Kinfolks (14 page)

He says his mother was so concerned about his non-Celtic looks when he was in high school that she tried to persuade him to dye his hair blond. I force myself not to ask if she's changed her name to Diane and gone to work at Hair Benders.

Brent says that he began his research after learning he had sarcoidosis, a debilitating inflammatory disease usually found in people with African or Mediterranean heritage. Yet he'd always been told he was Irish. One relative poured gasoline on her family photos and burned them up after he asked to see them. Another told him to rot in hell for suggesting that their family might be anything other than Irish. Someone bearing a Melungeon surname posted a fatwa against him on the Internet for proposing that Africans were among the Melungeon melange.

He confesses bewilderment, having originally thought people would be as eager as he to know the truth about their backgrounds. Clearly, he never met my grandmother, for whom genealogy was a blood sport in more ways than one.

At the end of our visit, Brent shows me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs. One of his remaining thumbs is disfigured. He tells me that his great-aunt and several other Melungeons he knows have been born with six fingers on each hand. He jokes that they're thinking of starting a Six Finger Support Group.

In a state of shock, I drive back to Kingsport and through the row of church signboards that loom like the placards of rival political candidates. But all these churches are stumping for Jesus. The Presbyterians counsel,

THETEN COMMANDMENTS ARE NOT A MULTIPLE CHOICE EXAM
.

The Christian church across the intersection says,

IF YOU STAND FOR NOTHING, YOU'LL FALL FOR ANYTHING
.

The Methodists' offering is

GOD IS DEAD. -NIETZSCHE NIETZSCHE IS DEAD. -GOD

The Baptists:

PRAY FOR A GOOD HARVEST BUT KEEP HOEING
.

And the Pentecostals:

SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKE ONE WEAK
.

But I'm too overwhelmed by Brent's extra thumbs to choose a winner for today.

My father is intrigued by the notion of being a Melungeon, though he says he's glad my grandmother is no longer around to hear this. As a doctor he's often encountered diseases in his patients that aren't supposed to exist in mountain people of supposedly British ancestry, such as sarcoidosis and thalassemia, a form of anemia that, like sickle cell anemia, confers a partial immunity against malaria.

My father also says he's always wondered why his mother's grandfather, William Vanover, left a fertile farm in North Carolina for hardscrabble land in the Virginia mountains. Abby Easterd, the alleged Cherokee, was William's grandmother. He left North Carolina not long after the 1838 Trail of Tears. Could he have been driven off his family's land in the aftermath of the Cherokee roundup? my father asks.

William's father, Cornelius VI, half Cherokee if the rumors are true, signed his will with an X. Might the Vanovers, unable to leave a written account, have been too ashamed to pass on orally what had happened? Might they have tried to spare their descendants further grief by concealing unpleasant facts? After the southeastern Indians were supposedly all marched off to Oklahoma, dark skin in the Southeast was equated to African ancestry. Mulatto and FPC meant the same thing, and those who insisted on being Indians were ridiculed for trying to escape their fate as Africans. Many hid their Indian ancestry from fear of being shipped west.

I've now read about some ancestors that Brent Kennedy and I share — the Sizemores. They're the laughing stock of wannabe genealogy. They claim Cherokee descent, but their paper trail shows them to be white.

In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside several million dollars and a large amount of land with which to compensate the descendants of Cherokee who lost land under the 1835 Treaty of New Echota just prior to the Trail of Tears. To qualify, applicants had to establish their kinship to a name on one of the official tribal censuses of 1835, 1848, or 1851. Exceptions were occasionally made for those who could prove that their ancestors visited and were visited by enrolled Indians.

The Sizemores filed two thousand applications for reparations, representing five thousand family members, many of whom belonged to a nonrecognized tribe in Virginia called the White Top band of Cherokee. In their interviews, several claimed that their ancestors didn't appear on the tribal rolls because they were afraid that if they registered, they'd be sent to Oklahoma. All these Sizemore claims were rejected. (Future DNA testing of Sizemore males will show nearly two-thirds have Native American Y chromosomes.)

If protecting their descendants from persecution was the Vanovers' reason for silence and subterfuge, I'm grateful. I ponder that water fountain at J. C. Penney's labeled “Colored” and the side steps up to the balcony at the State Theater. If my ancestors hadn't been so close-lipped, might I, too, have been barred from drinking chocolate ice cream sodas at Kress's lunch counter, along with so much else? Probably not, because my father likely wouldn't have gone north to college — or to college at all. He wouldn't have met my mother, so I wouldn't exist.

Back in Vermont I struggle to fill in the missing leaves on my father's family tree like a paint-by-number canvas, trying to determine whether or not they were Melungeon. Via various new cyber-cousins encountered on the Internet I sometimes learn another name. But unlike Greatgrandma Pealer, the national genealogist for the DAR, I can't link my father's ancestors to Europe. Most lines vanish in the mid-1700s, like creeks in desert sand, somewhere along the New River in the borderlands between Virginia and North Carolina. (Like the Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, which is the oldest bridge in Paris, some claim, based on the ages of the rocks through which it flows and rates of erosion, that the New River is the oldest river in the western hemisphere. Other geologists debunk this claim and posit various ages for the river between 3 and 220 million years.)

My brave entries on my charts start to have a hopeless feel to them, like the beads patients string in mental hospitals. So I put a couple of professional genealogists on the case. While I'm waiting, I look up Maggie Gibson, my grandfather's lost love, on the Mormon Web site. I find a Maggie Gibson born in southwest Virginia in the same year as my grandfather. But she's already died in Ohio.

Many months and dollars later the genealogists report that none of my father's ancestors except the Dutch Vanovers has made it out of the mountains and back to a seaport in an officially documented fashion.

I'm quite annoyed that my cousin Brent has opened this can of worms for me. By writing
Five Minutes in Heaven
, I thought I'd made peace with my crazy quilt of ancestors. But here I am face to face once again with those six-fingered peckerwoods who haunted my childhood. I feel deep nostalgia for the days when I was a Queen Teen and identity seemed a simple matter of not being a Devilish Deb.

Even though he's retired, my father is still very busy. He's entered every sweepstakes that exists. Stacks of mail arrive each day. He spends many hours filling out forms and pasting award stamps in boxes. He's made friends with the operators at the 1-800 numbers of the sponsoring companies. They give him tips for becoming a finalist. He wouldn't dream of being out of his house on Superbowl Sunday because he might miss the arrival of the Prize Patrol from the Publishers Clearing House.

Sometimes my father phones me in Vermont to ask what color I'd like the Jaguar he's about to win to be. I've planned the menus for more celebratory dinners at the Plaza Hotel than I can count on one five-fingered hand. Each Christmas we all receive nests of metal storage bowls decaled with violets, or sets of plastic coasters stenciled with Amish designs, which my father orders at the behest of the 1-800 operators to enhance his chances of becoming a finalist. What I enjoy most about my father's new hobby is finally finding someone as gullible as my grandfather Reed and myself— and right in our own family!

My father decides to take time out from his pursuit of sweepstakes triumphs to assist my ancestral research by attending some family reunions. He seems as eager as I am to uncover the truth about his elusive parents.

All over the South people with the same surname gather together on church lawns and in American Legion halls each summer. They catch up with one another, get to know new attendees, and eat some of the best potluck victuals ever invented, many of them involving miniature marshmallows.

My father drives my mother up to Hatfield-McCoy country in Kentucky for the Reed reunion. He phones me to report that it's uncanny to be surrounded by a hundred men who all look like his father — many well over my father's own six-four; with sky-blue eyes, noses like the beaks of hawks, and long earlobes. In my mind's eye, I picture an adult version of the children in
The Village of the Damned
.

My father's second reunion is held in a motel conference room in western North Carolina for the Reeves family. Betty Reeves, his three-times-great-grandmother, is the purported Portuguese Indian. My father is delighted with his newfound cousins. But they know nothing about Portuguese Indians, nor do they want to. Their main concern is to link their lineages to Christopher Reeve.

The woman who's organized this reunion arrives late in a new-model Cadillac, chauffeured by a black man in a uniform and cap. She bustles around greeting people and handing out name tags that link each Reeves to the various Reeves progenitors.

In her welcoming address, this woman offers to start a Reeves newsletter and organize another reunion for the following year. The grateful Reeves descendants take up a collection, each contributing $20 for postage and supplies. Thanking her “kissing cousins,” the woman folds the bills and slips them into her Paloma Picasso handbag.

At the end of the afternoon the woman climbs into her Cadillac and waves good-bye to her assembled kinfolk, who wave gaily back, intoxicated by the hours of family reminiscences and by the platters of seafoam fudge divinity. They never hear from, or of, this woman again.

Dad returns glumly to his sweepstakes forms, muttering that his 1-800 operator friends would never behave so dishonorably.

M
Y VERMONT FRIENDS SHAKE THEIR HEADS
and murmur among themselves about the waste of a fine mind. They can't fathom my ancestor worship. They've meditated at ashrams, so they know that the past is dead and the future yet to come. That the key to contentment is to be here now, not there then. The only problem I have with the present moment is that it's so brief, whereas the past endures for as long as there's a single soul left to remember it, however distortedly

A Swiss friend living in Vermont confesses that she doesn't get it. She'd thought America was the land of the future, freed from the European obsession with the past. Why do I want to gaze backward?

I try to explain that southerners, like Australian aboriginals, feel we scarcely exist except as an extension of our ancestors. We spend much of our lives in rapt contemplation of the Dream-time. It's no wonder we lost the Civil War.

But secretly I'm beginning to agree that my preoccupation with the past is interfering with my participation in the present. I don't know whether my cousin Brent's belief that our shared ancestors are Melungeon is accurate or not. Are Melungeons just those from families with the traditional surnames who lived in the traditional strongholds? Our family includes several surnames that Brent maintains are Melungeon-related — Burton, Fields, Hill, Martin, Phipps, Reeves, Sizemore, Swindall, Tolliver, Vanover, White. But only one of my ancestral surnames, Boiling, is found among the five that all researchers would agree are Melungeon — Mullins, Collins, Gibson, Goins, and Boiling. Of course, the daughters from those families would have taken their husbands' surnames, so the heritage would have spread. And although we don't live on Newman's Ridge, my grandparents grew up just over the border from it in Virginia. And I grew up just down the road in Kingsport.

Were you Melungeon only if your neighbors thought of you as such? I have no idea what my ancestors' neighbors called them behind their backs, any more than I know what my current neighbors may call me. My cousin Greg said that some Vanovers were labeled Black Dutch. Some say this term denotes the Dutch who, prior to immigration to America, mingled with the Spanish soldiers who invaded the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, or with Sephardic refugees in Amsterdam who fled the Spanish Inquisition during this same period. Others maintain that Roma (Gypsies) from Germany sometimes called themselves Black Dutch (Deutsche) to explain away their darker coloring, as did Germans from the Black Forest and the Danube region who were descended from African legionnaires stationed there by the Romans. Still others claim that the label Black Dutch, as well as Black Irish, was invented to disguise European families that had mixed with Africans and/or Indians on the early frontiers of this country.

If my ancestors were Melungeon, when did this mixing occur and among whom? It's like trying to unravel a sweater knitted by a homemaker hopped up on crystal meth. My current exit strategy from this quagmire is to examine each Melungeon myth in turn, anoint the least nonsensical, and then get on with my life. First, the Spanish explorers. Then the shipwrecked Portuguese. Finally, the Lost Colony. With a dollop of Pocahontas on the side.

Partly in order to facilitate this research, I accept a job teaching southern fiction at East Tennessee State University. I rent a condo in Johnson City, where the university is located, twelve miles southeast of Kingsport. I can't stay at the cabin on our farm because it's been rented out for a couple of decades to prevent vandalism. But I drive out there anyway, for old time's sake.

The dirt road down to the cabin has become deeply rutted and impassable without four-wheel drive. I park up top and descend the hill on foot. The renter has erected a couple of Quonset huts, which are crammed with collapsing VW bugs and corroded International Scouts. Two VW vans are decaying in the grass alongside the huts.