Kinfolks (7 page)

Sadly, Ruth sliced her finger on the edge of a page in the
Saturday Evening Post
and died of septicemia before seeing women enfranchised. The deciding ballot in favor of national suffrage for women was cast, coincidentally, by a young legislator from East Tennessee. The night before the vote in Nashville, this young man received a letter from his mother in the mountains saying that she counted on him to do right by her and his sisters. The next day he switched his vote from con to pro. Afterward he had to jump out a window to escape an enraged mob of opponents.

In emulation of this refreshing new role model, I volunteer as a birth control and abortion counselor at Planned Parenthood, having been permanently traumatized in high school by seeing the lives of some of my classmates destroyed by a lack of such services.

Wearing a gold enamel bracelet of Greatgrandma Pealer's that my mother has given me, I march on Washington at the drop of a hat. Each time I round the corner and start down Pennsylvania Avenue through the gauntlet of jeering men who hate everything I represent, I draw courage from the image of Inez Milholland in her white robes, riding a white horse, leading Greatgrandma Pealer and her cohorts through similar mobs in 1913.1 try to do my tiny bit to keep their ball rolling, but I avoid the
Saturday Evening Post
.

S
OON WEARIED BY THE TRAFFIC JAMS
of Gotham and inspired by the vision of surviving a nuclear attack with a home garden, Richard and I go back to the land in rural Vermont. Living in a crumbling brick farmhouse on a defunct dairy farm, we discover why our ancestors left the land in the first place. As the communes all around us turn on and tune out, I smoke beehives. As they smash monogamy, Richard faints while castrating baby roosters into capons.

When I become pregnant, I realize that I've finally found my calling: I'm an Earth Mother. Dressed in an Indian-print peasant dress, I attend natural childbirth classes, where I learn the breathing techniques that will allow my baby and me to escape poisoning from narcotics hawked by a drug industry motivated by greed.

One night I dream I'm holding our new baby. As I inspect its tiny hands, I discover an extra finger on each one. Although I wake up sweating, I laugh this off to Richard, explaining my childhood obsession with the Melungeons. But when I'm tired, I drive Richard mad itemizing the things that might go wrong. And I know them all from the dinner-table seminars with my father.

When we reach the Burlington hospital, the maternity wing is closed for renovations. My contractions are coming fast as we race for the other hospital. Its overcrowded maternity floor is packed with moaning mothers. I join them on my gurney of pain as a protesting Richard is led away to the fathers' waiting room.

It's hunting season, so many of the obstetricians are stalking deer in the snowy forests. The doctor on call has just had a heart attack during a delivery. Things don't look promising, but I keep panting as I've been taught, like a hound with heat stroke. Never in my wildest fantasies have I imagined such pain. The torments devised by the Marquis de Sade would seem like child's play to any woman who's ever been through labor.

Soon I'm begging for every drug ever invented, delighted at the prospect of single-handedly supporting the entire pharmaceutical industry. I pledge to purchase large blocks of their stock if I survive this ordeal, which looks increasingly unlikely.

This prognosis is confirmed when I hear a soft murmuring above me that includes the name of Jesus. A nun is standing over me telling her rosary beads.

Don't talk to me about Christ's suffering on the cross, I silently rage. Did Jesus push a bowling ball through the nozzle of a pastry bag with his stomach muscles? As I scowl at this presumed virgin in black, the next contraction hits me.

When it's over, I'm enchanted with the results — a tiny baby girl as exhausted as I am. Richard assures me she has no extra digits.

To occupy myself while my daughter Sara naps, I decide that either I can watch
As the World Turns
or I can write my own soap opera. I start my first novel. When Sara is awake, I put her in a backpack and we hike through the woods and pastures. Or she toddles around the yard tormenting the dog as I garden. Or she plays with pot lids on the kitchen floor as I can tomatoes or make raspberry jam.

While she sleeps, I write about a character who doesn't know who she is. She tries on roles as though they're Halloween costumes, but none fits — including Earth Motherhood.

My current problem is that I don't do drugs. When people pass joints at parties, I diligently inhale. But instead of collapsing into hysterical laughter over bad jokes, I fall asleep, confirming my lifelong reputation as a drag.

In addition, because of my occasional bouts of melancholy I'm leery of introducing outside chemicals into the already noxious soup my body can brew for itself. And I've read that magic mushrooms are sometimes dried apples injected with hog tranquilizer.

One of my father's favorite stories concerns his treating a dozen people for lockjaw one night at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York. They all attended a party at which they shot up heroin cut on a dusty mantel. The dust gave all these hip fun-seekers tetanus.

One afternoon I find myself leaving Sara with Richard and driving to the University of Vermont library to look up those six-fingered bogeymen of my youth — the Melungeons.

I learn that they were a group of olive-skinned people found living in what is now northeastern Tennessee by the early European settlers. In 1782, John Sevier reputedly found “white Indians” in that area. They themselves said they were “Portyghee.” But certain seemingly non-Portuguese surnames are associated with them — Collins, Mullins, Goins, Boiling, and Gibson being the most common. Most researchers source the name Melungeon to the French word
melange
, meaning “mixed.”

I picture my high school classmates who bore those surnames, but I can't recall any distinguishing characteristics. They had many different shades of eye, hair, and skin, and none had six fingers.

My sources divide into two hostile camps. The Romantics ascribe Melungeon origins to Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, to survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, to deserters from sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions, or to other exotic sources too far-fetched even for someone as gullible as myself. Normally I'll believe anything for a while, but wayward Phoenicians in Appalachia nudge me over the edge.

The Academics, however, insist that the Melungeons are merely one of some two hundred groups of “tri-racial isolates” numbering around 100,000 people, found throughout the southeastern United States as far west as Louisiana and as far north as New Jersey. These communities — with names like the Red-bones and the Brass Ankles, the Moors and the Turks — are said to be the product of early mixing on the frontier among natives, free blacks, escaped slaves, European fur traders, et al. Some were labeled “free persons of color” in census records.

In 1891, Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole visited some Melungeons and described them as “natural born rogues, close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly, and, to use their own word, sneaky.”

None of my sources mentions cave dwellings or extra fingers.

I persuade a couple of magazines to commission articles from me — one on snake handlers for the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
and another on the Melungeons for a London sociological journal called
New Society
. Both require me to go to Tennessee, where I've spent very little time since leaving for Wellesley. I've popped in for holidays every year or two. But this time I stay long enough to take a look around.

As I stroll the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, I realize that two kids I played Trail of Tears with are now dead — Martha from the car crash and Pam from lupus. They say the good die young, and my own continued existence gives me pause. Martha and Pam were definitely good people. But it's also possible they didn't have enough time in which to be bad.

Martha's brother Nie works for Tennessee Eastman. Stacy is a long-distance trucker based in Texas. Stanley flies a corporate jet out of Mississippi. It's hard for me to picture the funny little kid who helped my brother Bill burn down our tree house piloting a plane with other people's lives in his hands. But he no doubt feels equally skeptical about my being in charge of a small child.

The girls with whom I cruised Broad Street are now living all over the country. Marty works for Proctor and Gamble in Cleveland. One Jane is a city planner in New Orleans. Another Jane is an executive at ABC in New York. Barbara is a banker in Massachusetts. Portia is a real estate lawyer in Chicago. Susan is an investment analyst in New York.

My brother Bill is in medical school in New Orleans, and Michael is at Vanderbilt. After MIT and Columbia, John joined the sociology department at UNC Chapel Hill. He married his high school girlfriend, a gifted pianist with degrees from Duke and Harvard, and they have two young daughters. He's on the vestry of the Episcopal church. He wears handsome tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, and he smokes a pipe. He has clearly negotiated his identity crisis more successfully than I.

It would be stretching credibility to claim that we're all part of the Appalachian brain drain, but it's true that we've all left town. Even my grandmother has flown the coop. She's commandeered my retired Latin teacher to tour the Holy Land, sending my parents a photo of Miss Elmore and herself, both wearing Arab keffiyehs, sitting astride camels with a pyramid behind them and two sinister-looking Bedouin guides below.

I borrow one of my parents' cars and drive downtown for old times' sake. As I cruise a deserted Broad Street to the boarded-up train station, I discover that J. Fred's has been turned into a discount furniture store. The movie theaters are closed, one having become a cheerleading school. Many stores are vacant. Nobody is walking the streets. The Model City has become a ghost town. Everyone must be shopping at the new mall or eating at restaurants on the franchise strip along the highway. I realize that you really can't go home again, but only because home as you knew it no longer exists.

As I approach the church circle, I study the four red-brick churches with their white spires. Apart from my wedding day, I haven't been inside a church since I left for college. My grandmother was right to worry that once I left here, I'd never look back. But in order not to, I've performed an autolobotomy, renouncing religion, Republicans, and the Vietnam War. I help distraught women find abortions. My favorite members of my consciousness-raising group are lesbians, a category I didn't even know existed when I lived here. I've attended several of their gatherings, one a costume party at which I dressed as the Virgin Mary in a blue nightgown with a halo made from a foil-wrapped coat hanger. Their indifference to convention is refreshing.

But relics from my past keep surfacing like the bloated corpses of drowned swimmers. For instance, I always sit with my back to a wall because my mother used to tell us that Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead on the one day he played poker with his back to an open door. You can flee the forces that have formed you and join the Witness Protection Program in a foreign land. But like Mafia hit men, they just keep on coming, tracking you down despite your cleverest disguises.

As I drive up Watauga Street past the manor houses of the Yankee factory executives, I reflect that at least my parents still live in the house my grandparents built. Yet they've moved on, too. My father's nearing retirement. He's built a tennis court in the backyard and bought a ski chalet in North Carolina. After a lifetime of fourteen-hour workdays he takes time off now to ski, golf, and play tennis. He and my mother make annual ski trips to Colorado with my sister Jane.

Jane has turned into a striking young woman with her olive skin, dark auburn hair, and pale gray eyes that shift to blue or green depending on what she's wearing. She skis on the ski patrol and plays number 1 on the D-B tennis team. She's also first in her class academically, and she has a wacky sense of humor. On weekends she works as a dancing mushroom at the Land of Oz theme park on nearby Beech Mountain. It's as though she's an only child and the rest of us are Joseph's wicked older siblings in
The Coat of Many Colors
. I warn her never to sit with her back to a doorway.

Leaving Sara with my mother, I drive down to a building sided with asphalt shingles that sits in a forest clearing outside Newport, Tennessee. A sign over the door reads “Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name.” Men in green or khaki work clothes and women in housedresses are climbing out of battered pickup trucks. A few men carry small cages such as travelers use for their cats. One carries a guitar case.

The preacher, Listón, who drives a truck for a canning factory, has a pocked face, gelled hair, and long sideburns. He greets me warmly and ushers me inside to a seat on a wooden bench. The church members glance at me with shy smiles.

Once the service starts, Listón asks me to say a few words. I stand up and mumble something lame about appreciating their letting me share in their worship service.

A dozen women and girls in long dresses come forward. The guitarist starts playing, and they begin to sing, shaking tambourines and clashing cymbals —

Liston's sermon is quiet at first, with lots of Bible quotes, including the one from Mark 16:17-18 on which snake handling is based: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up Serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”