by Lisa Alther
I consider staying permanently in London so that I don’t have to be an American anymore. Although I’ve only officially been one since I arrived in England, shouldering the blame for everything that’s wrong with the world has me already exhausted. I’d have preferred to remain a simple Appalachian peasant so that I could be a victim of American imperialism rather than its perpetrator. But if I could become an exile in England instead of just a tourist, I could disclaim responsibility for anything at all.
I also love living at the crossroads of the former British Empire. Every day I meet fascinating new people from South Africa, New Zealand, India. Each time I fly out of Heathrow, I stand in front of the departure board and savor the names of the destinations, just as I did with the boxcars back home: Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Moscow, Stockholm, Tangiers….
On the other hand, after two years in London I still feel like a foreigner, despite the Tidewater land grants. My British friends are cool, witty, and urbane. Their most insulting epithet is “wet,” meaning “earnest,” which they often apply to Americans (despite the fact that it won’t be Americans who will build an altar of teddy bears outside Kensington Palace after Princess Di’s death). If you lay dying among the strutting pigeons in Trafalgar Square, your charming rescuers would offer you a pun to undercut the gravity of your situation. The British lack the Christ-crazed hysteria of southerners and the somber fanaticism of Yankees, and I find myself homesick for both.
In the end, I conclude that it isn’t healthy for me to live in a place where people hate me for eating hamburgers.
Back in Vermont, as I await publication of Original Sins, curiosity finally trumps inertia. For many years I wondered why my father or grandparents didn’t take us to meet our Virginia relatives. But I’ve had my driver’s license for over twenty years now, and I’ve never gone either. Now that I have a child of my own, I find myself more interested in the gossamer webs of kinship. So I decide to fly to Tennessee, leave Sara with my parents, and at last drive to southwest Virginia to meet some of these strangers who reputedly share my genes.
After I arrive at my parents’ house, my grandmother’s silver Cadillac materializes in the driveway like the coupe of Cruella De Vil. I go out to greet her. Her frosted perm is afrizzle, but she says nothing. She believes that cultivated people should communicate in ultrasonic squeaks, like bats. And she does get her point across: she doesn’t want me to visit her childhood stomping grounds. But I don’t know why.
She slides out of her car. As I hug her, I can tell that she’s lost weight. Encased in mink, she feels like a bear emerging from hibernation after a long winter’s nap. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the Virginia Club is appalled by my first novel, Kinflicks. It’s bawdy and contains some vulgar language. It also implicitly criticizes Tennessee Eastman, Kingsport’s sugar teat, for polluting the town’s air and water. No one has uttered a word about the book to my grandmother, in keeping with the old southern dictum, “If you can’t be kind, be vague.”
Looking me up and down, my grandmother says, “You know, your father’s a wonderful man.”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.” I glance at her quizzically.
“He never has a bad word to say about you!”
She sweeps inside to greet Sara, leaving me standing in the driveway feeling as though I’ve just been slapped.
My father’s response to Kinflicks was, with an amused smile, “I ought to take you out to the woodshed.”
But my friend Nellie reports that he’s written on a slip of paper the amount of money for which the paperback rights sold and pinned it inside his suit jacket. Whenever people bring up the book at parties, he just opens his jacket and flashes the amount at them to shut them up.
I soak my corn bread in the liquid from my soup beans at a cafeteria in Clintwood, Virginia. Across from me sit my father’s schoolteacher first cousins, Vonda and Zella. I’m trying to figure out why my grandmother has never introduced us. They seem delightful in every way.
I’m intrigued by their names, but they have no ancestral explanation for them. Their parents just liked the sounds. This isn’t uncommon in our region. Some of my relatives I’ve never met are named Arbutus, Nicatie, Bluford, Darkus, Ordealy, Perlina, Orbra, Bureta, Ancil, Rebeal. One is even named Spicie Dewdrop. And I’ve heard of girls in Riverview called Formica Dinette and Placenta Sue.
Vonda tells me about a road trip another cousin took with my grandmother. Several hours from home my grandmother realized that she’d forgotten her glasses.
When they checked out of their hotel the next morning, my grandmother said to the desk clerk, “Sir, I know that your guests must sometimes leave their eyeglasses in their rooms?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, “plenty do. We save them in a box in case they come back for them.”
My grandmother explained her plight. She proposed borrowing an abandoned pair to use on her trip, which she’d return to him on the way home. He pulled out the box of glasses. She tried some on, picked a pair she liked, and continued down the road. Vonda marvels at my grandmother’s resourcefulness, insisting there has never been a problem she couldn’t solve. {Kinflicks may be the first.)
A jury arrives at the cafeteria from the courthouse across the street. Our waitress explains that the case they’re hearing involves a football star at the local high school. The previous year he ran into a goalpost headfirst, scoring a winning touchdown and breaking his neck. He was buried in a church cemetery in town. The footballer’s parents have divorced, and his mother is moving away. She’s suing the father for custody. She wants to dig up their son and take him with her.
After lunch, I scale a steep hill on the edge of town. In the doorway of her attractive contemporary house I meet my grandmother’s cousin Hetty Swindall Sutherland. A decade older than my father, she wears her gray hair in a braid coiled atop her head. Vonda and Zella have reported that she sprints up and down her bluff, into town and back, every day. She reminds me of an aging Heidi. After assuring me that the rumors of a Cherokee in the family are untrue, she gives me a huge volume of oral histories collected early in the twentieth century by her late lawyer husband from the original settlers of the county.
Back in the car I look up the references to my various ancestors. One concerns my four-times-great-grandmother Betty Reeves. Her great-granddaughter, a first cousin to both my grandparents, states that Betty was a Portuguese Indian. I sit in stunned silence. Is this what my grandmother doesn’t want me to know? Some of the early Melungeons claimed they were Portuguese….
I also find several accounts of Civil War skirmishes in that area. I learn that my grandmother’s grandfather John Wesley Swindall (also my grandfather’s great-uncle) was a sergeant in the Union army. There’s a photo of him and his wife. He has straight black hair, a bushy gray beard that conceals his face, and small dark eyes. His wife, Polly Phipps, a granddaughter of the Portuguese Indian Betty Reeves, is a dark-eyed brunette. I read that John Wesley’s mother, Betsy Swindall, never married and that John Wesley’s father was named Solomon Tolliver.
I discover that my grandmother’s great-uncle Eli Vanover injured an arm fighting for the Union in the battle of Cranesnest in 1864. Her great-grandfather George Howell also fought for the Union in that battle.
My grandfather Reed’s parents, as well as some Vanover relatives of my grandmother, moved behind Union lines in Kentucky so as not to have to support the Confederacy. My grandfather’s grandfather Robert Y. Haynes was taken prisoner by some Confederate soldiers, who slaughtered one of his cows. Ironic that my grandfather put himself through medical school by caring for Confederate veterans, some of whom might have fought against his own relatives.
Having at last accepted that Appalachians are as racist as other southerners, I now discover that most of my ancestors supported the Union. I’d revere my ancestors, whoever they are — but who the hell are they? No wonder my grandmother, self-proclaimed duchess of Dixie, doesn’t want me prowling around over here. If she’s a so
utherner, then Billy Graham is Jewish.
Next I drive to the town of Wise to meet a distant cousin named Greg. We sit over glasses of iced tea in a coffee shop. He has dark, shiny hair and ruddy coloring. A few years younger than I, he’s writing a history of my grandmother’s family, the Vanovers. He, too, is a schoolteacher, and he tells me about tracing the Vanovers back to Cornelys Van Hovgem, who emigrated in 1684 to Flatbush in Brooklyn from Zeeland in the Netherlands. His descendants moved to New Jersey and then to North Carolina, where the fifth Cornelius Vanover married a woman named Abby Easterd, who is Greg’s and my four-times-great-grandmother. Greg says some of her earlier descendants applied for membership in the Cherokee Nation based on their claim that she was a full-blooded Cherokee.
He shows me the first photo I’ve ever seen of William Vanover, my grandmother’s grandfather, himself a grandson of Abby Easterd. He has high cheekbones and dark eyes set deep in their sockets. If the rumors about Abby are true, he’d have been a quarter Cherokee, and he does look it.
There are other nonwhites in the family, Greg says. When I press him, he replies that some Vanovers were described as Black Dutch by their neighbors. When I ask what this means, he hops in his car and speeds away. Later I write him several letters that he never answers.
My fourth stop on this Heritage Trail is the cabin of my grandfather’s nephew Bob, the son of a man who drove a wagon from the lowlands loaded with merchandise for his father’s store in the mountains. Bob was like a kid brother to my grandfather. My mother says I met him at my grandfather’s funeral, but I don’t remember him.
Banjo music drifts from his tiny cabin, which sits alone in a hilltop clearing in the middle of nowhere. Bob answers the door, holding the banjo by its neck. Well along in years, he looks like my grandfather’s identical twin, tall and lean with a large beaked nose and ears with unusually long lobes. Put a headdress on him, and he’d be a dead ringer for a Shawnee warrior.
Nancy Skaggs, my grandfather’s paternal grandmother and Bob’s great-grandmother, was reputedly kidnapped by several renegade Shawnee from her family’s homestead in the Virginia backwoods. The story goes that a man named George Reed tracked these Shawnee to their encampment and rescued Nancy as the Shawnee slept. George and Nancy hid overnight in a cave while the enraged Indians hunted for them.
Nine months later, Nancy, now Mrs. Reed, gave birth to my grandfather’s father, also named George Reed. Everyone apparently pretended to believe that old George was, in fact, the father of little George. But they must have wondered if it were really possible to make love in a cave while angry Indians were searching for you. Could one of the Shawnee have actually fathered little George?
Every second family in the South claims descent from either a Cherokee princess or a European woman abducted by ravaging natives. Several volumes of Indian captivity narratives were published in the nineteenth century. Some of the kidnapped Europeans wanted to remain with their captors, saying that they found Indian society more congenial than the lives they’d left behind.
The card-carrying members of Native American tribes that have achieved recognition from the federal government call such Europeans who claim Indian ancestry “wannabes.” I understand their scorn, stemming no doubt from an aversion to sharing their casino profits with those whose ancestors escaped the depredations heaped on others whose complexions left them no choice but to be labeled Indian.
I once talked in Boston with a couple of members of a small California tribe who ridiculed the Cherokee for accepting so many wannabes. I felt as though I were at a meeting of the membership committee for the Virginia Club. (Future DNA testing will show that federally recognized tribes exhibit an average of 61.1 percent Native American ancestry, whereas the unrecognized exhibit 47.6 percent.)
The function of such pervasive wannabe mythology may be to explain away darker-skinned family members. Also, if you can claim a few drops of native blood, perhaps you don’t have to feel quite so guilty about the relentless atrocities committed on Indians by your European ancestors.
But in some cases wannabes could be actually-ares. Plenty of people with documented Indian heritage who were pale enough to dodge it didn’t want their names on some official government watch list, where they’d be sitting ducks for any new form of discrimination that might come down the pike. Even now some descendants of these unrecorded Indians sneer at the “reservation Indians” for having been bought off by government subsidies.
As we sit down on Bob’s cot, he tells me about having been a miner and then a car salesman. He says my grandfather owned one of the first autos in the county — a Model T Ford. He was thrilled at the prospect of putting his horses out to pasture. But when he tried to drive the car on his house calls, it got mired down in the rutted wagon paths that served as roads.
One day when he was creeping down a steep incline, his brakes failed. The car picked up speed. My grandfather jumped out just as the Ford careened off the track and bounced down a cliff on its hard rubber tires. At the foot of the cove it plunged into a creek. He decided to leave it there and bring his horses back from retirement.
When I mention having visited Hetty, Bob tells me about two of her husband’s in-laws, brothers named Cage and Buck Ervin, who were arrested for passing counterfeit coins. While awaiting trial in a jail cell, Buck groaned, “Cage, Fm worried that we won’t get justice.”
“Shut up, you sorry fool,” Cage hissed, “we don’t want justice.”
Then Bob tells me about my grandfather’s uncle Caleb Haynes, who longed to be a preacher. At the end of his first sermon, as he exhorted his audience to come to the altar and be saved, he proclaimed, “The time which was to have arriven has arroven!” The congregation started giggling and couldn’t stop.
Next Bob tells me about my grandfather’s first love, Maggie Gibson. She married someone else and moved to Kentucky. I recognize Gibson as a Melungeon surname. Having failed to learn from experience, I ask Bob if Maggie was Melungeon.
Bob grabs his banjo and begins playing a reel, explaining that he often plays it for barn dances. I have to admire my relatives’ powers of deflection. They’ve honed to a fine edge the ability to tell someone to get lost in the most charming ways possible.
As I drive away, I reflect on my grandfather’s failed love. Did he not marry Maggie because she was Melungeon? Might his sister Evalyn have opposed such a union? Or did Maggie’s family object to him because he was a landless, penniless orphan? Or was he too young? He ran away from his sister’s farm in his early teens, hiking a hundred miles through the Cumberlands to join two brothers in Kentucky. Was he trailing woefully along after Maggie and her new husband? Or might he and Maggie have tried to run off together and been stopped? I’ll never know now because my grandfather is dead. Although sad for him that this relationship didn’t work out, I’m glad for myself. Otherwise, I wouldn’t exist.
One after another I pass the church marquees on the outskirts of Kingsport, consulting their messages as earnestly as I would the slips in fortune cookies:
JESUS IS MY ROCK AND MY NAME IS ON HIS ROLL.
A MIND IN THE GUTTER IS A LIFE DOWN THE DRAIN.
COME ON IN AND JOIN OUR PROPHET-SHARING PLAN.
AVOID TRUTH DECAY: BRUSH UP ON YOUR BIBLE.
And today’s winner is, I silently announce to my imaginary audience of enthralled Christians, the Bethel Presbyterians with
NOTHINGTO BETHANKFUL FOR? TRY TAKING YOUR OWN PULSE.
Back at my parents’ house I tell them about my encounters. We try to decide whether my grandmother is afraid I’ll have learned about Maggie Gibson, Betty Reeves, Abby Easterd, Bob Artrip’s low-rent living arrangements, John Wesley Swindall’s having been in the Union army, or his illegitimacy. Or is there some other unsavory secret I haven’t yet sniffed out?
My father tells us about Bob’s father, Casander, the teamster who was also sheriff for his county. One afternoon when my father was a boy, Uncle Cas took him fishing. They sat on a hillside while Cas d
rank from a jar of home brew and tossed sticks of dynamite into the creek below. He sent my father down to collect the fish that landed on the shore.
Finally my father asked, “Uncle Cas, isn’t this against the law?”
Cas replied, “Son, in these parts, I am the law.”
My father speculates that this is why his parents left that area — to escape both the omnipresent moonshine and the casual violence. He said my grandfather carried a revolver when he lived there, not just as protection against drug addicts but also in response to a death threat from someone unhappy with his political affiliation.
My mother has just returned from church, where she’s heard that my grandmother’s aunt Ura Grizzle is ill. My mother suggests I go see Ura, since she’s 104 and may not live much longer. Maybe she’ll provide some of the information my grandmother has censored. My father has said that when he was a boy Aunt Ura told him there were Cherokee in her family. I’ve met Aunt Ura just once, even though she lives only a dozen blocks away with her daughter, Annette. For many years she was the truancy officer for the Kingsport schools.
“If ‘twere well done,” quotes my mother, “‘twere well ‘twere done quickly.”
My mother is pleased I’m showing an interest in my ancestry. She’s spent all her adult life in the South with her nearest relatives nine hundred miles away. Her own ancestors have been more real to her than her everyday acquaintances, not unlike the cast of The Young and the Restless for a soap opera addict. She’s constantly struggling to decipher boxes full of their correspondence. She refers to them, in a phrase from the Episcopal prayer book, as her “cloud of witnesses.”
My mother’s favorite saying, no doubt handed down from Cotton Mather, is, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” She prides herself on never having bought a mattress, having inherited them all. Every mattress in our house has been slept on by scores of her witnesses. They feel like it, too, each with a body-shaped crater in the center that it’s impossible not to roll into at night, like an open grave. Lying there in these family foxholes, I always feel as though I’m cradled in the embrace of my Pilgrim fathers.
