Kinfolks (28 page)

The latter seems more likely. But recently I found reissued copies of my grandparents' birth certificates from the Bureau of Vital Statistics. My grandfather's is signed by Walter Plecker himself. Both list my grandparents as “white.” However, the Dickinson County commissioner, whose signature confirmed their whiteness, was William Vanover, my grandmother's grandfather, himself the grandson of Abby Easterd, our family Cherokee.

The early Melungeons could probably never have imagined a day when it might feel safe to acknowledge being a “mongrel.” But is it really safe even now? After all, German Jews considered themselves loyal Germans for many generations prior to the Holocaust, and Muslims lived in Spain for eight centuries prior to their expulsion in 1609.

Heading back across the James River, I speculate on what would make someone behave as vilely as Walter Plecker. He was a son of the South, his father and male relatives having fought for the Confederacy. He was reared by a black slave named Delia. After emancipation, she remained with the family and was married in their parlor.

Plecker was quoted as saying, “As much as we held in esteem individual negroes, this esteem was not of a character that would tolerate marriage with them…. The birth of mulatto children is a standing disgrace.” A fundamentalist Presbyterian, he wrote in an essay, “Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality.”

His newspaper boy said of him, “I don't know anyone who ever saw him smile.”

Rigid in other ways, he reportedly ate a single apple for lunch every day. And he refused to look when he crossed a street, expecting cars to stop for him. In 1947, a car — hopefully one driven by a “mongrel”— didn't stop, and he died two hours later.

Trying to figure out why Plecker found “mongrels” so threatening, I decide that he must have felt a visceral, physical affection for Delia, who'd cared for him as an infant. And this attraction may have appalled him. Just so, gay bashers are said to be unhinged by their attraction, unconscious or not, to other men. Just so did the sin-obsessed residents of Salem burn some of their fellow citizens as witches. Such people project their own tendencies onto others and then try to destroy those tendencies by destroying their designated scapegoats. As the poet Rumi puts it, “People of the world don't look at themselves, and so they blame one another.”

Also, many people know who they are only by knowing who they aren't. They're not black, so they're white. They're not gay, so they're straight. Should you introduce such people to a “mongrel” or a bisexual
(quelqu'un qui va á voile ou á vapeur
, as the French put it, “someone who travels by sail or by steamboat”), they experience an identity meltdown because they're forced to realize that their ironclad categories are permeable. By designating anyone with a single drop of African blood as African, Plecker was, in effect, copying his Virginian forebears by denying that any interracial mixing had ever occurred or that any sexual taboos might have been violated.

The early Cherokee revered creatures that crossed boundaries — snakes that lived both on and beneath the ground, birds that inhabited sky as well as land, frogs and turtles that occupied land and water. Many native tribes regarded women who fought as warriors and men who dressed as women and did women's work as sacred for the same reason. Their existence confirmed, rather than undermined, the identity of the other men and women in the tribe.

I detour so as to avoid Liberty University, where Jerry Falwell is busy inoculating Southern Baptist youth with his own venom, which will confer upon them an immunity to tolerance of anyone who isn't a straight white male Jesus freak. Falwell's hatred even extends to Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby on PBS. He's identified it as homosexual, claiming that purple is a gay color and that the triangle on the top of its head is a gay symbol. He also insists that the magic bag it carries is a purse. The next thing you know, Reverend Falwell will be sterilizing the Teletubbies.

In 2002 the
National Enquirer
(always my source of choice) reported on a circle of gay students on the Liberty campus. The girlfriend of one dragged him to the authorities after she overheard a rumor that he'd had an assignation with a male staff member. He confessed to this allegation. The administrators insisted he was lying, so he described in detail the sheets on the bed of the staff member in question. Then an assistant pastor, a bodybuilder who directed the band, resigned.

Asked to comment, Falwell said, “I was told he had problems in this area that you speak of.”

The bodybuilder, however, denied being homosexual. His father, the dean of Liberty's theological seminary, said his son was leaving only because “he feels the Lord may be leading him in a new direction, a music path.”

Early in the seventeenth century King James I of England said of the Anabaptists, the cousins of contemporary Baptists, that they “thinke themselves only pure, and in a manner, without sinne, the onely true church … and all the rest of the world to be but abominations in the sight of God.”

This is the King James for whom Jamestown was named, the same James who supposedly gave land grants to the Tidewater ancestors of the Virginia Clubbers. He's also the King James who organized the English translation of the Bible that still bears his name — and the King James who had a long romance with the Duke of Buckingham.

I drive back into Kingsport, consulting the competing church marquees for some much-needed guidance after my upsetting afternoon at the Hospital from Hell. The Presbyterians say,

SEARCHING FOR A NEW LOOK? GET A FAITH LIFT
.

I lisp this to myself. Not helpful. The Methodists ask,

WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? IN THE SMOKING ORTHE NON-SMOKING SECTION?

Also unhelpful.

The Belvue Christians say,

HONK IF YOU LOVE PEACE AND QUIET
.

This cheers me up.

The Baptists suggest that

FORBIDDEN FRUIT MAKES MESSY JAMS
.

I crack a smile.

But it's the Free Pentecostals who give me the lift I'm seeking:

GOD LOVES SPIRITUAL FRUITS, NOT RELIGIOUS NUTS
.

Sitting on the porch at the cabin trying to digest my grim journey like a python swallowing a rat, I watch the steers suddenly gallop to the upper end of the valley, bellowing and rolling their eyes like stars of the silent screen. They look like they're auditioning for a John Wayne movie.

Then I spot the cause of their panic: a coyote slinks across the valley and disappears behind the dam, on his way to his den in the woods at the top of the hill. A whole mob of them arrived in our area recently, following the interstates from out west, snacking en route on roadkill, their equivalent of fast food.

Len has told me that the mother cows, placid cud-chewers of our childhood, have become black belt karate masters, lashing their hooves like cudgels at coyotes that try to dine on their calves.

I wonder if this coyote feels bad that the steers stampede whenever they see him coming. Or is he proud to have such power? Like Walter Plecker and Jerry Falwell, the coyote probably takes perverse pleasure in striking terror into the hearts of our hybrid cattle. I sometimes hear him and his slavering pack on their hillside late at night, yipping and howling at the harvest moon as though at a burning cross.

S
PRING SUN POURS THROUGH MY WINDOWS
, and Lake Champlain is lapping at my doorstep. But I haven't gone outside in several days. I've become as addicted to my computer as a gambler at the Cherokee casino to his slot machine. I've joined an Internet discussion group that specializes in the use of DNA testing for genealogical purposes. The results from the Melungeon study will be released in a few weeks, and I intend to be ready.

Many members of my new focus group are doctors, geneticists, and professional genealogists. At first I was intimidated, so I “lurked.” I read their postings, but I didn't join in. Eventually, though, I began to feel like a voyeur at a porn site, so I started posing an occasional timid question.

In time, I absorbed the fact that three types of DNA tests are available for genealogical purposes. One samples mitochondrial DNA, multiple copies of which are found in every cell, where they govern metabolism. A mother passes her mitochondrial DNA to all her children. It dead-ends in her sons, but her daughters pass it on to their children. Since it mutates very slowly, it's useful in tracing population migrations. But it gives an individual information only about his or her distaff side, all the way back to a mitochondrial Eve who lived in Africa around 150,000 years ago.

A second type of test is for males only. It uses the Y chromosome, which a man inherits from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on, back to a Y-DNA Adam. Y-DNA mutates more quickly than mitochondrial DNA and is, therefore, useful in tracing more recent ancestry.

If you visualize someone's ancestry as a fan, mitochondrial DNA and Y-DNA provide data about only the outer stay on either side. Ten generations back, each individual's fan has 1,024 separate stays, and these tests will have sampled only two. To learn about the center of the fan, a test called the Ancestry-ByDNA has been devised, which samples non-sex-related DNA markers from the nucleus of a testee's cells.

My discussion group explains that the test is an exercise in statistics. The markers it samples are not those that determine physical characteristics but are, rather, taken from the “junk” DNA located between genes on the chromosomes. Although this type of DNA has no as yet determined function, these markers are found in varying proportions in the four major population groups — Indo-Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and East Asians. Since so much global mixing has occurred, only one marker so far discovered occurs in just a single group. The others are found in different proportions in all the groups. For example, a particular marker might appear in 15 percent of Indo-Europeans, 60 percent of Native Americans, 10 percent of East Asians, and 5 percent of sub-Saharan Africans. The averages of these readings from 176 markers are computed by a complex formula. The testee is then given the percentages of the four populations represented by his or her sample.

My group discusses the controversial nature of this test. It has difficulty distinguishing East Asian from Native American because the two populations separated so recently that not enough mutations have accumulated to make the readings for each truly distinctive. Also, because of all the panglobal mixing, the confidence contours for the reported percentages are quite wide. Single-digit readings could represent smoke from some distant ancestral campfire, or they could be just statistical “noise.”

Another test called the EuroDNA uses the same technique on 320 additional markers to break down the Indo-European component of the AncestryByDNA results into four more categories: northern European, southeastern European (Greek, Turkish, and Italian populations), South Asian (East Indian, Pakistani, and Roma populations), and Middle Eastern (including North African populations).

In answer to one of my questions, the group discusses the fact that a single Native American ancestor more than six generations back wouldn't register with this test. In other words, Pocahontas's input is no longer discernible in her descendants via the DNA tests currently available. However, the input of several Native American ancestors from that far back might be detectable.

I try to tell my father about what I'm learning, but my e-mails to him keep bouncing back. He uses an Internet provider until his free, introductory hours expire, and then he switches to a new one until their free hours expire, and so on. No one is ever able to contact him via e-mail because his address keeps changing.

Several dozen messages arrive every day from my DNA group. Many require research in the recommended textbooks I've been buying. Participation in this group starts to seem like practice for the afterlife. Everyone interacts as a disembodied essence. Yet there are still very distinctive personalities — know-it-alls, altruists, and windbags. Anyone who shows his or her fangs too insistently is cast into limbo by our moderator, who intervenes in disputes like an avenging archangel. Hell is when your computer crashes and you're cut off from your comrades altogether.

My new best friends talk a lot about the individual DNA testing that many are conducting on their families via several commercial labs. As I gain confidence, I decide to try this. I order some test kits, and soon I'm swabbing the inner cheek of every person who opens his or her mouth in my presence.

One day my group mentions Mongolian blue spots, another physical sign of non-European heritage. I leap up from my desk chair, strip off my jeans, and grab a hand mirror. Contorting myself into a position that reminds me of the days when feminists were using specula to befriend their own cervixes, I study my coccyx. I've never seen it before. I'm intrigued. I notice a blue bruise the size of a quarter. For a horrified moment, I wonder if my idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura has returned. Then I conclude that I've merely sat down too hard.

I wait several days. Then I peek again. The bruise is still there, but it's blessedly not spreading. Day after day I study my bruise, like a Roman oracle consulting fowl innards. I try to maintain the scientific detachment forced on me by growing up in a family of physicians. Finally, I accept the fact that I have a Mongolian blue spot.

I'm enchanted, but I can't think how to share this thrill with others. Remembering the Queen Teens fashion show, I'm alarmed by the notion of what I might do at the next Melungeon conference to prove that I may be one of them.

One sunny afternoon I take time out from my cybercult to throw bread crumbs to some kamikaze seagulls along the lakeshore with an enthralled Zachary. An airplane passes overhead, flashing silver in the sun.