Kinfolks (11 page)

He shows me the first photo I've ever seen of William Vanover, my grandmother's grandfather, himself a grandson of Abby Easterd. He has high cheekbones and dark eyes set deep in their sockets. If the rumors about Abby are true, he'd have been a quarter Cherokee, and he does look it.

There are other nonwhites in the family, Greg says. When I press him, he replies that some Vanovers were described as Black Dutch by their neighbors. When I ask what this means, he hops in his car and speeds away. Later I write him several letters that he never answers.

My fourth stop on this Heritage Trail is the cabin of my grandfather's nephew Bob, the son of a man who drove a wagon from the lowlands loaded with merchandise for his father's store in the mountains. Bob was like a kid brother to my grandfather. My mother says I met him at my grandfather's funeral, but I don't remember him.

Banjo music drifts from his tiny cabin, which sits alone in a hilltop clearing in the middle of nowhere. Bob answers the door, holding the banjo by its neck. Well along in years, he looks like my grandfather's identical twin, tall and lean with a large beaked nose and ears with unusually long lobes. Put a headdress on him, and he'd be a dead ringer for a Shawnee warrior.

Nancy Skaggs, my grandfather's paternal grandmother and Bob's great-grandmother, was reputedly kidnapped by several renegade Shawnee from her family's homestead in the Virginia backwoods. The story goes that a man named George Reed tracked these Shawnee to their encampment and rescued Nancy as the Shawnee slept. George and Nancy hid overnight in a cave while the enraged Indians hunted for them.

Nine months later, Nancy, now Mrs. Reed, gave birth to my grandfather's father, also named George Reed. Everyone apparently pretended to believe that old George was, in fact, the father of little George. But they must have wondered if it were really possible to make love in a cave while angry Indians were searching for you. Could one of the Shawnee have actually fathered little George?

Every second family in the South claims descent from either a Cherokee princess or a European woman abducted by ravaging natives. Several volumes of Indian captivity narratives were published in the nineteenth century. Some of the kidnapped Europeans wanted to remain with their captors, saying that they found Indian society more congenial than the lives they'd left behind.

The card-carrying members of Native American tribes that have achieved recognition from the federal government call such Europeans who claim Indian ancestry “wannabes.” I understand their scorn, stemming no doubt from an aversion to sharing their casino profits with those whose ancestors escaped the depredations heaped on others whose complexions left them no choice but to be labeled Indian.

I once talked in Boston with a couple of members of a small California tribe who ridiculed the Cherokee for accepting so many wannabes. I felt as though I were at a meeting of the membership committee for the Virginia Club. (Future DNA testing will show that federally recognized tribes exhibit an average of 61.1 percent Native American ancestry, whereas the unrecognized exhibit 47.6 percent.)

The function of such pervasive wannabe mythology may be to explain away darker-skinned family members. Also, if you can claim a few drops of native blood, perhaps you don't have to feel quite so guilty about the relentless atrocities committed on Indians by your European ancestors.

But in some cases wannabes could be actually-ares. Plenty of people with documented Indian heritage who were pale enough to dodge it didn't want their names on some official government watch list, where they'd be sitting ducks for any new form of discrimination that might come down the pike. Even now some descendants of these unrecorded Indians sneer at the “reservation Indians” for having been bought off by government subsidies.

As we sit down on Bob's cot, he tells me about having been a miner and then a car salesman. He says my grandfather owned one of the first autos in the county — a Model T Ford. He was thrilled at the prospect of putting his horses out to pasture. But when he tried to drive the car on his house calls, it got mired down in the rutted wagon paths that served as roads.

One day when he was creeping down a steep incline, his brakes failed. The car picked up speed. My grandfather jumped out just as the Ford careened off the track and bounced down a cliff on its hard rubber tires. At the foot of the cove it plunged into a creek. He decided to leave it there and bring his horses back from retirement.

When I mention having visited Hetty, Bob tells me about two of her husband's in-laws, brothers named Cage and Buck Ervin, who were arrested for passing counterfeit coins. While awaiting trial in a jail cell, Buck groaned, “Cage, Fm worried that we won't get justice.”

“Shut up, you sorry fool,” Cage hissed, “we don't
want
justice.”

Then Bob tells me about my grandfather's uncle Caleb Haynes, who longed to be a preacher. At the end of his first sermon, as he exhorted his audience to come to the altar and be saved, he proclaimed, “The time which was to have arriven has arroven!” The congregation started giggling and couldn't stop.

Next Bob tells me about my grandfather's first love, Maggie Gibson. She married someone else and moved to Kentucky. I recognize Gibson as a Melungeon surname. Having failed to learn from experience, I ask Bob if Maggie was Melungeon.

Bob grabs his banjo and begins playing a reel, explaining that he often plays it for barn dances. I have to admire my relatives' powers of deflection. They've honed to a fine edge the ability to tell someone to get lost in the most charming ways possible.

As I drive away, I reflect on my grandfather's failed love. Did he not marry Maggie because she was Melungeon? Might his sister Evalyn have opposed such a union? Or did Maggie's family object to him because he was a landless, penniless orphan? Or was he too young? He ran away from his sister's farm in his early teens, hiking a hundred miles through the Cumber-lands to join two brothers in Kentucky. Was he trailing woefully along after Maggie and her new husband? Or might he and Maggie have tried to run off together and been stopped? I'll never know now because my grandfather is dead. Although sad for him that this relationship didn't work out, I'm glad for myself. Otherwise, I wouldn't exist.

One after another I pass the church marquees on the outskirts of Kingsport, consulting their messages as earnestly as I would the slips in fortune cookies:

JESUS IS MY ROCK AND MY NAME IS ON HIS ROLL
.

A MIND IN THE GUTTER IS A LIFE DOWN THE DRAIN
.

COME ON IN AND JOIN OUR PROPHET-SHARING PLAN
.

AVOID TRUTH DECAY: BRUSH UP ON YOUR BIBLE
.

And today's winner is, I silently announce to my imaginary audience of enthralled Christians, the Bethel Presbyterians with

NOTHINGTO BETHANKFUL FOR? TRY TAKING YOUR OWN PULSE
.

Back at my parents' house I tell them about my encounters. We try to decide whether my grandmother is afraid I'll have learned about Maggie Gibson, Betty Reeves, Abby Easterd, Bob Artrip's low-rent living arrangements, John Wesley Swindall's having been in the Union army, or his illegitimacy. Or is there some other unsavory secret I haven't yet sniffed out?

My father tells us about Bob's father, Casander, the teamster who was also sheriff for his county. One afternoon when my father was a boy, Uncle Cas took him fishing. They sat on a hillside while Cas drank from a jar of home brew and tossed sticks of dynamite into the creek below. He sent my father down to collect the fish that landed on the shore.

Finally my father asked, “Uncle Cas, isn't this against the law?”

Cas replied, “Son, in these parts, I am the law.”

My father speculates that this is why his parents left that area — to escape both the omnipresent moonshine and the casual violence. He said my grandfather carried a revolver when he lived there, not just as protection against drug addicts but also in response to a death threat from someone unhappy with his political affiliation.

My mother has just returned from church, where she's heard that my grandmother's aunt Ura Grizzle is ill. My mother suggests I go see Ura, since she's 104 and may not live much longer. Maybe she'll provide some of the information my grandmother has censored. My father has said that when he was a boy Aunt Ura told him there were Cherokee in her family. I've met Aunt Ura just once, even though she lives only a dozen blocks away with her daughter, Annette. For many years she was the truancy officer for the Kingsport schools.

“If ‘twere well done,” quotes my mother, “‘twere well ‘twere done quickly.”

My mother is pleased I'm showing an interest in my ancestry. She's spent all her adult life in the South with her nearest relatives nine hundred miles away. Her own ancestors have been more real to her than her everyday acquaintances, not unlike the cast of
The Young and the Restless
for a soap opera addict. She's constantly struggling to decipher boxes full of their correspondence. She refers to them, in a phrase from the Episcopal prayer book, as her “cloud of witnesses.”

My mother's favorite saying, no doubt handed down from Cotton Mather, is, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” She prides herself on never having bought a mattress, having inherited them all. Every mattress in our house has been slept on by scores of her witnesses. They feel like it, too, each with a body-shaped crater in the center that it's impossible not to roll into at night, like an open grave. Lying there in these family foxholes, I always feel as though I'm cradled in the embrace of my Pilgrim fathers.

I phone my grandmother to convey greetings from Vonda, Zella, Bob, and Hetty. But I censor news of Maggie Gibson, Abby Easterd, Betty Reeves, and John Wesley Swindall. She's so intent on her Tidewater ties to Confederate cavaliers that I don't have the heart to unknot them. But I do realize that it's through such cowardice that the great scams of history are perpetuated.

Although my evasions about my trip may have put her mind at ease, I can tell from her tone of voice that she's still suffering over
Kinflicks
. As a peace offering, I ask if we can go together to visit Aunt Ura.

She hesitates, then replies, “Well, we might could, but we hadn't ought.”

There's a long silence. Every time she comes out with one of these anachronisms from the hills, I'm reduced to speechlessness, feeling myself in the presence of a flesh-and-blood fossil. She seems embarrassed, as though her dentures have just tumbled out on the dinner table.

“Why not?” I finally ask.

“Aunt Ura may be dying.”

“Isn't that all the more reason to visit her?”

“Let her die in peace,” murmurs my grandmother.

I say nothing, but I see no reason why Aunt Ura should get to die in peace when I'm coming unglued trying to figure out what these people are hiding from me. I've never been a fan of conspiracy theories, believing for example that Lee Harvey Oswald was likely a lone lunatic. But lately my grandmother has been behaving like Lady Macbeth in more than just her diction. Who are these shunned ancestors whose legacy she's strangled with her well-manicured hands?

I go see Aunt Ura anyway. After all, she's my twice-great-aunt. I find her lying on white sheets in a bedroom in Annette's house. Her face is dark and cracked like an old motorcycle jacket. Her sharp cheekbones form caves for her tightly shut eyes. She resembles a mummy. I reflect with wonder that her father John Wesley Swindall fought in the Civil War. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

I sit down and chat with Annette, eventually describing my mission. I don't use the M-word, having finally understood that it's a deal-breaker for older people who haven't grown up in an era of ethnic chic. But I do use the C-word, asking Aunt Ura in her apparent coma if she knows whether we have any Cherokee ancestors.

She lies so still that I begin to suspect she's already dead. After a while she rolls over and turns her back to me. Annette looks at me, her dark eyebrows raised, and shrugs. I apologize to Aunt Ura for bothering her, and I wish her a speedy recovery.

As I head back to my parents' house, I reflect that someone who's guarded her secrets for 104 years isn't about to spill them now, deathbed or no, and certainly not to a published author. This is Kingsport, Tennessee, after all, not Hollywood, California.

F
OR THE NEXT DECADE AND A HALF
, I give scarcely a thought to my annoying ancestors. I'm too preoccupied with the present, having joined a feminist karate group. We've hired a brown belt from Florida to instruct us. But everyone is down on her because she acts as though she knows more than we do. Many are complaining that she's elitist. We spend our practice sessions sitting in a circle with her, processing our resentment. Those who feel a circle is too fascistic roam the room, offering their feedback from wherever they please.

I've also joined a basketball team called the Hot Flashes. We play in the Burlington city league against teams of former stars from the local colleges. Because of our antihierarchical policy of letting every member play an equal number of minutes, even those who can't dribble, we usually lose by at least a hundred points.

In addition to my athletic endeavors, I'm busy policing a teenager, writing novels and traveling to promote them, getting divorced, conducting romances, and attending therapy sessions to recover from them. A child of the sixties, I came of age believing that the human heart was just another muscle, one that could be strengthened by aerobics, the more the better. Always a slow learner, I prowled around a few too many campfires, trying to project an aura of louche glamour, before finally understanding that my heart is not a muscle. It's a mushmelon, unsuitable for use as a kickball on the playground of desire. I've also gradually come to understand that other people's hearts can be snapped as easily as chicken necks and must be handled with care, or not at all.