfolks (15 page)

The metal roof of the cabin is rusting, and the shutters have fallen off. The white paint on the siding has faded and is peeling. Woodpeckers have excavated large holes through the siding down to the logs beneath in their quest for insects. The porch where we used to sit and watch the pond is stacked with debris, and the torn screens are flapping in the breeze. Mats of wild grapevines and kudzu entangled in the trees along the dam have blocked the view down the valley. The yard is mown, but everything else has run riot. Tattered black plastic covers piles of rotting firewood.

Peeping through the windows, I can see that the cabin itself is packed to the rafters with junk — furniture, piles of newspapers and magazines, who knows what. A pathway has been cleared from room to room.

My old friend Melancholy lays his gnarled hand on my shoulder. It was a mistake to come back to this farm. It was a mistake even to return to this area. Almost everyone I used to know is dead or gone. Our cabin is a wreck. My only companions down here will be ghosts — the ghosts of friends and playmates, the ghosts of my grandparents, the ghosts of ancestors I never even met. I plop down in the grass and consider crying.

Then I remember one of my mother's favorite sayings: “I'll but lie down and bleed awhile and then rise up to fight again.”

Smiling reluctantly, I stand up and hike the hill to my car. From the top, this House of Usher doesn't look quite so dismal. The valley is green and full of grazing Holsteins. The North Carolina mountains still roll away to the horizon in a palette of blues and grays. I decide to persuade my father to ask the renter to leave so we can restore the pond and cabin to how they used to be. Never let it be said that I desert old friends.

Once classes at the university begin, I discover that reinforcements have arrived in the Valley of the Dead. Although almost no one from my past is still around, the area is full of delightful new people. Some have come from far away — Birmingham, Florida, New Orleans, New York, Paris, Detroit. But others were here all along. We just ran in different circles and didn't know each other.

Hoping to start my Melungeon project off on the right foot, I revisit Ground Zero — Sneedville. A sea change has occurred since I visited twenty-five years ago. Apparently the shift was already under way then, although not evident to outsiders. The first stirrings of Melungeon Pride began with the various liberation movements of the 1960s. In 1965, the Kentucky author Jesse Stuart published a novel called
Daughter of the Legend  
about a young lumberman from lowland Virginia who meets and marries a beautiful Melungeon woman from a fictionalized Newman's Ridge. (Stuart himself purportedly fell in love with a Melungeon woman in college but abandoned her because of opposition from his family. This novel may be his penance.)

Toward the end ofthat decade, advisers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and from Carson Newman College teamed up with some Sneedville citizens, including a school administrator and a Methodist minister, to explore ways to bring economic opportunities to Hancock County. They decided to stage an outdoor drama based on early Melungeon history called
Walk Toward the Sunset
.

Local workers built an amphitheater at the foot of Newman's Ridge. A specialist in such outdoor dramas was hired to write the script. Area Melungeons and college drama students enacted it under the direction of a theater professor. Despite opposition (including a bomb threat on opening night) from some residents who feared further ridicule, the drama was performed for six years. Although not ultimately a financial success due to lack of local lodging and dining facilities and a summer of gas rationing, the production did draw spectators from all over the United States. Most importantly, its version of Melungeon history instilled a new appreciation for their ancestry in Melungeon descendants themselves.

Atop Newman's Ridge, I discover a new church called the Coins Chapel built at the old cemetery containing the weathered tombstones of Mullinses, Gibsons, Collinses, and Goinses. I spot some attractive new houses along the main road. People appear to be returning to this ridge with its spectacular views. Or else those who never left have accrued enough money to upgrade their ancestral farmhouses.

Driving through Sneedville, I spot a young man on the main street wearing a T-shirt that reads “Proud to Be Melungeon.” The local sheriff is parked by a curb in his cruiser. His graying hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Apparently he hasn't watched
Easy Rider
and doesn't realize that he's adopted the wrong persona. As I leave town, I notice on the marquee of the Baptist church an announcement that the Jews for Jesus will be presenting a program that Sunday on Christ's role in Yom Kippur. Although this sounds worth sticking around for, I have to teach the next day, so I head home.

When I get to Kingsport, a homecoming parade for Dobyns-Bennett is under way on Broad Street. Parking, I climb out of my car to watch the band march past. The music and the formations are much more sophisticated now than when I played my family clarinet in the fourth row. It was all we could do to blare out Sousa marches while tromping straight ahead in wavering rows. But this band with its jazzy tunes and elaborate interweavings has been invited three times to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.

The flag swingers now wear diaphanous gowns instead of uniforms. Their flags are larger, the staffs longer, the fabric filmier, and the colors more vivid. Furthermore, their ranks have swollen from half a dozen to maybe forty or fifty. The builds of some flag swingers are closer to Miss Piggy's than to Farrah Fawcett's. Who says progress isn't possible? If only I weren't fifty-five years old, I might at last stand a chance in the auditions.

Another big difference is that some band members and flag swingers are African-American. The city schools were integrated shortly after I graduated. Among the crowds lining Broad Street are several young white women holding adorable babies with café au lait complexions. These infants are dressed in miniature Levis and Nikes or jumpers and Mary Janes. Everyone is admiring them and making faces at them to elicit smiles.

The social mixing that racists feared would accompany integration is happening. On the surface no one seems concerned. African-American students are included in all the school activities in at least a token fashion. But African-American boys dominate the sports teams and are charming and experienced in their dating behavior. Some choose white girlfriends, which can still incite resentment among the white boys and the black girls — and panic among some parents. A few of these girls end up having babies, whom the white grandparents sometimes raise (and dote on after their initial hysteria).

The parents of some students are also in mixed marriages — both white women with black men and vice versa. What was once a secret scandal has become unremarkable, if not yet commonplace.

I spot an open white BMW convertible next in line behind the band. Along the top of the back seat sit three attractive middle-aged women wearing cardboard Burger King crowns. A sign on the side of the car reads

HAS-BEEN HOMECOMING OUEENS
.

D-B tradition allows one crasher per parade, and apparently this float of aging beauties is it for this year.

I recognize one of the queens as a new friend named Ina. She's a principal at D-B. We grew up five miles apart, but we never knew each other until recently because we attended different schools. She lived along the railroad tracks that passed my grandparents' house, and she, too, used to marvel over the names painted on the boxcars.

I feel as though she's stepped out of the pages of
Kinflicks
because she was head majorette at her high school, the one who twirled the fire baton at halftime. She was also homecoming queen in 1961 and an attendant to both Miss Burly Tobacco and Miss Holston Electric. The difference between her and Ginny Babcock, the main character of my novel, is that Ina has a brain and a sense of humor.

I wave and she waves back, twisting her hand as Queen Elizabeth does to the plebeians on her parade route.

I start reading in English translation the endless Spanish chronicles of de Soto's 1539 expedition through La Florida. The most florid and least reliable of the four versions was written by Garcilasco de la Vega, the son of an Incan woman and a Spanish conquistador. His 1591 account is based on interviews with participants conducted nearly half a century after the actual events. He may be the first published Melungeon author in history.

De Soto's route has been hotly debated by southern towns wanting to erect commemorative plaques that will draw tourists. But most historians agree in sending him through what is now western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.

His four-year expedition started out with 200 mounted knights, 300 foot soldiers, 100 artisans and slaves, and 300 hogs. Like all conquistadors worthy of the name, they murdered, raped, and pillaged everywhere they went. They cut the noses and ears off Indians who objected, or they threw them to the war dogs for supper. They also seized native men as porters and native women as concubines and servants, chaining them together and forcing them onward.

By the time they reached the Mississippi River, they'd accumulated 500 native slaves, some no doubt pregnant, others toddlers sired by the soldiers. The Spaniards boarded rafts to descend the Mississippi to Mexico, abandoning most of these Indians and their half-Spanish progeny to the wilderness. An expedition that had departed from Spain as a sixteenth-century version of
Star Trek
degenerated into a Hispanic-American
Brady Bunch
.

En route to the Mississippi, some tried to escape from this dysfunctional caravan. As I read, I count ten deserters, half African slaves and half soldiers. Two were hunted down and dragged back. The motive for desertion in one case was depression; in another, illness. The rest were in love with native women.

Contrary to their bad press, natives often didn't mutilate and kill strangers. If the tribe needed a captive's skills, or if a family had lost a member and wanted a replacement, a captive could be adopted into a tribe with full rights.

Or a captive might be enslaved, as was a Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca, who was seized by Indians on the Texas coast when his exploring fleet sank. He escaped, and it took him seven years to hike to Mexico, during which time he collected an escort of several hundred Indians who revered him for the Catholic rituals he performed for them like an itinerant magician.

Another Spaniard named Juan Ortiz was captured by a tribe in what's now the Florida Panhandle when he was separated from a party that was searching for de Vaca's expedition. In what may have been the original for the fable of Pocahontas rescuing Captain John Smith from death at the hands of her tribe, Ortiz was being barbecued over a welcome fire when the chief's daughter pleaded successfully for his release. After twelve years, part slave and part free, Ortiz joined de Soto as a translator when the Spaniards passed near his village.

Around eight soldiers and slaves who escaped from de Soto's expedition weren't caught. It's possible some fathered children with the Indian women for whom they'd deserted. In addition, the swath cut through the southeast by de Soto's marauding troops would have been crawling with half-Spanish babies. To say nothing of the five hundred natives and their half-breed babies abandoned on the banks of the Mississippi.

Would the tribes have accepted these mixed children and their defiled mothers, or driven them out, or killed them? Would some of these children have survived to gang together and form their own tribe, either because they were outcasts (like the children with Vietnamese mothers and American soldier fathers) or because they'd inherited their Spanish fathers' sense of racial superiority?

Who can say? Not me, that's for sure. Historians of the Southeast have called the period from 1570 to 1670 both the Silent Century and the Great Black Hole because almost no written records exist of what was going on then. In any case, I can see no conclusive way to link de Soto's depredations to the Melungeons, whose historical stomping grounds were some sixty miles northwest of his nearest possible approach.

A requirement of my new teaching job is that I give four public lectures on topics of my choosing. One concerns the Melungeons. I go to get my hair done the afternoon before the evening lecture.

Diane shows me her new Chinese fighting fish, which is a vivid scarlet. He lives in a glass vase on her counter amid some floating greenery. She warms the side of the vase with her hairdryer to show me how he rubs up against the glass to feel the warmth. Then she holds a hand mirror up to the fish to show me how he bashes himself against the glass, trying to fight his own reflection. Although this seems an apt metaphor, I decide not to pursue it.

Once she settles down to her trimming, Diane starts complaining about her weight.

“You look fine to me,” I tell her. And she does. She's tall and lean with long legs.

“I used to be as big around as Twiggy,” she moans. “Now when I'm sitting, I look down and I think, ‘What's all this crap in my lap?'“

I suggest the Pizza Diet. I explain that you follow a standard diet like Atkins or Scarsdale, but you substitute a slice of pizza for any item on the recommended menus.

“Does it really work?” Diane asks hopefully.

“No. But neither do the others, and at least you're happy as the pounds accumulate.”

I tell her about my upcoming talk on the Melungeons, and she says her ancestors in southwest Virginia claimed Indian heritage. She wonders if they were Melungeons. She's about the fiftieth person in town to respond like this to my mentioning Melungeons.

Brent Kennedy also gives talks on the Melungeons around the area, and the venues are always jammed. He has a Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Tennessee and is a charismatic and entertaining speaker. If he wanted, he could probably start a cult. Instead, he begs his audiences to do their own research and draw their own conclusions and add them to his, in hopes that synergy can yield some answers to this Melungeon mystery. He's assembled an academic advisory committee of archaeologists, linguists, historians, etc., who are researching related topics.