Authors: Lisa Alther
I listen to him explain to some unsuspecting fund-raiser that if his organization wouldn't spend so much money on phone calls and mailings, they'd have that much more to devote to their charitable activities. My father sends small contributions to many charities, hoping they'll call him so that he can explain this.
Smiling, he waves to me. Meanwhile, he's telling the fundraiser that 12 percent of his foundation's solicitations goes for administrative expenses. In contrast, the Salvation Army spends only 2 percent on administration. He says regretfully that this is why he'll be giving to the Salvation Army, rather than to the poor sap on the other end of the phone.
W
HILE DIANE TRIMS MY HAIR
in preparation for a Melungeon conference at Brent Kennedy's college, she tells me about all the women we know in common whose undyed hair makes them look so much older.
I reply that my gray gives me a credibility I lacked when dark-haired.
Diane says nothing, but I can feel her thinking that although she's blond, there's never been any question of her credibility. She'd no doubt agree with Dolly Parton who, when asked if she minded “dumb blond” jokes, replied, “Law, no. I know I'm not dumb, and I know I'm not blond.”
Diane sighs. But she cheers up once we start discussing recent plane crashes â one off Long Island, another off Nova Scotia.
“You know what's happened?” she asks.
I make the mistake of shaking my head, nearly losing a lobe to her snipping shears.
“El Niño has blown the Bermuda Triangle north.”
As I digest this, I'm alarmed to find myself wondering if it might not be true. Once you've seen the Lake Champlain monster, anything seems possible.
One allure to life in Kingsport is that my haircuts cost half what they do in Vermont, which is in turn half of what they cost in New York City. Of course, New York stylists pass along tidbits about the stars whose locks they tend as an incentive for their favorite nobody clients to return. This is how I know things I've promised never to reveal about several celebrities foolish enough to impart their darkest secrets to unethical hairdressers. However, no New York hairdresser has ever shown me the antics of a Chinese fighting fish or explained the symbiosis between El Niño and the Bermuda Triangle.
Armed with clipped but undyed hair, I head for Wise with my brother Bill, who's visiting my parents from California. He's tall, lean, and muscular. Probably because John and I tortured his teddy bear when he was a toddler, he's become a karate master who could kill either of us with a flick of his wrist.
We find two thousand people gathered beneath a large tent. For two days we listen to reports on and energetic discussions of Melungeon-related topics. Although some participants look like escapees from a NASCAR race, almost everyone amazes me with his or her knowledge of world history and personal ancestry. I'm so outgunned here that my pistol doesn't even leave its holster.
Bill seems interested in the data, but he's a true scientist. From the distracted, dreamy expression on his face I suspect that he's ingesting the information but reserving judgment on its accuracy and implications.
On the second afternoon, a Turkish professor from George Washington University named Turker Ozdagan takes the podium to discuss the similarities between kilim carpets and Native American blankets. He points out that both Turks and Native Americans came from the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. Some went northeast across the Bering Strait to America, while their cousins headed southwest to eastern Europe and the Aegean. He maintains that if Turks did come to America in the sixteenth century, as Brent Kennedy proposes, they'd have assimilated into Native American tribes with ease because of the cultural similarities that already existed.
“It would have been a natural marriage,” he says, “one in fact that would have gone largely unnoticed by most Europeans arriving in the New World over the ensuing centuries.”
Every shade of skin, eye, and hair is represented beneath this tent, but as I listen to Dr. Ozdagan, I start to become aware of a certain distinctive combination: Many attendees have, like my cousin Brent, wavy dark hair, faces that appear tawnily tanned, and deep blue eyes. Once I zero in on this look, I see it everywhere. It's like a reunion of failed Elvis impersonators.
But I'm baffled. If Melungeon heritage is Hispanic or Turkish or African, plus Native American, where do the blue eyes come from? I'd thought blue eyes represented a recessive trait that genes for darker eye color overwhelm. Who are these bizarre-looking people?
I study Bill. I realize that he and I look equally bizarre. I've met my childhood bogeyman, and he is me.
One speaker discusses physical traits associated with non-Caucasian heritage. Afterward, audience members tug at the corners of one another's inner eyes and stick their fingers into each other's mouths, checking for East Asian eyefolds and Native American shovel teeth. They also stroke the backs of one another's heads like primates grooming for lice, trying to determine who has the Anatolian lumps indicative of East Asian or Native American ancestry.
Bill observes, but I join in. I'm downcast to discover that the backs of my teeth are smooth and my eyelids are single-folded, albeit drooping with age. There's a lump on my head, but it's probably an old football injury. Once again I'm an Episcopalian watching the Baptist Youth depart on their hayride without me. I'm beginning to suspect that I'm wasting my time. If Melungeons actually exist, it's unlikely that their ranks include my family, or surely we'd have heard about it before now.
Ina and Nellie have volunteered to accompany me to my next station along the Melungeon Via Dolorosa â Roanoke Island at the northern end of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Ina believes her family to be Melungeon. Her paternal grandmother's maiden name was Freeman, a common Melungeon surname, and these Freemans lived near the base of Newman's Ridge. Her maternal grandmother always claimed to be half Cherokee.
Nellie is just along for the ride. She grew up on eleven thousand acres in Alabama that she calls the “planation” (for reasons that escape me). She's an English teacher at Dobyns-Bennett and a columnist for the
Kingsport Times News
. Her columns alternate among community service stories, tales of life on the planation, and pieces that support abortion and gay marriage and attack fundamentalist preachers and right-wing politicians. Yet sometimes she drives her Mercedes to St. Paul's Episcopal Church to attend services in her ankle-length mink coat. She's such a moving target that her enemies can't figure out how to attack her. The most they can do is write outraged letters to the editor offering to take up donations to send her to Cuba. But this doesn't bother her because she never reads the paper, any more than she reads the hate mail that arrives at her house, which she tosses unopened into the trash.
In any case, she'd love to go to Cuba. Nellie has cruised into the fjords of Norway, around Cape Horn, and along the ice shelves of Antarctica. I've never met anyone as interested in everything as she. She's even interested in the Melungeons.
As we drive across North Carolina from the Blue Ridge through the piney Piedmont to the swampy coastal plains, Ina and Nellie regale me with tales of Dobyns-Bennett. Some of my old teachers are still there, including my nemesis, Mrs. Hawke, who turns out to be Ina's cousin. Ina has thirty-eight aunts and uncles, forty-five first cousins, nine double first cousins, and God knows how many second and third cousins. This is one of the many challenges of Appalachian genealogy. The families are huge and interconnected, and many people share the same names generation after generation. One of my ancestors had eighteen children, and many of them had at least a dozen.
Nellie tells about Ina's sleuthing skills at school. Students are no longer allowed to leave campus for lunch, but one day Ina saw some entering the building who, instinct told her, were returning from McDonald's. When she confronted them, they denied it. So she invited them out to the parking lot. Once there, she asked the most nervous-seeming to take her to his vehicle, a white truck. She requested that he unlock the door. He did so. She reached in and pulled out a McDonald's cup.
“That's left over from breakfast,” he said quickly.
“Then why is it full of unmelted ice?” she asked.
He remained silent, so she asked him to pop his hood.
When he'd done so, she said, “Well, Clint, you've failed the Ice Test. And now we'll do the Engine Test. If you didn't go out to lunch, it will be cool.”
As she reached out her hand to touch the block, he pushed it aside and said, “You don't want to do that, ma'am. You'll burn yourself.”
As we approach Roanoke Island, they request my lecture on Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony. I obligingly explain that in the sixteenth century England, Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal were locked in a struggle to rule the world. It was like a giant video game, each country trying to establish a foothold in the New World, while simultaneously destroying everyone else's. The Spaniards appeared on the verge of victory because the pope had granted them most of North and South America. (I confess to not knowing why the pope thought it was his to give.) Spain was now looting those continents of their gold and silver in order to finance its conquest of Protestant northern Europe and its defense of Christendom against the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which was encroaching from the east via the Balkans and the Mediterranean and from the south via North Africa.
These New World colonies were a double blessing: they allowed the various nations to stake their territorial claims, and they were also a dumping ground for troublemakers â criminals, debtors, prostitutes, and religious and political heretics. No one in his right mind would have chosen to join a colony bound for the Americas, but most weren't in their right minds. They were the madmen, the dreamers, the paupers, the fugitives, and the fanatics. Many believed right up until they were slaughtered or starved to death that their god would keep them safe.
We check out the reconstruction of the Lost Colonists' fort, trying to imagine cowering behind those flimsy palisaded posts as enraged Indians tried to scalp us.
“It definitely isn't how I'd have chosen to spend my time,” I confess.
“Not unless the alternative were the gallows,” Nellie says.
In the harbor bobs a replica of their ship. It's scarcely larger than Dolly Parton's tour bus.
“I'm amazed they didn't murder each other on the voyage over,” says Ina.
“Once they got here, they probably wished the ship had sunk. At least sharks kill you quickly,” I reply.
I tell them about Sir Walter Raleigh's three attempts to people this small green island. The first, commanded by Sir Richard Grenville in 1585, involved around a hundred settlers. While Grenville returned to England for supplies, the colonists antagonized some Indian neighbors by burning down their village because they claimed an Indian had stolen one of their silver cups.
Being mostly city dwellers, the colonists were unable to hunt, fish, or farm. Like everyone's worst nightmare relatives, they constantly demanded corn from the Indians and stole fish from their traps. But there'd been several years of drought, and the Indians were barely able to feed themselves. When they moved inland to their winter camp, as they did every year, the colonists became convinced that the Indians were trying to avoid feeding them (likely) and were plotting an attack against them (also likely).
As the situation deteriorated, the English privateer Sir Francis Drake arrived off the coast, en route to England from the Caribbean, where he'd sacked the Spanish town of Cartagena in what is now Colombia. Cartegena was the main port at which gold and silver looted from Incan mines were loaded onto Spanish ships, which sailed back to Spain in large fleets, in an effort to avoid being plundered by privateers from other countries. The loading on the docks was done by slaves â South American Indians, Africans, Protestants, Turks, and Moors. The Turks and Moors were routinely captured during Spanish sea battles with the Ottoman fleets on the Mediterranean, the most notable being the battle of Lepanto in 1571.
After raiding Cartagena, Drake had spare room on his ships because yellow fever had killed some of his soldiers and sailors. So he rounded up several hundred slaves who'd assisted his attack against their Spanish captors. Originally he intended to take them to Cuba to set up a colony from which to harass the Spanish treasure fleets. But a storm drove Drake off course toward eastern Florida, so he decided to sack St. Augustine instead and then head back to England, stopping off at Roanoke Island to see how Sir Richard Grenville's colony was faring.
In fact, the colonists were now cold and hungry, sick and scared. Drake offered to leave them some supplies and slaves or to take them back to England. After a dreadful storm demoralized them even further, they decided to go home, even though it meant abandoning three absent colonists who were delivering a message to a neighboring Indian village.
At this point, what happened becomes speculation. Some historians believe that Drake, having lost some ships from his fleet in the storm and not having enough room for the colonists, dumped some of the freed slaves from Cartagena on Roanoke Island. (This is the basis for Brent Kennedy's belief in a Turkish component for the early Melungeons, in addition to some Turkish and Armenian textile workers later brought to Jamestown as indentured servants.) In any case, Drake left Cartagena with several hundred slaves of various ethnicities, but he arrived in England with only one hundred Turks. Either the others were dumped on some coast while still alive, or they died on the voyage and were heaved overboard. It wasn't unusual for ship captains to unload sick, unruly, or otherwise unwanted passengers on some desolate shore.