Kinfolks (9 page)

“Free person of color” (FPC) was a category applied in the nineteenth century to anyone whose skin wasn't pale enough to allow him or her to pass for a northern European. This included Middle Easterners, Native Americans, Africans, East Asians, East Indians, Mediterraneans, or any mixture of these.

Of course, many settlers were illiterate and had no record of who their ancestors were. Many hid exotic origins, changing or anglicizing their names, moving to new places, fabricating new ancestors. So in practice, it was darker skin that made you vulnerable to being labeled FPC. Since FPCs weren't allowed to testify against white people in court, those who were edged off their land had no recourse (short of murder or suicide) but to move to a place no one else wanted, like a swamp or a mountaintop.

One such spot is Newman's Ridge. It looms over Sneed-ville, the county seat for Hancock County, the poorest county in Tennessee, with 29.4 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line.

I drive my parents' Buick up and down the rutted dirt roads across the face of Newman's Ridge, searching for Melungeons. Fifty years earlier, several hundred people lived here. Now all I find on the densely wooded cliffs are a few vacation cabins, a deserted church, and the ruins of some farmhouses and outbuildings in fields overrun with briars and saplings.

The only signs of life I discover are a couple of new ranch houses on the main road and a well-tended cemetery on a slope overlooking the Cumberland Mountains, which stretch ridge upon ridge toward Virginia. Wandering among the headstones, some merely flat rocks with names and dates scratched onto their faces, I find several of the traditional Melungeon surnames — Mullins, Collins, Goins, Gibson. Whatever their hardships while alive, these Melungeons are enjoying in death some of the most spectacular views I've ever seen.

I drive into Sneedville, park, and stroll around the streets past the usual feed store, drugstore, grocery store, hardware store, and funeral home found in any rural county seat. In the eighteenth century, this spot was a favorite meeting place for trappers and hunters, who called it Greasy Rock. The few people I pass look just like the farmers who used to gather on Broad Street in Kingsport on Saturday mornings. I don't see a single extra finger.

I phone a woman with a Melungeon last name, a friend of a friend. She lives close by and comes down to meet me on the main street. An attractive woman in a tailored suit, she looks like an escapee from the Virginia Club. We sit down over coffee in a small restaurant and discuss the weather and our mutual friends. Eventually I tell her about my proposed article, asking her if she's Melungeon and whether I could interview her.

She gives me a look that would wilt a stalk of celery. Too late I remember how to operate in the South: you must never ask a direct question. Most southerners have plenty to hide, but they consider it rude to refuse a request. Therefore, as in China, good manners here consist of never putting another in the position of having to say no.

“My family is descended from de Soto's exploring party in the sixteenth century,” she replies icily and with finality.

As I drive back to Kingsport with no material for my article, I remember too late having been warned that calling someone a Melungeon in Sneedville is like calling a black person a nigger. I've been impersonating a Yankee for so long that I've forgotten the southern codes, which have remained remarkably intact, like insects in amber, despite the widely bruited homogenization of America. In New York, a murderer will walk right up and shoot you. In the South, he'll bring you casseroles until he gets to know you, and then he'll shoot you.

Shaking off my chagrin, I review the more exotic Melungeon origin myths — shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, de Soto's deserters, survivors of the Lost Colony. I conclude that life on the isolated farms of Appalachia is stultifying and that romantic tales about one's glamorous forebears make it less dreary.

When I'm trying to write fiction, I prefer to lock myself in a small room without a view. I turn off the phone and unplug the TV. If I can bear the wait, characters eventually emerge to relieve my boredom, like a child's imaginary playmates. No doubt a similar process of sensory deprivation has produced these unlikely Melungeon myths.

After my arrival this trip, I rode around Food City with my father in a motorized cart, to spare his bad back. Grocery shopping can take him several hours because many store employees and customers are his patients, and they all want to regale him with tales of their latest ailments.

He introduced me to an old woman with no teeth, who was stocking a shelf in the pasta aisle. He told her I was a writer in town to research some magazine articles.

She said companionably, “Well, I reckon readin's good, ain't it?”

Because many Appalachians have been, and are, illiterate, a rich oral culture has evolved. The International Storytelling Center is only a few miles from our farm, and their festivals draw thousands. People need their stories, true or not, and the Melun-geons are no exception.

As I drive back to my parents' house, I run a gauntlet of churches in competition over which can post the most clever sayings on its illuminated signboard out front.

Today the Bethel Presbyterian sign reads

A SHARP TONGUE CAN CUT YOUR OWN THROAT
.

Across the highway I pass the Belvue Christian church, whose message is

IF GOD FILED A 1040, COULD HE CLAIM YOU AS A DEPENDENT?

As I ponder this question, I study the marquee at St. Luke's Methodist next door:

TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED THE PRESENT
.

The Glenview Baptists across the street warn

THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH. REPENT BEFORE PAYDAY
.

I like that one, but I decide that today's winner is the New Covenant Free Pentecostals down the block with their

IF YOU GIVE SATAN AN INCH, HE'LL BECOME YOUR RULER
.

I'm sitting in the backyard of some of my parents' friends whom I particularly like. Throughout my childhood they always bought whatever junk I was selling for school fund-raisers — magazine subscriptions, Girl Scout cookies, chocolate bars, greeting cards. I tell them about my doomed Melungeon article and my failures in the field as a journalist.

Mrs. Shobe stands up and disappears. She returns with her elderly yardman in tow, announcing that he was born in Hancock County to a mother whose maiden name was Collins.

I stand up from my lounger to shake his hand. A tall, lanky man in bib overalls, he has straight white hair and high cheekbones. The whites of his eyes are bright around navy blue irises, and his face looks as though he's been sweeping chimneys.

We sit down and chat interminably about the habits of rhododendrons.

Finally Mrs. Shobe asks, “Buddy, are you a Melungeon?”

I blush furiously. She's from Louisiana. She must not realize that this is a question one doesn't pose.

“Half Melungeon,” he replies pleasantly.

“Where did your people come from?” she asks.

“I don't know nothing about it.” He describes moving as a child from Kentucky to Virginia, where his parents sold him to a farmer for twenty-five cents a day.

“Sold you?” I echo faintly.

“I worked for him from sunup to sundown ever' day of the year but Christmas.”

“When did you go to school?”

“Didn't never go to no school. Wouldn't nobody take me, not the whites nor the coloreds, neither one. I was too dark for the whites and too pale for the coloreds.”

He describes his children — one in Indiana, a second in Maryland, and a third an airplane mechanic in Louisiana. “Seem like that they don't much care to come home no more,” he says sadly.

Back in Vermont I write my article about going in search of the Melungeons and finding that the only ones still on Newman's Ridge are lying in their graves. The younger generations have fled the stigma, blending imperceptibly into the American mainstream. Once Buddy's generation is gone, there will be no more Melungeons. I mock my quest for these legendary mixed-race people when I myself am of Dutch, French, German, Scottish, Irish, English, and perhaps Native American heritage.

I close with a quote taken from a newspaper interview with a Melungeon bank president in Sneedville: “Any mystery our people ever had is gone — or at least any way of solving it. We are all immigrants in this country.”

May the Melungeons rest in peace, I think as I push the envelope containing the article through the mail slot at the post office.

As I write about the snake handlers for the
New York Times
, I realize that although I don't miss church, I do miss God. Eating, breeding, and interior design are terrific, but if this is all there is, why bother?

This thought plunges me into the melancholy familiar from my college years. To combat it I check out an armload of books from the University of Vermont library on the various world religions.

As I read about the Puritans and their almost pornographic fixation on original sin, I begin to suspect that I've inherited my melancholy from my mother's Puritan forebears. The Puritans seem as relentless as Southern Baptists in their preoccupation with the fires of hell and as obsessed as the snake handlers with evil. Virginians slaughtered Indians because they wanted their land, but Puritans slaughtered them because they saw them as Satan.

I find Hinduism with its cast of plotting gods and goddesses amusing, especially in contrast to the cool austerities of the Buddhists. Those two are the East Indian equivalent of Baptists and Episcopalians.

But it's the Cherokee who grab me by the throat and won't let go. Maybe it comes from having spent too much time on farms, but I've always suspected that each creature contains a spark from the same flame. Whether you call this flame God or the Great Spirit doesn't matter. And the best part is that you don't have to handle snakes or even set foot in a church to experience it. You live it every day by the way in which you treat the other creatures who are essentially yourself. The cruel merit pity rather than hatred because their behavior is proof that they haven't yet located this crucial core within themselves.

This notion of God as Mr. Rogers seems much more soothing than that of God as a bipolar Santa who dispenses rewards and punishments to His cowering elves based on whether they've been naughty or nice.

Clinging to this sunny theology as though to a rope lowered to a suffocating miner in a collapsing shaft, I return to my neglected novel. I finally get to be a flag swinger by turning my main character, Ginny, into one. Always a recycler, I invent a Melungeon boyfriend for her, one who becomes a snake handler. Nodding to my preoccupation with extra fingers, I make Ginny's father lose one in an accident. I give her mother idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. And I get rid of Ginny's lesbian lover by decapitation as she rides a snowmobile under a barbed wire fence, just as I myself once rode my pony under a wire clothesline.

By the end of
Kinfolks
, I foolishly believe that I've exorcised my past and am now free to start afresh.

M
Y DEBAUCHED SOUTHERN SELF
wants to spend the money my novel has earned on a new Jaguar. But my thrifty Puritan self, knowing that I may never earn another penny from my writing, wants to invest it so I can pay myself a salary and continue to write what I please. Having finally realized that I'm a bi-sectional, I decide to honor both selves by salting some away for the famine and using the rest to take Richard, Sara, and me to London for a couple of years. I've always wanted to live in a foreign country, so I persuade Richard and Sara that they do, too.

We rent an apartment in Hampstead across the road from the Heath, the eight-hundred-acre park that overlooks the city. I expect to fit right in here because of the eleven lines of Great-grandma Pealer's family that hailed from England and because of Grandmom Reed's ancestral land grants from James I.

But in a nightmare flashback to my own childhood, Sara immediately comes home from school in tears because her British classmates have mocked her accent.

“Tell them that if it weren't for people who talk like you do, they'd be speaking German,” suggests my brother John, who's visiting.

Eventually we make some friends. Sara's is an urchin named Phoebe, who conducts her around the neighborhood along the tops of the walls that divide the backyards. Phoebe regularly steals all the fruit from our fruit bowl and teaches Sara how to shoplift.

I fall into a nest of feminists — socialist feminists, Marxist feminists, cultural feminists, radical feminists. Although they spend lots of time arguing about their differences, I can't tell them apart. They all seem like bright, attractive, excessively rational young women. But the only thing they share, ideologically speaking, is a hatred of America as the seat of power for the capitalist patriarchy.

Sometimes I serve as their whipping boy. “You Americans this, that, and the other …,” they snarl, with no seeming awareness of whose British ancestors first taught Americans the wiles of empire-building.

I'm intrigued because I've never been accused of being an American before. I point out that just as England isn't London, so America isn't New York City or Hollywood. Just as the English have Cornwall and Yorkshire, so do Americans have Tennessee and Vermont. But when I mention having taken Sara to London's first McDonald's, they go into a group cardiac arrest that nearly ends the budding friendships.

Sometimes leaving a place behind lets you see it more clearly. As Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote Willa Cather, “One must know the world so well before one can know the parish.” With three thousand miles between Tennessee and me, I start to remember things about my childhood that I've conveniently repressed — the iron staircase up the side of the State Theater, the water fountain at J.C. Penney's labeled “Colored,” the ghetto of redbrick apartment buildings across the railroad tracks.