Kinfolks (23 page)

Some older texts, with the racism characteristic of their era, maintain that a nonwhite family can “bleach” in four generations. More recent textbooks confirm this basic idea in more scientific jargon. In theory, should a 100 percent non-European mate with a 100 percent European, their child would possess approximately 50 percent non-European ancestry. Should this child, in turn, mate with another 100 percent European, their child would be around 25 percent non-European, genetically speaking. After another such mating, offspring would exhibit roughly one-eighth non-European ancestry. Racists used to insist that such “octoroons” were sterile, like mules (hence the word
mulatto)
. In reality, many children born to octoroons disappeared into the white community. It only appeared that octoroons didn't reproduce.

But these percentages are only averages. In practice, a child can inherit all, some, or none of an ethnically mixed parent's minority ancestry, depending on how minor that ancestry is. Two siblings share only 50 percent of their DNA on average, some pairs more and others less. This explains the very different physical appearances of siblings in some families.

Studies have shown that the vast majority of the 35,000 to 50,000 African-Americans who switch their census designations to white or Hispanic each year have 12.5 percent or less African heritage. Some with up to 25 percent are still able to “pass.” But those with more than 40 percent of a non-European heritage normally resemble the phenotype for that heritage so strongly that they don't attempt to switch to another ethnicity, assuming that they'd even want to.

The average African-American has almost 20 percent European ancestry, and one quarter have Native American ancestry as well. A third of African-American males have European Y chromosomes. (I will later encounter several European-identified men who have African Y chromosomes.) Geneticists have calculated that nearly 40 percent of the Native American gene pool represents other ethnicities. One-third of white Americans have some African ancestry, white Texans possessing on average 5 percent (in addition to what all
Homo sapiens
share as heirs to our genetic Adam and Eve, who were African). White, after all, is a description not of race but of skin color — and not a very good one at that. Most people with albinism have some pigmentation and, thus, some hint of coloring to their skin. And only mass delusion allows human beings to imagine that exclusive races exist.

If my grandparents were both partly Melungeon, whatever mixture that entailed at the end of the nineteenth century, my father would be about as Melungeon as each of them. Since he married a Yankee, I myself would be half as Melungeon as my father and my grandparents. Since I also married a Yankee, Sara would be around a quarter as Melungeon as her great-grandparents. She, too, married a Yankee, so Zachary would be one-eighth as Melungeon as his twice-great-grandparents.

I study the slumbering baby. I would do anything to make his upcoming life easier and more pleasant. If that entailed falsifying records, changing my name, fabricating new ancestors, and never admitting this to a single soul, would I do it? I certainly would. I'd order a fake British coat of arms off the Internet and join the DAR. And I'd kneecap anyone who tried to rip off my mask.

But would it make Zachary's life easier not to be taught to honor all the ancestors to whom he owes his existence? Not knowing who I am hasn't worked that well for me. I've wasted a lot of time trying to wedge my psyche into borrowed shoes that have pinched and chafed and rubbed it raw.

The Melungeons, whoever they might once have been, are ceasing to exist through outmarriage. Ironically, it's only during these last twilight years that their putative descendants are discovering and celebrating this complex legacy. I vow to make sure that they don't vanish before their story is told — if only I can figure out what that story is. I've already started writing about a young boy in Galicia, as sweet and innocent as Zachary, who joins a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition to La Florida, where he's forced to confront the truth about how badly many human beings treat those who appear unlike themselves.

Strolling to the bank of mailboxes outside my condo, I wave to Sara as she drives away with her precious human cargo. On the bumper of a parked car, I spot a sticker that reads

I SUPPORTTHE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS
.

Smiling, I reflect on what might happen to my car if I pasted such a sticker on its bumper in Tennessee, where a man's choice of firearms is as important to him as his wife's choice of hair color is to her.

Bumper stickers are Vermont's equivalent to Tennessee's church signboards, although they usually have a political rather than a religious drum to beat. When civil unions were being debated in Vermont, opponents' cars sported stickers reading

TAKE BACK VERMONT
.

Supporters countered with stickers saying,

TAKE VERMONT FORWARD. Some comedian posted on his bumper the message TAKE VERMONT FROM BEHIND
.

Another sticker I saw recently read

VEGETARIANS DO IT WITH RELISH, AND THEY ALWAYS USE CONDIMENTS
.

Inside my mailbox, I discover a postcard from a London friend named Ramsay, who's traveling in Pakistan. On the front is the word
Malangs
and photos of three bearded, disheveled old men in multicolored clothing, one draped in chains. The explanation on the back is that Malangs are Muslim mendicants who embrace poverty in order to detach themselves from the chains of materialism.

Ramsay's message reads, “Does that name sound familiar? Thought you'd be interested.”

I'm very interested. It's one more brick for my Great Wall of Bewilderment. Earlier in the week my brother John forwarded me an e-mail from a woman named Joanne Pezzullo laying out her theory that the word
Melungeon
comes from the Old English
malengin
— “guile, deceit.” She quoted a verse from Edmund Spenser's 1589
Fairie Queen:

This unflattering description fits right in with Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole's 1891 description of Melungeons as sneaky rogues. It seems unlikely the largely illiterate settlers of Appalachia would have known
The Fairie Queen
, but it does illustrate that the word
malengin
was in common usage in the Elizabethan era to describe an undesirable. And as I observed in my own grandmother, archaic words and speech patterns have survived longer in the Appalachians than in less remote settings. One spring day near our farm, as an older man in overalls was filling my gas tank, the sun went behind a cloud and a sharp breeze blasted down the valley. The man looked up and said, “Hit's kindly airy, ain't it?”

Other researchers have discovered that Portuguese plantations in Brazil employed Moors who called themselves “mulangos” or “melungos.” Tim Hashaw claims this term came from
malungu
, used by Kimbundu-speaking Angolan slaves in both Brazil and Virginia to designate a watercraft and, by extension, a shipmate or comrade.

James Guthrie discusses some residents of the Anatolian maritime empire of Miletus, who fled a Persian invasion in 494
B.C
. to settle on the island of Melun in the Seine. In 52
B.C.
, Julius Caesar reported driving these “Melungeons” from the island, some of whom were last seen sailing west into the sunset.

C. S. Everett maintains that
Melungeon
came from the Italian
melongena
, meaning “eggplant.” He claims it's an epithet still used by Italian Americans to describe someone of African heritage because of an eggplant's dark skin. And he points out that there were Italian settlements in central Virginia in the late eighteenth century.

A genealogist named Pat Elder has proposed the Old French
melanjan
, which also means “eggplant,” as the origin of
Melungeon
, explaining that Baron Francois de Tubeuf tried to establish a French colony on the Clinch River in southwestern Virginia near a large Melungeon settlement in 1793. Elder also suggests “mal-injun” as a possible source for the term, hinting at the hilarity to which the whole topic eventually reduces those of us who explore it. It's a certifiable syndrome known as Forebear Fatigue.

Returning to my office, I log on to the Internet and discover that the contemporary Melungeons are restless. Brutal battles are being waged at the various chat sites. A girl gang of professional genealogists is attacking Brent, claiming he's not a real Melungeon because his ancestors aren't listed as FPCs on the censuses. Brent has pointed out that censuses were conducted by local people, who'd have given the neighbors they liked or feared the benefit of the doubt since the consequences of being designated an FPC were so dire. He's also presented them with citations from records earlier than those they've consulted that do list some of his ancestors as FPCs. And he's explained that much of the Melungeon mixing presumably occurred before record-keeping, or even literacy, existed on this continent.

These belligerent genealogists are also insisting that the Melungeons weren't in fact the “white Indians” found living in East Tennessee by John Sevier in 1784, and that no one claimed Portuguese ancestry for the Melungeons until 1848, when it was fabricated to explain away their dark complexions in an attempt to avoid classification as FPCs. They maintain that there's nothing mysterious about Melungeon origins, that they're descended from a group of mulattos who migrated west from Louisa County, Virginia — and they've got the paper trail to prove it.

They also chide Brent for broadening the definition of Melungeon to include every mixed-race wannabe in America. And they ridicule the idea of a Turkish component in the Melungeon makeup, portraying Brent and those pursuing similar connections as cultists, cranks, and crackpots.

Their hostile tone baffles me. There's something about the Internet that turns perfectly nice people into harridans. It may be the absence of facial expressions and tones of voice. Unsure of whether they've made their point, people shriek it into cyberspace.

I discover that several more splinter groups have split off from the Melungeon totem pole. One wants to apply for state recognition of individual Melungeons as Indians so they can qualify for various scholarships and grants. The mainline Melungeons are opposing this, preferring to emphasize the multiethnic nature of Melungeon heritage.

Another group is accusing those who champion the Portuguese and Turkish origin theories of racism for trying to explain away their darker coloring as something other than African. Yet most Melungeons I know are scouring the census records and throwing cocktail parties whenever they locate ancestors designated “mulatto.” In fact, a baffled African-American reporter for a Washington, D.C., newspaper has recently confessed in print that she's never before encountered white people so eager to be African.

Yet it's clear from the Internet chat sites that not everyone with a Melungeon surname is eager to be African. Some are downright appalled. Others are furious about the DNA study. Since we don't know who the Melungeons are in the first place, they point out, who's to say that those sampled for the study are representative? And in a fit of I'm-more-Melungeon-than-thou, some with documented ancestry back to those who bore the traditional Melungeon names and who lived on Newman's Ridge in the nineteenth century are raging that Melungeon wannabes are trying to abduct their hard-won heritage. Still others are furious that certain diseases like sarcoidosis and thalassemia have been labeled Melungeon, fearful of what this might do to employment prospects and insurance coverage.

Everybody's mad about something, and I'm no exception: I'm mad at my grandparents for dying without telling me what they know about this mess. My head is reeling from the strain of trying to sort out all the old information and fit in the new.

But Brent keeps trying to levitate above the fray. He always acknowledges everyone's point of view, however demented, often referring to the Middle Eastern tale of the elephant. Each of us is exploring an ear or a leg, but it's all part of the same elephant, he insists in a voice that usually goes unheard above the din of clashing opinions.

It's an elephant, all right, the elephant in the room that our grandparents wouldn't discuss. But now nobody will shut up about it. In the 1990s, captive elephants killed 65 people and injured 130. Before this flap is over, our Melungeon Murderous Mary is going to trample us all to pulp.

I find myself unable to renounce either lesbian weddings on Lake Champlain buffalo farms or mud-wrestling matches between monster turtles and one-armed trappers. So in the autumn I now head south to Tennessee with the ducks and the snow geese, to the land where men in their personals ads say that they're seeking a girl who can bait her own fishing hooks. And when the ice breaks up so that Lake Champlain resembles a giant frozen margarita, I shoot back up the Shenandoah Valley to Vermont, land of the silent sunset sailors and the solo skiers who vanish into the darkening woods. If some of my ancestors were Native American, I've reclaimed their nomadic ways. I'm like a dog that turns around and around before lying down, but that never actually lies down.

Consequently, I don't have a lot of friends. People tend to want others to pick one team and play on it to the death. Most of my pals are misfits like myself, standing with each foot firmly planted in canoes headed in opposite directions. I used to think that a real friend was someone who, had I been Jewish in Germany, would have hidden me from the Gestapo. Now that I'm a senior citizen, I know that a real friend is someone who will drive you home from your colonoscopy