Kinfolks (31 page)

After a moment of bewilderment over all the rogue Turks, Greeks, and Italians, my father smiles, savoring his new role as Melungeon poster boy.

My mother sighs. When she married my father in New York in 1940, she probably thought she was getting Rhett Butler, not ChiefSit'n'Bull.

Michael starts singing “We Are the World.”

“This is really annoying,” mutters my father. “If only we'd known about the Native American part, Bill, Michael, and Jane could have gone to medical school for free. Do you realize how much tuition we could have saved?”

The phone rings. The Chief answers. He listens for a while, apparently to some fund-raising pitch. Finally he replies, “I'm sorry, but I can't help you. You see, I'm Cherokee, and I need to give my money to my own people.”

S
EVERAL QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED
, even while new ones have arisen (which I won't have enough time to resolve in this life or the next). But the one that got me into this in the first place — Were my father's ancestors Melungeons? — hasn't been. I suppose it depends on the definitions being used. No, they weren't Melungeons, if Melungeon means those directly descended from the community on Newman's Ridge in the early nineteenth century who bore the traditional surnames.

But yes, they were Melungeons, if that means the larger population of ethnically mixed settlers in the Squabble State. Refugees from the racial and economic tyrannies of the Tidewater oligarchy, many pressed westward into the mountains of northwestern North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and southeastern Kentucky, where they appear to have merged with detribahzed Indians, themselves probably already quite mixed as well.

But there's also a socioeconomic element to Melungeon-hood: those with enough money and social standing in their communities were allowed to be whoever they claimed to be. As one researcher puts it, “Money whitens.” Whatever may have happened to them beforehand, once my ancestors were living with others like themselves, they bought and sold land, married and produced many children, died and left modest estates. Most were farmers. A couple owned a thousand acres. Cornelius Vanover VI, the half-Cherokee son of Abigail Easterd, was a miller and an herb doctor. Several were teachers or preachers. Although many signed their official documents with
Xs
until the last half of the nineteenth century, Cornelius Vanover's son William was elected commissioner of revenue for his county. Within the confines of their own small world, my ancestors don't appear to have been persecuted — unless by their own fears of being unacceptable beyond their borders.

My father and we children grew up believing ourselves to be northern Europeans, and the Virginia Club agreed. This raises the question of which is more dominant — one's cultural heritage or one's genetic heritage. Some of the Cherokee membership rolls give the “blood quantum” of those on the list. Many are designated only l/32nd or l/64th or 1/128th Cherokee by “blood.” Yet the Cherokee Nation considers their descendants, and they consider themselves, fully Cherokee. Clearly, many more factors than just genetic endowment contribute to shaping someone's sense of identity. But what happens within the psyche when one's cultural heritage and genetic heritage don't match? What happens when there are several heritages?

Luckily, my family has plenty of company in our ethnic no-man's-land. Ina's test has shown her to be:

Brent Kennedy's brother has received the following results:

Others with suspected Melungeon ancestry show similar mixtures. Some even admit to having Mongolian blue spots, though I haven't checked them out in person.

So what does this hodgepodge make us, in addition to Melungeons? It makes us Americans, for one thing. Many branches of my family have been on this continent for at least twelve generations, and the Native Americans for perhaps 14,000 years. My ancestors crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia, sailed to Plymouth on the
Mayflower
, saved Jamestown from starvation, and were saved from starving at Jamestown — in addition to the thousands with unknown or less glamorous stories. I am, indeed, an Ur-American.

Yet my own DNA results show me to be:

The analysis of my CODIS markers (those used by the FBI to establish genetic bar codes for felons) suggests a similar makeup, which I corroborated by scrolling through the interminable Internet databases of gene frequencies until I developed the chronic squint of a roulette croupier. The contemporary populations whose barcodes most closely approximate my own are Tuscans, southern Croatians, Moroccan Arabs, Portuguese, and Byelorussians. This doesn't mean that my ancestors necessarily belonged to these groups, since current populations sometimes don't resemble earlier ones and since gene flow has never respected geopolitical boundaries. But it can suggest generalized geographical origins.

One of my HLA factors (the human leukocyte antigens analyzed by the platelet center) reaches its highest frequency in Lapland, among the reindeer-herding Saami of northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Northern Russia; another, in Central Asia, New Guinea, and several Amerindian populations. Despite my own moments of skepticism, I find it difficult to explain these echoes of concordance among the different types of tests, unless they happen to be pointing to some genetic truths, however ancient they may or may not be.

The famous American melting pot that historians portray as commencing with the nineteenth-century immigration from Ireland and from southern and eastern Europe actually existed here right from the start. It's a shame our founding fathers chose to portray the fledgling United States as an outpost for wayward Anglo Saxons, rather than as the panglobal mosaic it really was. Our resulting history might have been less grim.

It's particularly ironic since, as one example from many, Thomas Jefferson's Y chromosome has been classified as haplogroup K2, which is believed to have originated in the Levant. His political enemies taunted him with having a mulatto father and a half-breed mother. In fact, his mother was a Randolph, one of the families associated with descent from Pocahontas.

Several books have been written, accurate or not, tracing the genealogies of five American presidents to African and/or Native American ancestors — Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding, and Coolidge. Some researchers maintain that Lincoln was of Melungeon descent via his mother, Nancy Hanks. (To say nothing of the King himself, Elvis Presley, whose mother's ancestors came from western North Carolina and claimed Cherokee and Jewish ancestry.)

But America has never really been a melting pot, in any case. It's actually a stir-fry. Like picky children, each generation selects only the vegetables it deems palatable. My grandmother Reed speared the Tidewater ones, and my great-grandmother Pealer the
Mayflower
ones. But the other heritages were still there, however repressed or mangled, lending their scents and flavors to the entire skillet.

I ponder contacting the relatives who've helped me reach this point, to share my findings. But Hetty, Bob, Vonda, and Aunt Ura — to say nothing of my Reed grandparents — are all dead. Although this makes me sad, it's for the best. Their origin stories got them through life. To have invalidated them would have been like clipping the wings of elderly bluebirds. But history is made to be revised. I revised theirs, as I hope my descendants will revise my version when more sophisticated DNA techniques become available.

The most important lesson my exploration into the Melungeon diaspora has taught me is that it's apparently possible for congenital belligerents to live cheek by jowl in peace and love. Greeks and Turks, Irish and English, Arabs and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, those with complexions of every hue — all can amalgamate into one people. The Melungeons have proven that the children of Cain and Abel have the capacity to become kissing cousins. All that such a transformation requires is ostracism by your neighbors and the threat of imminent extinction.

As I drive out of Kingsport, I pass a steady stream of RVs the size of small ranch houses headed into town like covered wagons converging on Dodge City during the gold rush. This is a NASCAR weekend, and 160,000 Tomato People will soon cram the motels and campgrounds for a hundred miles in every direction. The rival churches have posted beguiling quips on their marquees in an effort to lure itinerant worshippers to their services on Sunday morning before the Food City 500 race starts. One by one, they flash past me:

LORD, HELP ME BETHE PERSON MY DOG BELIEVES METO BE
.
LIVE SO THAT YOUR PREACHER DOESN'T
HAVE TO LIE AT YOUR FUNERAL
.
WHAT DID NOAH DO WITH THE WOODPECKERS?
BLESSED ARE THE NASCAR FANS
FORTHEY SHALL PAY LOCAL SALES TAX
.

It's past time for me to retreat to the shores of Lake Champlain. I've started wondering whether I could make a living down here composing slogans for church signboards….

It takes a village to write a book, and my reading list includes just a handful of the titles I consulted during my ten years of researching and writing. So I thank the ranks of anonymous explorers, historians, sociologists, archaeologists, geneticists, linguists, and genealogists whose work helped me shape and sharpen my own perceptions.

I also thank my faceless Internet colleagues at the Roots-web Genealogy-DNA list, and especially its founder Ann Turner, who kindly fielded my many questions. Any misinterpretation of their answers is my own doing.

With their groundbreaking book
The Melungeons
, Brent Kennedy and Robyn Vaughan Kennedy blazed trails through the thickets of Melungeon myth that made my own journey easier. Many other Melungeon descendants and researchers also shared important findings with me. My family patiently put up with my shifting theories about our ancestral origins.

Robert Gottlieb gave me the idea for this memoir and generously offered useful feedback on its early drafts, as did Doris Lessing and Ramsay Wood.

The keen editorial eye of my agent, Martha Kaplan, helped me sharpen the focus of my story and eliminate digressions, and she found it a happy home at Arcade Publishing with Dick and Jeannette Seaver. My editor there, James Jayo, smoothed out the rough patches in my prose and in my logic and made the process of turning the manuscript into a finished book a real pleasure. And Casey Ebro's impressive publicity expertise has helped bring the book to the attention of interested readers.

Jan Hanford built a wonderful new stable in cyberspace for this book and my previous ones. My daughter Sara Bostwick provided my author photo and the moral support she's always given my projects. Deborah Deutschman, Nellie McNeil, Diane Patterson, Jody Crosby, Jo Carson, Steve Fischer, Merritt and Rita Shobe, and the late Idries Shah made valuable contributions to my story as it unfolded. So did my cousins Ava McCoy, Greg Vanover, Wilma Jack, the late Bob Artrip, and the late Hetty and Elihu Sutherland.