Kinfolks (27 page)

Close to hyperventilating, I calm myself with the words of Jeanette Carter, daughter of Sarah and A. P. Carter, who recorded the first country music songs in the 1920s: “All you can do is the best you can do. You can't do no more than that.”

One last circuit around the Kaaba on my Melungeon hajj, and I vow to call it quits. I drive up the Shenandoah Valley to Lynch-burg, Virginia, the hometown of Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, who blamed 9/11 on homosexuals, abortionists, feminists, pagans, and the ACLU because they offended God, who therefore allowed America's enemies “to give us probably what we deserve.” Lynchburg is also the former home for the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. A coincidence, or another of God's little jokes?

During the Civil War Lynchburg's huge tobacco warehouses served as hospitals for the mutilated troops from both sides, who were transported from the Virginia battlefields in crammed boxcars. Those who arrived already dead were packed in charcoal and shipped home to their parents. If their identities or their parents couldn't be located, they were buried in Lynchburg.

I visit this sad cemetery in the heart of town, which features row after row of identical stone tablets, arranged by state, sometimes carved with only regiment numbers. All my life I've been fighting the Civil War inside my own brain. Yet this is how the Civil War — or any war — ends: barren fields of blank headstones. Will my Melungeon struggle end similarly with my anonymous ancestors still lying unclaimed in unmarked graves, despite all my efforts to find and acknowledge them?

I drive across the James River and wind up a road to the bluff on which the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded sits. Now named the Central Virginia Training Center, it houses five hundred mentally handicapped patients in several handsome red-brick Colonial Revival buildings. These occupy 350 well-groomed acres that used to be a working farm run by the inmates.

I arrive at a building that was constructed in 1910 to house the first one hundred epileptics, assembled here from Virginia's mental hospitals. As I park alongside the nearby infirmary, I remember a Helen Keller quote featured on the Training Center Web site: “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.” Although the sun is beating through my windshield, I can't help but see the shadow that drapes over this infirmary like a shroud.

In 1913, the Virginia Colony for Epileptics became the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. By 1926, there were 511 epileptics of both sexes and 334 “feebleminded,” all women. Two were a mother and daughter, Emma and Carrie Buck.

Carrie, being illegitimate, had been taken from Emma and placed in foster care in Charlottesville. When a nephew of her foster parents raped her at age seventeen, she became pregnant. Her foster parents committed her to the Virginia Colony, where she was at last reunited with her mother. Carrie's resulting daughter, Valerie, was judged “feebleminded” at seven months and was placed with another foster family.

I try to imagine how I'd have felt if some official had taken Sara away from me and entrusted her to strangers — especially if I myself had been denied my own mother and then raped while in the care of her replacement. Or how I'd feel to have someone declare Zachary “feebleminded” and confiscate him. I might very well strangle such a person with my bare hands.

Next, the state of Virginia passed a law mandating sterilization of the “feebleminded.” Carrie Buck became the test case. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in support of Virginia's law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in the majority opinion in 1927, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will, and without the consent of her mother, inside the building I'm looking at, a redbrick structure with white wooden two-story porches out front. Carrie's sterilization opened the floodgates. Four thousand more were performed in this building on people the superintendent of the Virginia Colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, called the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Many were told they were receiving appendectomies. Some didn't learn the truth until many years later, after repeated failures to conceive. The last mandatory sterilizations in Virginia were performed in 1972.

During this period, an additional 4,300 were sterilized elsewhere in Virginia. Fifty-two thousand more were sterilized in twenty-seven other states — 20,000 in California alone. At the Nuremberg trials, the chief Nazi eugenicists, who engineered the sterilization of somewhere between 360,000 and 3.5 million people, defended themselves by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes's Supreme Court decision in the Carrie Buck case.

In 1985, Stephen Jay Gould investigated the third generation of Buck “imbeciles”— Carrie's daughter, Valerie. He found that, before dying at age eight of a childhood disease, she attended a public school, where she received superior marks for deportment and average ones for class work. Carrie herself had once made the honor roll at school.

The “feeblemindedness” of Carrie and her mother evidently consisted of their being impoverished unwed mothers, however unwillingly so on Carrie's part. But after seeing photos of the two, I've realized that there may have been an additional motive behind their incarcerations and Carrie's sterilization. Both appear partly Native American. The present-day Saponi Nation, whose original territory included what is now Lynchburg, maintains that they were descendants of a chief named John Buck.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, several pseudo-anthropological studies of rural mixed-race communities set out to prove that the genes for degenerate and criminal behavior descend from generation to generation. The Virginia Colony in Lynchburg appears to have expanded its patient base from epileptics to the “feebleminded” so that the children of such communities could be separated from what was seen as the bad influence of their families. They were fed, clothed, educated, taught a trade — and sterilized so that in time these mixed people would die out.

One of the Virginian eugenicists behind these plans was a medical doctor named Walter Plecker. In 1912, he became the first registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics in Richmond, which recorded births, marriages, and deaths in the state. He, along with others, worked behind the scenes to pass the mandatory sterilization law. This law was especially important to him because he maintained that it was “feebleminded” whites who were most prone to mate with Indians and Africans. “The worst forms of undesirables born amongst us are those whose parents are of different races,” he wrote.

In a tone bordering on hysteria, he continued that unless these “defective” people could be prevented from reproducing, “We have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.” He regarded the United States as “the last stronghold of the white race.”

Plecker also worked for passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law in 1924, along with such friends as John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. Until early in the twentieth century, a Virginian had been considered “colored” if he or she had one “colored” grandparent. Even the Nazis were more lenient in their definitions, designating Germans as fully Jewish only if they had at least three Jewish grandparents.

But in 1919, the Virginia code was tightened to read, “Every person having one-sixteenth or more of negro blood shall be deemed a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more of Indian blood shall be deemed an Indian.” How it could take only one-sixteenth of a certain heritage to make one person a Negro, whereas one-fourth of another heritage made someone else Indian, remained unclarified.

In 1924, the so-called one-drop rule, officially the Virginia Racial Integrity Law, tightened the requirements for whiteness even further: “The term ‘white person' shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian, but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.”

This last provision allowing those who were one-sixteenth or less Indian to be white was for the benefit of the some 20,000 descendants of Pocahontas who were scions of the First Families of Virginia — the Jeffersons, Lees, Randolphs, et al. Their proclaiming themselves Indian while the “one-drop rule” was being implemented in their home state was not unlike Marie Antoinette's donning her shepherdess costume prior to the French Revolution.

To make matters even more mind-numbing, the different southern states had different standards for determining race. In South Carolina at this same time, for example, anyone with one black ancestor five generations back was legally black, regardless of physical appearance. In Missouri, Mississippi, and Florida, a “colored” person was anyone with one-eighth or more Negro blood. Meanwhile, in South America, one drop of European blood made someone European.

But the passage of bills and their actual implementation are two different matters. In reality, many Virginians, especially those in the mountains, had no idea whether or not their ancestry included Indians and Africans. Illiteracy was rampant, and lives were short and focused on survival.

History books label the years 1880 to 1925 the Great Age of Passing. Two-thirds of the southerners listed as “mulatto” on the federal censuses lived in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Those who looked white enough struggled to become officially white, whatever their actual ancestry, in order to sidestep the Jim Crow laws passed around the turn of the century. Those remaining under the most dire threat from the new laws were those with darker skin or telltale surnames that had been listed as “mulatto” or FPC on the censuses from the mid-nineteenth century.

But Walter Plecker's efforts to stem the destruction of civilization didn't end with the passage of these restrictive bills. He began a program to remove the corpses of people he considered nonwhite from white cemeteries. In his twisted logic, he reasoned that since all the Indian tribes in Virginia had intermarried with Negroes (in his unsubstantiated opinion), and since one drop of Negro blood now made a person Negro, there were no longer any Indians left in Virginia. Therefore, anyone claiming to be Indian was, in effect, acknowledging African ancestry and then trying to hide behind Pocahontas in order to disguise it. With reasoning like this at the highest levels of government, it's a wonder the entire population of Virginia didn't become feebleminded as they tried to make sense of it.

“Like rats when you're not watching,” Plecker explained, “they have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white as racial classification.” His mission became to expose these “rats.” What the Ku Klux Klan, resuscitated in 1915, was accomplishing in other southern states via lynching, Plecker was determined to accomplish in Virginia via the more genteel tools of documentary genocide and mandatory sterilization.

Like the Grinch stealing Christmas, Plecker notified a white woman in Pennsylvania that the man her daughter was about to marry had black blood. He also wrote to a new mother, “You will have to … see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia. It is a horrible thing.”

When someone finally challenged him about one such letter, he wrote to his pal John Powell, “I have been doing a good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could never be legally sustained.”

Not content to limit his pathology to Virginia, Plecker gave the keynote speech at the Third International Conference on Eugenics in New York in 1932, which was attended by Ernst Rudin, a German who eleven months later helped write Hitler's new eugenics law.

Dr. J. H. Bell, the new superintendent of the Virginia Colony, wrote in 1933, “The fact that a great state like the German Republic … has in its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this idea.”

Of the birth and marriage records Plecker assembled in Virginia, he wrote proudly in 1943, “Hitler's genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.” In that same year, Plecker sent a letter to all the health and educational professionals in Virginia warning that those he called “mongrels” were moving from county to county, trying to change their racial designation from colored to Indian or white as they went. He listed their surnames by county. All the traditional Melungeon names appear on the list, as do some Melungeon-related names, including four in my grandparents' families.

The last vestiges of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law weren't overturned until 1975. In 2002, Governor Mark Warner and the Virginia General Assembly apologized to the 8,300 victims of the eugenic sterilization policy. Some who are still living said that although the apology was very nice, it was a case of too little, too late.

My grandparents lived a hundred and fifty miles from Lynchburg when my grandfather was practicing medicine on horseback. They left Virginia for Tennessee in 1918 when my father was three years old. Were they aware of Plecker's bureaucratic noose tightening around the necks of ethnically mixed people? As a doctor and a schoolteacher, they'd have received memos from the Bureau of Vital Statistics about its activities. Did they feel personally threatened? Did they feel alarmed for their friends and neighbors, their relatives and in-laws? Could that be why my grandmother, although ostensibly proud of her Virginia heritage, rarely went back there from Tennessee? Could this be why we never met, or even saw photos of, my grandparents' relatives? Did my grandparents move to Tennessee because it was more racially relaxed, having hosted many abolitionists before the Civil War and many Unionists during it — and never succumbing to the fad of forcibly sterilizing its citizens? Or did they simply see an opportunity for advancement when J. Fred Johnson and George Eastman invited my grandfather across the border to open a hospital in Kingsport?