by Lisa Alther
After a couple of days in the library employing my newly activated neocortex, I discover that I’m not even a pseudo-southerner. East Tennessee is so mountainous that most of its antebellum farms were subsistence operations, so there weren’t many slaves. These struggling farmers, many descended from indentured servants, resented those large landowners and merchants who were profiting from slavery. Also, many mountain families took pride in ancestors who’d fought to free the colonies from Britain and were appalled by the notion of dissolving that hard-won union.
In 1819, a Quaker named Elihu Embree founded the nation’s first abolitionist journal, the Manumission Intelligencer, in Jonesborough, the town in which my family’s farm is located. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, as West Virginia had from Virginia. During the Civil War, 30,000 East Tennesseans joined the Union army, comprising one-third of all white southerners who fought against the South. Guerrillas in East Tennessee burned railroad bridges there to cut Confederate supply lines. Mountain men called “pilots” led Confederate draft dodgers and deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners to the Union lines in Kentucky.
My neocortex collapses into a whimpering stupor. Since I’m taking a creative writing class, I decide to write a short story set in East Tennessee to sort this out. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions…. It’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”
In the resulting tale, one character says to another, “Law, honey, where’d you get that hat at?”
When my professor returns the story, she’s scribbled in the margin, “Real people don’t talk this way.” I’ve never before known that the people I grew up among weren’t real. This might explain why I’m so confused.
Embracing my newly excavated Appalachian heritage, I buy a banjo and learn to play it badly. Ophelia plays a guitar, and our favorite tune is “They Are Moving Grandpa’s Grave to Build a Sewer.” The hallmate who’s sickened by southerners offers to cover our waitress shifts in the dining hall if we promise never to play it again. To punish her insolence, we sing eight verses of “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” All around the courtyard windows slam shut. But even Ophelia good-naturedly ridicules East Tennesseans as white trash who make a laughingstock of the entire state.
Undeterred, I continue to court my inner hillbilly, lounging around the dorm in bib overalls, an undershirt, and bare feet. When my housemother, Mrs. Bradner, complains, I accuse her of cultural imperialism. I explain to my profoundly uninterested hallmates that the Deep South is to Appalachia as mint juleps are to Pepsi. That if the plantation South is the land of moonlight and magnolias, the mountain South is the land of moonshine and magnum rifles.
I take my final exams in the infirmary, where I’m incarcerated for a month with carbon monoxide poisoning acquired on a trip home from Cornell in a car with a faulty exhaust system. I also have mononucleosis from the stress of trying to function in such a bizarre place.
But I do survive the cut my freshman year, despite feeling like the first amphibian ever to lie gasping on dry land. And I’ve learned the most important lesson of an Ivy League education: Ivy Leaguers are no different from anyone else — except for the fact that they don’t know this.
Sealing my exit from the South (just as my grandmother has feared), I marry Richard from Cornell after graduation. The reception takes place in our backyard in Kingsport beneath a huge revival tent erected for free by an evangelist who’s one of my father’s many grateful patients.
A New Jersey native, Richard is working at an ad agency in New York City. By bribing several Dickensian characters lurking in a basement office, we manage to rent an apartment with high ceilings and parquet floors in a prewar building overlooking the Hudson. The only drawback is that getting from the subway on Broadway to our building is like negotiating the no-man’s-land between the British and German trenches during World War I.
As a wedding gift my father gives me a box of bullets and the .38 special his father carried in his medical bag on house calls in case of attack by a drug addict. My father kept the pistol in his sock drawer at our house in town for the same reason. But the West Nineties clearly trump the streets of Kingsport when it comes to danger. So I take the pistol to a gun shop on Broadway to get it cleaned. When I pick it up, the dealer tells me I’m lucky I didn’t fire it because a metal guard is missing and I’d have blown my hand off.
As I walk back to our apartment, I imagine a scenario in which I shout at an attacker, “Stop or I’ll blow my hand off!”
I’ve spent my first two decades struggling with whether I’m a southerner. Since my mother is a New Yorker, I feel genetically entitled to spend my next two decades struggling with whether I’m a Yankee. So I put my banjo in mothballs, buy some suits at Saks, and start work as an editorial assistant at Atheneum Publishers. Richard and I attend operas, concerts, and ballets. We eat at ethnic restaurants all over the city and attend plays both on and off Broadway. On weekends we join the nearly inert lines of traffic in and out of the city in order to ski in Vermont and swim off Long Island. We eat lobsters on Cape Cod and cotton candy on the boardwalks of New Jersey. I conclude that I like being a denizen of my mother’s motherland.
My mother’s grandmother, Ruth Griswold Greene Pealer, was a piano teacher and choir director who rose to the rank of national genealogist for the Daughters of the American Revolution. En route, she traced eleven lines of her family back to England — and one to the Mayflower (along with six million other Americans). Late in life she modeled for a bust included in an international exhibition called The Family of Man under the label “Caucasian Female.” A cast of it sits on our piano back home.
Ruth lived in South Danville in upstate New York. Her husband, Phillip Greene, died of Bright’s disease when her son, my maternal grandfather Floyd Greene, was five. She married again, this time to a farmer and state assemblyman named Peter Pealer. Peter had lost several fingers in a fireworks accident (in a novel variation on my childhood horror of extra fingers).
Caught up in the fight for women’s suffrage, Ruth delivered a speech entitled “Woman and Her Advancement” to community groups. In it she maintained that since God made the creatures of our world in order of increasing significance, Woman as the last created was intended as “the crowning work of the Creator.” This was confirmed, she insisted, by the fact that Woman was the “last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher” and that it was to Woman that Christ first appeared after His resurrection. However, because of Eve’s having been unjustly blamed for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, “eternity has no time and words no power to express the despairing anguish and woeful heart experiences which have been the lot of Woman through all the ages.”
Upon discovering that she was a third cousin once removed to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth longed to go where the big-league suffragists roamed. In a letter to her teenage son Floyd she explained, “If I don’t get out of this town, I’ll go crazy.” So she left Floyd to finish high school while living with an uncle, and she dragged Peter Pealer to Washington, D.C.
Hating housework, Ruth insisted they live in a hotel. While Peter worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Ruth joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Wimodaughsis (short for Women/mothers/daughters/sisters), a suffrage association. She also served as president of the Women’s National Press Association.
Ruth attended rallies addressed by Susan B. Anthony and commented in letters to my grandfather on the beautiful hats and dresses of the audience. She marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in a hat piled high with fake fruit and flowers, demanding the vote. About her fellow suffragists she wrote to her son, “People outside have no idea of the ‘push,’ interest, and determination of the women to win their cause. There is no such word as ‘fail’ with them, and that is a force that men will find it impossible
to break.”
Sadly, Ruth sliced her finger on the edge of a page in the Saturday Evening Post and died of septicemia before seeing women enfranchised. The deciding ballot in favor of national suffrage for women was cast, coincidentally, by a young legislator from East Tennessee. The night before the vote in Nashville, this young man received a letter from his mother in the mountains saying that she counted on him to do right by her and his sisters. The next day he switched his vote from con to pro. Afterward he had to jump out a window to escape an enraged mob of opponents.
In emulation of this refreshing new role model, I volunteer as a birth control and abortion counselor at Planned Parenthood, having been permanently traumatized in high school by seeing the lives of some of my classmates destroyed by a lack of such services.
Wearing a gold enamel bracelet of Greatgrandma Pealer’s that my mother has given me, I march on Washington at the drop of a hat. Each time I round the corner and start down Pennsylvania Avenue through the gauntlet of jeering men who hate everything I represent, I draw courage from the image of Inez Milholland in her white robes, riding a white horse, leading Greatgrandma Pealer and her cohorts through similar mobs in 1913.1 try to do my tiny bit to keep their ball rolling, but I avoid the Saturday Evening Post.
3
Insects in Amber
SOON WEARIED BY THE TRAFFIC JAMS of Gotham and inspired by the vision of surviving a nuclear attack with a home garden, Richard and I go back to the land in rural Vermont. Living in a crumbling brick farmhouse on a defunct dairy farm, we discover why our ancestors left the land in the first place. As the communes all around us turn on and tune out, I smoke beehives. As they smash monogamy, Richard faints while castrating baby roosters into capons.
When I become pregnant, I realize that I’ve finally found my calling: I’m an Earth Mother. Dressed in an Indian-print peasant dress, I attend natural childbirth classes, where I learn the breathing techniques that will allow my baby and me to escape poisoning from narcotics hawked by a drug industry motivated by greed.
One night I dream I’m holding our new baby. As I inspect its tiny hands, I discover an extra finger on each one. Although I wake up sweating, I laugh this off to Richard, explaining my childhood obsession with the Melungeons. But when I’m tired, I drive Richard mad itemizing the things that might go wrong. And I know them all from the dinner-table seminars with my father.
When we reach the Burlington hospital, the maternity wing is closed for renovations. My contractions are coming fast as we race for the other hospital. Its overcrowded maternity floor is packed with moaning mothers. I join them on my gurney of pain as a protesting Richard is led away to the fathers’ waiting room.
It’s hunting season, so many of the obstetricians are stalking deer in the snowy forests. The doctor on call has just had a heart attack during a delivery. Things don’t look promising, but I keep panting as I’ve been taught, like a hound with heat stroke. Never in my wildest fantasies have I imagined such pain. The torments devised by the Marquis de Sade would seem like child’s play to any woman who’s ever been through labor.
Soon I’m begging for every drug ever invented, delighted at the prospect of single-handedly supporting the entire pharmaceutical industry. I pledge to purchase large blocks of their stock if I survive this ordeal, which looks increasingly unlikely.
This prognosis is confirmed when I hear a soft murmuring above me that includes the name of Jesus. A nun is standing over me telling her rosary beads.
Don’t talk to me about Christ’s suffering on the cross, I silently rage. Did Jesus push a bowling ball through the nozzle of a pastry bag with his stomach muscles? As I scowl at this presumed virgin in black, the next contraction hits me.
When it’s over, I’m enchanted with the results — a tiny baby girl as exhausted as I am. Richard assures me she has no extra digits.
To occupy myself while my daughter Sara naps, I decide that either I can watch As the World Turns or I can write my own soap opera. I start my first novel. When Sara is awake, I put her in a backpack and we hike through the woods and pastures. Or she toddles around the yard tormenting the dog as I garden. Or she plays with pot lids on the kitchen floor as I can tomatoes or make raspberry jam.
While she sleeps, I write about a character who doesn’t know who she is. She tries on roles as though they’re Halloween costumes, but none fits — including Earth Motherhood.
My current problem is that I don’t do drugs. When people pass joints at parties, I diligently inhale. But instead of collapsing into hysterical laughter over bad jokes, I fall asleep, confirming my lifelong reputation as a drag.
In addition, because of my occasional bouts of melancholy I’m leery of introducing outside chemicals into the already noxious soup my body can brew for itself. And I’ve read that magic mushrooms are sometimes dried apples injected with hog tranquilizer.
One of my father’s favorite stories concerns his treating a dozen people for lockjaw one night at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York. They all attended a party at which they shot up heroin cut on a dusty mantel. The dust gave all these hip fun-seekers tetanus.
One afternoon I find myself leaving Sara with Richard and driving to the University of Vermont library to look up those six-fingered bogeymen of my youth — the Melungeons.
I learn that they were a group of olive-skinned people found living in what is now northeastern Tennessee by the early European settlers. In 1782, John Sevier reputedly found “white Indians” in that area. They themselves said they were “Portyghee.” But certain seemingly non-Portuguese surnames are associated with them — Collins, Mullins, Goins, Boiling, and Gibson being the most common. Most researchers source the name Melungeon to the French word melange, meaning “mixed.”
I picture my high school classmates who bore those surnames, but I can’t recall any distinguishing characteristics. They had many different shades of eye, hair, and skin, and none had six fingers.
My sources divide into two hostile camps. The Romantics ascribe Melungeon origins to Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, to survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, to deserters from sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions, or to other exotic sources too far-fetched even for someone as gullible as myself. Normally I’ll believe anything for a while, but wayward Phoenicians in Appalachia nudge me over the edge.
The Academics, however, insist that the Melungeons are merely one of some two hundred groups of “tri-racial isolates” numbering around 100,000 people, found throughout the southeastern United States as far west as Louisiana and as far north as New Jersey. These communities — with names like the Red-bones and the Brass Ankles, the Moors and the Turks — are said to be the product of early mixing on the frontier among natives, free blacks, escaped slaves, European fur traders, et al. Some were labeled “free persons of color” in census records.
In 1891, Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole visited some Melungeons and described them as “natural born rogues, close, suspicious, inhospitable, untruthful, cowardly, and, to use their own word, sneaky.”
None of my sources mentions cave dwellings or extra fingers.
I persuade a couple of magazines to commission articles from me — one on snake handlers for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and another on the Melungeons for a London sociological journal called New Society. Both require me to go to Tennessee, where I’ve spent very little time since leaving for Wellesley. I’ve popped in for holidays every year or two. But this time I stay long enough to take a look around.
As I stroll the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, I realize that two kids I played Trail of Tears with are now dead — Martha from the car crash and Pam from lupus. They say the good die young, and my own continued existence gives me pause. Martha and Pam were definitely good people. But it’s also possible they didn’t have enough time in which to be bad.
Martha’s brother Nie works for Tennessee Eastman. Stacy is a long-distance trucker based in Texas. Stanley
flies a corporate jet out of Mississippi. It’s hard for me to picture the funny little kid who helped my brother Bill burn down our tree house piloting a plane with other people’s lives in his hands. But he no doubt feels equally skeptical about my being in charge of a small child.
The girls with whom I cruised Broad Street are now living all over the country. Marty works for Proctor and Gamble in Cleveland. One Jane is a city planner in New Orleans. Another Jane is an executive at ABC in New York. Barbara is a banker in Massachusetts. Portia is a real estate lawyer in Chicago. Susan is an investment analyst in New York.
My brother Bill is in medical school in New Orleans, and Michael is at Vanderbilt. After MIT and Columbia, John joined the sociology department at UNC Chapel Hill. He married his high school girlfriend, a gifted pianist with degrees from Duke and Harvard, and they have two young daughters. He’s on the vestry of the Episcopal church. He wears handsome tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, and he smokes a pipe. He has clearly negotiated his identity crisis more successfully than I.
It would be stretching credibility to claim that we’re all part of the Appalachian brain drain, but it’s true that we’ve all left town. Even my grandmother has flown the coop. She’s commandeered my retired Latin teacher to tour the Holy Land, sending my parents a photo of Miss Elmore and herself, both wearing Arab keffiyehs, sitting astride camels with a pyramid behind them and two sinister-looking Bedouin guides below.
I borrow one of my parents’ cars and drive downtown for old times’ sake. As I cruise a deserted Broad Street to the boarded-up train station, I discover that J. Fred’s has been turned into a discount furniture store. The movie theaters are closed, one having become a cheerleading school. Many stores are vacant. Nobody is walking the streets. The Model City has become a ghost town. Everyone must be shopping at the new mall or eating at restaurants on the franchise strip along the highway. I realize that you really can’t go home again, but only because home as you knew it no longer exists.
