The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  In Virginia and Tennessee especially, public antipathy toward Melungeons was unrestrained. In 1890 a Tennessee legislator said: “A Melungeon isn’t a nigger, and he isn’t an Indian, and he isn’t a white man, God only knows what he is.” He went on to say, “I should call him a Democrat, only he always votes the Republican ticket.” Another senator described his rival to a journalist as “tricky as a Melungeon.” He elaborated that a Melungeon was a “dirty sneaky thief.”

  Yet there was always curiosity about them too. As early as the late nineteenth century, newspapers published articles about the mysterious Melungeons. In one famous series published in 1890, written by a woman named Will Allen Dromgoole (who spoke to the senators described above), Melungeons were described as poor and despised and in the habit of distilling spirits. Dromgoole’s series was a uniquely valuable and much-quoted record of Melungeon lives, but from today’s vantage point it is difficult to distinguish between her descriptions of the extreme poverty, social isolation, and stigma experienced by her subjects and the stigmatizing that the journalist was herself doing. She wrote:

  They look for [the train] constantly . . . bringing joy to the cabin even of the outcast and ostracized; ostracized indeed. Only the negroes, who have themselves felt the lash of ostracism, open their doors to the Malungeons.

  They are exceedingly lazy. They live from hand to mouth and in hovels too filthy for any human being. They do not cultivate the soil at all. . . . They all drink, men, women and children. . . .

  After the breaking out of the war, some few enlisted in the army, but the greater number remained with their stills, to pillage and plunder among the helpless women and children. Their mountains became a terror to travelers; and not until within the last half decade has it been regarded as safe to cross Malungeon territory.

  • • •

  Today Melungeons are thought to be triracial. Indeed, there are many groups who have lived in the United States who, since records were first kept, have been called either one of the “little races” of the South or a lost triracial group. Like Winkler’s clan, they are large, related family groups who have been long identified by their local communities as “not white.”

  It’s thought there were at least two hundred triracial groups in colonial America, including the Guineas of West Virginia; the Croatan of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland; and the Wesorts of Maryland. As with the Melungeons, their origins are unknown, and their name was often used as a term of derision. The Issues of Virginia were so called because the term “free issues” had been used to denigrate “free blacks” before the Civil War. The name “Wesorts” allegedly came from the phrase “we sorts of people” (as opposed to “you sorts”). The Guineas were named after the English coin used in the United States during the Revolutionary War.

  These groups often acknowledged Indian heritage in some form, although historically they didn’t live with known tribes in a traditional culture. Now some have been recognized as Native American by federal and state governments. In 2011 the Wesorts were recognized formally by the State of Maryland as descended from the Native American Piscataway. Although many groups have long denied any African American ancestry, it’s thought that this was primarily because of the prejudice they would encounter. Now it’s widely believed that the ancestry of the Melungeons and other “little races” includes African Americans—as indeed does the ancestry of many modern white Americans.

  But other origin stories exist for these groups as well. One legend of the Melungeons had it that their forebears were survivors from the lost colony of Roanoke, an attempt at settlement in 1584 that failed so completely that not a soul was found when the British went looking for survivors. Some suggested they were shipwrecked pirates. More dramatically it was proposed that they were ancient Phoenicians who had sailed to the New World in ancient times and remained, mingling with the natives. Various historical documents record that Melungeons identified themselves as Portuguese—or, as they said, “Portyghee.” Another legend has it they are at least part Turkish in origin.

  N. Brent Kennedy, who wrote The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People and whose personal journey was similar to Wayne Winkler’s, argued that Melungeons descend from a group of Mediterranean sailors who landed on the North American continent decades before the establishment of Jamestown, the first continuous European settlement. Kennedy believed that the Melungeons were a group of stragglers abandoned on the continent by Juan Pardo, a Portuguese sailor who was employed by the Spanish. Pardo built a fort and, according to Kennedy, left behind a diverse collection of fellow Portuguese, Moorish, French Huguenot, Turkish, and Iberian prisoners. Kennedy believes the group traveled inland and ended up settling into their own community with natives from Virginia and North and South Carolina. The Turkish and Moorish contribution to this new population was strongest at this time.

  One of the arguments Kennedy uses to support his theory is the uncanny similarity of words in the local Indian dialects to some words from Turkish. According to his research, “Tennessee” is like tenasuh, which means “a place where souls move about.” “Kentucky,” which is Indian for “dark and bloody ground,” is like the Turkish kan tok, which means “saturated with blood.”

  Even the word “Melungeon” has many fascinating origin stories. “Melungeon,” say some, derives from the French mélange (mixture), from when a French colony lived near the Melungeon settlement in the eighteenth century. Others have suggested that it derives from the Afro-Portuguese melungo (shipmate) or the Arabic melun jinn (cursed soul) or the Turkish melun can (one who has been abandoned by God). The most romantic candidate is the old English term malengin, meaning “evil machination; guile; deceit.” The word appears in The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser in 1590:

  So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale,

  That could deceive one looking in his face;

  Therefore by name Malengin they him call.

  The Faerie Queene was well known in America’s first European colonies. In addition it is said that Melungeons used archaic words long after they had been discontinued in other English-speaking populations.

  Clues to the origins of the Melungeons may also lie in a cluster of physical traits said to recur in the group’s families today. These include the grandly named Anatolian bump, which is described by many as an unusually large protrusion on the back of the head. Sometimes described as doughnut shaped, it is an exaggerated protrusion at the point where the skull turns from one angle to another. So-called shovel teeth—an indented hollow at the back of each incisor—are reportedly another common trait in the Melungeon group, as is the palatal torus, a bony protrusion at the top of the palate.

  Brent Kennedy believed that certain diseases were prevalent among the Melungeons, including sarcoidosis, thalassemia, and familial Mediterranean fever. Kennedy’s own investigation of his family’s lineage began when he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis.

  • • •

  It is a strange experience to discover that you are a member of an almost mythical group. When Wayne Winkler first met the woman who would become his wife and told her he was Melungeon, she reacted, wrote Winkler, as if he had announced he was a leprechaun.

  “She thought that’s what the Melungeons were, that it was just a story, a folktale,” Winkler recalled. “There are all sorts of folk legends around about the Melungeons. As a matter of fact, one day the History Channel sent a crew to Kingsport, Tennessee, and in a parking lot of a shopping center they asked people at random, ‘What do you know about the Melungeons?’ People said they were giants, they were cannibals, they lived in trees, the wildest things. Things that I had never heard.”

  Winkler published a powerful history of Melungeons, Walking Toward the Sunset. His Aunt Hazel and his father had been the most willing to share their pasts, and although his father was dead by the time he wrote his book, his aunt was proud of him. “They were the youngest c
hildren in their family,” said Winkler. “I think they suffered less discrimination than the older kids.” Still, during the writing of the book he had to deal with people who thought that Melungeons were a fairy tale. But after the book appeared, Winkler said, “There were quite a lot of people that were unhappy about my talking about the family like that, even though I barely mentioned my own personal connection.”

  It wasn’t just the two contradictory beliefs—that Melungeons don’t exist and that they do exist but no one should admit it—that made research so difficult for Winkler. Melungeon history is enormously complicated, mostly unwritten, and in many respects remains hidden. Exactly who was a Melungeon was never fully recorded or formalized; everyone simply knew who others in the group were. Now, because the people who lived through those times are dead, all of that social complexity is lost. “Anybody who is involved in any sort of family research, they all find out that nearly everyone who could give them good information has passed away by the time they thought to ask the questions,” Winkler explained. “You’re always a little bit too late to get the good answers, to feel the thoughts of the people who might really have been able to tell you something.”

  Of his reluctant relatives Winkler observed, “I think they had a sense of shame that they weren’t considered good enough, but the way the discrimination happened was really strange. It wasn’t formal.” When his relatives were young, said Winkler, authorities “just said, ‘This is the school you go to’ and ‘Here’s the school these people go to,’ and everybody just kind of knew why.”

  Even when social attitudes became more liberal, there was little clear acknowledgment about what life had been like and why it was changing. “That all just sort of disappeared in a way that I haven’t really been able to put my finger on,” Winkler said. “I’ve talked to people who were around then, and nobody seems to know what exactly happened. But right around the time of World War II, the separation between Melungeons and non-Melungeons just kind of stopped. They started identifying Melungeon men going into the army as white. I think it had something to do with the idea that if we’re sending people from our home county off to the army, we’re going to send them in as white men so they’ll be treated better, and we’ll back that up at home. We’re not going to have their kids go through a different school.”

  One might hope that the surge of Melungeon pride and the reclamation of a complicated, nonwhite identity would constitute a satisfying turnabout. But the situation is more complicated than that. Some Melungeons have themselves come to restrict the term so narrowly that it excludes most potential members. As one man said to Wayne Winkler, “If you can’t trace your family back to Hancock County, you ain’t a Melungeon. Period.”

  There is suspicion too about why people might wish to reclaim Melungeon heritage. Local people who have always identified as Melungeon are skeptical about “wannabes” who only now want to acknowledge a Melungeon heritage because it has become exotic or popular. While it’s admittedly easier now for someone to call himself a Melungeon without having to suffer any of the explicit discrimination and shame that have historically burdened the group, the “wannabe” accusation is an easy but potentially crude label for people with unique motivations.

  Winkler explained his own motivation for his interest in his ancestry:

  I want to document as best I can, the lives of those who struggled against racism and a rigidly enforced class system to survive. Those of us who descend from Melungeons owe much to our ancestors who worked hard to provide their children with a quality of life that they themselves would never enjoy.

  For his part, Kennedy wrote about the effect of shame on many generations of his family. He had long wondered why so many of his people looked Mediterranean, why they often lived in inhospitable places, and why their surrounding communities treated them so badly. His own great-grandfather had not been allowed to vote, even in the twentieth century. No one in his family would explain any of this when Kennedy asked about it, or, if they did, their explanations struck him as unconvincing. When the topic came up, they often didn’t look him in the eye. Only after tracking down piece after piece of evidence, many of which had been purposely hidden by his family, did he discover that he was Melungeon. The missing piece of his identity explained a lot of confusing incidents in his life, like the fact that as a girl his mother was always dressed in long sleeves, long skirts, and a hat, even in the summer—all to make certain she didn’t turn “black.”

  The centuries of silence damaged his family, wrote Kennedy: “I saw the still-living tentacles spawned by this morass in much of my own behavior. This silent monster still lived and breathed and it had to be confronted if we were truly to move beyond it.” He believed that reclaiming his heritage, coming out of the “Melungeon closet,” would be a critical act of healing. His mother, who was uncomfortable with his choice, eventually grew to accept it. “I suppose it’s like hearing a cry from the grave,” she said, “and then having to decide whether or not to answer it.”

  • • •

  Most investigations into Melungeon history are carried out by amateurs. Many are thorough, responsible, and compelling, but like much of the research that takes place in the sphere of genealogy and personal history, the lack of a university or corporate imprimatur leaves the area vulnerable to being dismissed as niche and unreliable. When Kennedy published his first newspaper article on the topic, long before the Internet and the lightning-speed responsiveness of services like Twitter, he received hundreds of calls and letters from people who felt they recognized themselves in his piece. Yet when he began his research, he wrote letters and telephoned many scholars to ask them for their thoughts, tried to fax his research to history and anthropology departments, and got no response.

  Can genetics help lend validity to the stories of groups like the Melungeons? Currently the actual genetics are as complicated as the legends. In principle, if geneticists can identify the ancestry of large populations, they should be able to find ways to focus in on the more recent history of smaller populations. Indeed, the scientists who were able to detect differences in the small populations of Britain opened the door to this kind of fine-grained history. But as of now there have been only a few DNA analyses of Melungeon groups.

  The largest study to date found evidence of male African American ancestry and female European ancestry, which is consistent with some of the legends. The subject group in this case was limited to descendants of those who had been described as Melungeon in historical records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet records of the word “Melungeon” as a descriptive category for members of a particular population are rare and incomplete, although for a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century a number of individuals were noted as Melungeon in censuses. The subjects in the study represented just a small sample of families from Tennessee and other states. Moreover, within those families the researchers looked only at Y DNA and mtDNA, which in a set of possible great-great-grandparents represents just a small fraction of the DNA of two of the thirty-two people at this level.

  What about the clustering of physical traits in Melungeon groups, the shovel-shaped incisors, the Anatolian bump, the palatal torus? Anthropology has long recognized that different physical features—such as the shape of one’s head or teeth or the distance between one’s eyes—occur at different frequencies in different populations. Richard Scott, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada at Reno, says that looking at teeth alone, he couldn’t tell a German from an Italian, but he could always pick a German person from a Japanese or a Bantu person. Much like paper records and DNA, the evidence of the body can be definitive, but it can also be incomplete: The trick is knowing how to determine which it is.

  The first step to determining if Melungeons developed a characteristic dentition would be to carry out studies to see if shovel-shaped incisors or other typical traits were significantly more common in Melungeon fam
ilies than in the general population. If they were, it would suggest family connections, if not population-level ones. Here too we are only on the cusp of answers.

  It’s thought that one reason Melungeons might have shovel-shaped incisors is because Native Americans have shovel-shaped incisors. According to Scott, the trait occurs in 98 percent of the Native American population. If Melungeons have Native American ancestry, the trait may have been passed down from those ancestors. In fact, shovel-shaped incisors tell a story that dates back even further. More than fourteen thousand years ago, an extremely hardy group of people walked out of Siberia, across the Bering land bridge and down into North America. The first band that crossed what is now the Bering Strait originally came from Asia and brought their shovel-shaped incisors with them. The dimpled teeth are still a common trait in Asia and among Eskimo-Aleuts, and more than 90 percent of Chinese people have shovel-shaped incisors.

  Shoveling does occur in Europeans and African populations, but much less frequently. Typically, it is the extent of shoveling, not just its presence, that distinguishes different populations. “For some reason, people always get fixated on shovel-shaped incisors,” Scott said, “but they are only one of many traits that we look at.” In fact, there are at least twenty-six different features of teeth that can help map ancestry. As far as shoveling is concerned, Europeans and Native Americans tend to be at opposite ends of the scale. With respect to other dental features, Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans are quite distinct. If Melungeons are a truly triracial population, there is a good chance it will be obvious from their dentition.