by Lisa Alther
I keep in touch with my New York friends via messages on our answering machines. Unless you impersonate the Dalai Lama, they can’t make a date with you on their Palm Pilots in under three weeks. Once those weeks have expired, they cancel.
Canceling in New York is a spiritual discipline, like a Japanese tea ceremony. It’s important to cancel, but not too soon. If you don’t cancel, the other person may think that you have nothing more important to do than to see him, which will lessen his respect for you. But should you cancel too soon, he might have time to make other plans, rather than sitting at home alone thinking about how much more important you are than he.
The only way to be absolutely certain that you maintain the respect of your New York friends is never to call them at all, which will prove that, like them, you’re too busy and important to have time for your friends. But this may incite them to call you for dates that they can cancel so as to regain your respect for them as people who are too busy to see you. Either that, or they’ll forget all about you.
If you do get to lay eyes on the elusive New Yorker, it’s often at very delightful dinner parties. During the conversations everyone lets it be known that not only is he or she a New Yorker, he’s also Jewish or French or Chinese, African-American or Italian-American or Irish-American. Their confidence about exactly who they are gives me a severe case of genus envy.
One night I try to emulate their ethnic élan by mentioning that not only am I an authentic in utero New Yorker, I’m also an Appalachian-American. My dinner companions look at me pityingly and segue seamlessly to another topic.
I guess if you live in a city of eight million, you need to be very clear about who you are or you might lose yourself in the crowds. This possibility reminds me of a Sufi story I heard from my Afghan friends in London about a merchant in a crowded caravanserai who ties a gourd around his ankle before going to sleep so that he’ll know which person he is when he wakes up. To tease him another merchant ties his gourd on to someone else’s ankle while he’s asleep. When he awakens, the first merchant looks at the gourd on the other man’s ankle and says to him, “Excuse me, but if you’re me, then who am I?”
I’m sitting in an office in midtown Manhattan speaking my pidgin French with a chunky man with dyed red hair that doesn’t suit his weathered face. You very quickly run out of small talk with a stranger, especially in a language not your own, but since this immersion course lasts for two weeks, we have to keep talking no matter what. So our topics are becoming increasingly intimate.
I tell him that I’ve decided I’m too lazy to be a New Yorker. I like to hang out. My character was shaped by cruising Broad Street. I’d like to cruise Broadway, but I can’t find anyone who isn’t working to do it with me. (In fact, the only person I can find to hang out with me at all is this elderly Frenchman who’s charging me eighty dollars an hour. He thinks he’s running a language school, but he’s actually running an escort service.)
My tutor is Jewish, and he tells me about his activities with the Resistance during World War II, employing his language skills and various disguises against the SS somewhere in the Alps. Four times he was captured and sent to camps from which he escaped. He complains that some Frenchmen who collaborated big-time with the Nazis have never been charged.
I tell him about my father’s experiences in the field hospitals of France. He listens intently. Then he thanks me for having done without my father as a baby so that he and others like him could live. Once I figure out what he’s said, I almost burst into tears. I’ve never thought about it like that before.
Then he asks me (in French), “Why do you want to go to Paris? New York is the greatest city in the world. Why not just stay here?”
I don’t admit that what I’m actually interested in is the three-hour lunches and the early-evening assignations with paramours that I’ve read about in Belle Epoque novels. Instead I explain that some of my ancestors were French and that I want to experience their world.
“Their world!” he snorts. “The French! What are the French? I’ll tell you what the French are: the French take an anorexic woman and drape her in fabric and call it haute couture. The French cover disgusting animal organs with a sauce and call it haute cuisine. The French don’t bathe for a week and then douse themselves in scent and call it eau de quelquechose.”
Although alarmed by this tirade, I assure him that I still want to go there. My mother’s father’s grandfather, Phillip Grün, was a miller in Alsace. And some of the ancestors that Greatgrandma Pealer edited out of her DAR application were French Huguenots named Sauvage. My mother and I have tracked them from Montpelier to Picardy to London to Massachusetts.
My teacher gives a Gallic shrug. “You notice they all left?”
Undaunted, I rent a sixth-floor walk-up atop the butte of Montmartre from Jan, a professor friend in Florida. The entire City of Light spreads out below me, the Eiffel Tower in the center. I sit by the open doors in the afternoon sun for hours, smoking miniature Dutch cigars and reading French history, transfixed by the view as the swallows swoop and the clouds drift, as the sunlight shifts and fades, as the stars pop out above the city and the Eiffel Tower illuminates.
As with London and the land grants, and my New York days in utero, I expect to feel right at home here in Paris because of my French ancestors. Also, I know some writers and publishers here, as well as some American professors who own flats in which they spend vacations and sabbaticals.
But instead I soon feel like a Hun hunkered down outside the gates of Rome — especially after a French friend confides that it’s considered bad manners to use someone’s bathroom at a party. She says foreigners are forgiven since they don’t know any better, but that French children are trained to use the toilet before they leave home and to hold it until they get back. This sounds not unlike the instructions given Negro children in the South during segregation. I blush thinking about all the French toilets I’ve unwittingly defiled.
I start to see what my tutor in New York was trying to warn me about. Distaste for the natural has inspired the French to invent such elegant contortions as ballet, dressage, Versailles, and the espaliered fruit tree. Since my French ancestors’ surname, Sauvage, means “savage,” I realize that my siege of the battlements of Artifice may as well be lifted before it’s even begun.
I continue to find my French companions delightful in every way, but I come to understand the genesis of their Hundred Years’ War with the British. In fact, I’m amazed it didn’t last longer. No two groups could be more different and still metabolize oxygen. The English specialize in understatement. If his house and entire family have been swept away in a flash flood, an Englishman might acknowledge having had a bit of bad luck.
Whereas the French specialize in inflation. They’re not just pleased to meet you, they’re ravi or enchanté. They’re not just sorry to miss your phone call, they’re desolé. (In reality, the emotional charge behind a French ravi and an English pleased are roughly similar.)
You can see more of these differences in their novels. Pride and Prejudice starts with courtship and ends in marriage. Madame Bovary starts with marriage and ends in death.
For the English, love is pleasant, and sex can be rather jolly. But for the French, to love is to suffer. And a French friend once admitted that for her the best parts of sex are the chase beforehand and the Gitane after. From my reading of Lacan I know that for any self-respecting Gaul, an attraction, once consummated, is finished because le désir can exist only when its object is unattainable. Even Napoleon was quoted as saying, “The only victory in love is flight.” This may explain why Paris has more citizens who live alone than any other city in the world.
In the end, I’m forced to face the fact that the Catholic ancestors of my French friends, if they knew the Sauvages, hated them. They wanted to kill them in especially painful ways. They invited some Huguenots to Paris for a royal wedding and then murdered somewhere between 10,000 and 70,000 of them all across France, tossing th
em into the rivers until the waters flowed red with Huguenot blood. That’s why the Sauvages fled. And you can’t happily go home again if the people you left behind ran you out in the first place.
My fifth novel, Five Minutes in Heaven, is written in front of that window overlooking the Eiffel Tower, with the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame, Les Invalides and the Pantheon, lying below me like miniatures in a child’s toy village. The book turns into an attempt to unite my own scattered beads of mercury — urban and rural, northern and southern, American and European. My main character grows up in East Tennessee, lives in New York City, and then moves to Paris. Experiencing these cultural differences, she comes to understand that love in its highest sense is the only force that can override the conflicts and violence that such surface variations incite.
Once I finish it, I feel suffused with an unfamiliar peace. I don’t have to try to choose among my warring heritages anymore. They are all me. My psyche is a Balkans, but I can establish my own Yugoslavia within. I can be my own Tito.
A couple of American reviewers demand to know why an American would want to write about France, and French publishers want nothing to do with the book.
*
I return to Kingsport to do a reading from Five Minutes in Heaven. In preparation, I drive to Hair Benders, where I’ve had my hair cut on recent trips home by an entertaining beautician named Diane. This time she tries, as usual, to convince me to let her dye my graying hair. With a tragic expression she lifts strands and lets them fall limply to my head. I explain that I spend much of my time in Vermont and New York, where many women don’t dye their hair.
She replies, “You know, that’s the truth? Those Yankee women don’t make a lot of effort. Why, one time I went up at Baltimore, and I couldn’t hardly find me a woman worth looking at.”
As she trims my dreary hair, she informs me that her mother was once the girlfriend of Duke Means, a notorious local moonshiner. One weekend when Duke failed to phone, her mother retaliated by marrying a mortician at the funeral home where she styled the hair of the corpses (which Diane says beauticians call, among themselves, “deadheads”).
One night a few weeks later, Duke appeared at her door with his bodyguards. Showing her a small revolver cradled in one hand, he said, “Either you can come with me right now, or I can drop you to the floor.”
Not surprisingly, she went with him.
Their affair eventually ended on an airplane runway in Middle Tennessee. The flight in Duke’s private plane had been a stormy one, the plane bobbing like a cork on an angry sea. They couldn’t find the airport through the cloud cover, and the gas was about to run out. Diane’s mother prayed to the Lord that if He’d let them land safely, she’d return to her husband. All at once the sun burst forth and the clouds parted to reveal the landing strip.
Finding herself on the ground in one piece, she realized she had no choice but to strip off the jewelry Duke had given her and tell him it was over.
“I still don’t see why she thought she had to return the jewelry,” muses Diane. “It wasn’t like that was part of the deal.”
I tell her that my father was on call years later when Duke was carried into the emergency room with a gunshot wound in his chest. (He refused to say who had shot him or why.) Duke’s heart had been nicked, and his chest was filling with blood. His family arrived and gathered around his bedside with a hamper full of fried chicken and deviled eggs.
Despite having no pulse, Duke was still conscious. My father explained to him that he needed to take some stitches in the bullet hole in his heart.
Eyes closed, Duke replied, “I don’t want nobody operating on me but Doc Taylor.”
My father said, “But Duke, we can’t find Dr. Taylor. He’s out on the golf course somewhere. And if I don’t operate right now, you’ll die.”
Duke said, “Well, Doc, if Taylor don’t show, you can just take me on over to the graveyard.”
He didn’t — and they did.
During my reading at a bookstore in the Kingsport mall, my friend Jody spots a new book and buys it for me — it’s called The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People. The author, Brent Kennedy, is a self-acknowledged Melungeon.
As I read it that night, I encounter all the familiar origin theories. In addition, Kennedy presents his own belief that the original Melungeons descended, in part, from Turks marooned on the Carolina coast in the sixteenth century. He maintains that the name Melungeon may come from the Turkish melun can or the Arabic melun jinn, both meaning something like “cursed soul,” which is no doubt how people stranded in a strange land surrounded by surly natives might feel about their plight. Later, he theorizes, this sobriquet was adopted by Europeans as a term of opprobrium for the descendants of these early Turks.
Kennedy goes on to discuss the different branches of his own family. One branch turns out to be on my family tree as well — twice over, since my grandparents were cousins. His grandmother’s grandmother and mine were the same person: Polly Phipps, a granddaughter of the alleged Portuguese Indian, Betty Reeves. Polly’s sister Susan was my grandfather’s grandmother. In the appendix, Kennedy lists 137 Melungeon-related surnames. Fourteen appear in my grandparents’ families.
I hunt down Kennedy by phone. Explaining that I’m both his third and fourth cousin, I request a meeting, to which he agrees. I drive to his office at the University of Virginia in Wise, where he’s vice chancellor. He’s a slender, handsome man a few years younger than I. He has wavy dark hair, a very tanned face, and malamute blue eyes. We discuss our shared family members, and he explains why he believes them to be Melungeon.
He says his mother was so concerned about his non-Celtic looks when he was in high school that she tried to persuade him to dye his hair blond. I force myself not to ask if she’s changed her name to Diane and gone to work at Hair Benders.
Brent says that he began his research after learning he had sarcoidosis, a debilitating inflammatory disease usually found in people with African or Mediterranean heritage. Yet he’d always been told he was Irish. One relative poured gasoline on her family photos and burned them up after he asked to see them. Another told him to rot in hell for suggesting that their family might be anything other than Irish. Someone bearing a Melungeon surname posted a fatwa against him on the Internet for proposing that Africans were among the Melungeon melange.
He confesses bewilderment, having originally thought people would be as eager as he to know the truth about their backgrounds. Clearly, he never met my grandmother, for whom genealogy was a blood sport in more ways than one.
At the end of our visit, Brent shows me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs. One of his remaining thumbs is disfigured. He tells me that his great-aunt and several other Melungeons he knows have been born with six fingers on each hand. He jokes that they’re thinking of starting a Six Finger Support Group.
In a state of shock, I drive back to Kingsport and through the row of church signboards that loom like the placards of rival political candidates. But all these churches are stumping for Jesus. The Presbyterians counsel,
THETEN COMMANDMENTS ARE NOT A MULTIPLE CHOICE EXAM.
The Christian church across the intersection says,
IF YOU STAND FOR NOTHING, YOU’LL FALL FOR ANYTHING.
The Methodists’ offering is
GOD IS DEAD. -NIETZSCHE NIETZSCHE IS DEAD. -GOD
The Baptists:
PRAY FOR A GOOD HARVEST BUT KEEP HOEING.
And the Pentecostals:
SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKE ONE WEAK.
But I’m too overwhelmed by Brent’s extra thumbs to choose a winner for today.
My father is intrigued by the notion of being a Melungeon, though he says he’s glad my grandmother is no longer around to hear this. As a doctor he’s often encountered diseases in his patients that aren’t supposed to exist in mountain people of supposedly British ancestry, such as sarcoidosis and thalassemia, a form of anemia that, like sickle cell anemia, confers a pa
rtial immunity against malaria.
My father also says he’s always wondered why his mother’s grandfather, William Vanover, left a fertile farm in North Carolina for hardscrabble land in the Virginia mountains. Abby Easterd, the alleged Cherokee, was William’s grandmother. He left North Carolina not long after the 1838 Trail of Tears. Could he have been driven off his family’s land in the aftermath of the Cherokee roundup? my father asks.
William’s father, Cornelius VI, half Cherokee if the rumors are true, signed his will with an X. Might the Vanovers, unable to leave a written account, have been too ashamed to pass on orally what had happened? Might they have tried to spare their descendants further grief by concealing unpleasant facts? After the southeastern Indians were supposedly all marched off to Oklahoma, dark skin in the Southeast was equated to African ancestry. Mulatto and FPC meant the same thing, and those who insisted on being Indians were ridiculed for trying to escape their fate as Africans. Many hid their Indian ancestry from fear of being shipped west.
I’ve now read about some ancestors that Brent Kennedy and I share — the Sizemores. They’re the laughing stock of wannabe genealogy. They claim Cherokee descent, but their paper trail shows them to be white.
In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside several million dollars and a large amount of land with which to compensate the descendants of Cherokee who lost land under the 1835 Treaty of New Echota just prior to the Trail of Tears. To qualify, applicants had to establish their kinship to a name on one of the official tribal censuses of 1835, 1848, or 1851. Exceptions were occasionally made for those who could prove that their ancestors visited and were visited by enrolled Indians.
The Sizemores filed two thousand applications for reparations, representing five thousand family members, many of whom belonged to a nonrecognized tribe in Virginia called the White Top band of Cherokee. In their interviews, several claimed that their ancestors didn’t appear on the tribal rolls because they were afraid that if they registered, they’d be sent to Oklahoma. All these Sizemore claims were rejected. (Future DNA testing of Sizemore males will show nearly two-thirds have Native American Y chromosomes.)
