Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  If protecting their descendants from persecution was the Vanovers’ reason for silence and subterfuge, I’m grateful. I ponder that water fountain at J. C. Penney’s labeled “Colored” and the side steps up to the balcony at the State Theater. If my ancestors hadn’t been so close-lipped, might I, too, have been barred from drinking chocolate ice cream sodas at Kress’s lunch counter, along with so much else? Probably not, because my father likely wouldn’t have gone north to college — or to college at all. He wouldn’t have met my mother, so I wouldn’t exist.

  Back in Vermont I struggle to fill in the missing leaves on my father’s family tree like a paint-by-number canvas, trying to determine whether or not they were Melungeon. Via various new cyber-cousins encountered on the Internet I sometimes learn another name. But unlike Greatgrandma Pealer, the national genealogist for the DAR, I can’t link my father’s ancestors to Europe. Most lines vanish in the mid-1700s, like creeks in desert sand, somewhere along the New River in the borderlands between Virginia and North Carolina. (Like the Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, which is the oldest bridge in Paris, some claim, based on the ages of the rocks through which it flows and rates of erosion, that the New River is the oldest river in the western hemisphere. Other geologists debunk this claim and posit various ages for the river between 3 and 220 million years.)

  My brave entries on my charts start to have a hopeless feel to them, like the beads patients string in mental hospitals. So I put a couple of professional genealogists on the case. While I’m waiting, I look up Maggie Gibson, my grandfather’s lost love, on the Mormon Web site. I find a Maggie Gibson born in southwest Virginia in the same year as my grandfather. But she’s already died in Ohio.

  Many months and dollars later the genealogists report that none of my father’s ancestors except the Dutch Vanovers has made it out of the mountains and back to a seaport in an officially documented fashion.

  I’m quite annoyed that my cousin Brent has opened this can of worms for me. By writing Five Minutes in Heaven, I thought I’d made peace with my crazy quilt of ancestors. But here I am face to face once again with those six-fingered peckerwoods who haunted my childhood. I feel deep nostalgia for the days when I was a Queen Teen and identity seemed a simple matter of not being a Devilish Deb.

  Even though he’s retired, my father is still very busy. He’s entered every sweepstakes that exists. Stacks of mail arrive each day. He spends many hours filling out forms and pasting award stamps in boxes. He’s made friends with the operators at the 1-800 numbers of the sponsoring companies. They give him tips for becoming a finalist. He wouldn’t dream of being out of his house on Superbowl Sunday because he might miss the arrival of the Prize Patrol from the Publishers Clearing House.

  Sometimes my father phones me in Vermont to ask what color I’d like the Jaguar he’s about to win to be. I’ve planned the menus for more celebratory dinners at the Plaza Hotel than I can count on one five-fingered hand. Each Christmas we all receive nests of metal storage bowls decaled with violets, or sets of plastic coasters stenciled with Amish designs, which my father orders at the behest of the 1-800 operators to enhance his chances of becoming a finalist. What I enjoy most about my father’s new hobby is finally finding someone as gullible as my grandfather Reed and myself— and right in our own family!

  My father decides to take time out from his pursuit of sweepstakes triumphs to assist my ancestral research by attending some family reunions. He seems as eager as I am to uncover the truth about his elusive parents.

  All over the South people with the same surname gather together on church lawns and in American Legion halls each summer. They catch up with one another, get to know new attendees, and eat some of the best potluck victuals ever invented, many of them involving miniature marshmallows.

  My father drives my mother up to Hatfield-McCoy country in Kentucky for the Reed reunion. He phones me to report that it’s uncanny to be surrounded by a hundred men who all look like his father — many well over my father’s own six-four; with sky-blue eyes, noses like the beaks of hawks, and long earlobes. In my mind’s eye, I picture an adult version of the children in The Village of the Damned.

  My father’s second reunion is held in a motel conference room in western North Carolina for the Reeves family. Betty Reeves, his three-times-great-grandmother, is the purported Portuguese Indian. My father is delighted with his newfound cousins. But they know nothing about Portuguese Indians, nor do they want to. Their main concern is to link their lineages to Christopher Reeve.

  The woman who’s organized this reunion arrives late in a new-model Cadillac, chauffeured by a black man in a uniform and cap. She bustles around greeting people and handing out name tags that link each Reeves to the various Reeves progenitors.

  In her welcoming address, this woman offers to start a Reeves newsletter and organize another reunion for the following year. The grateful Reeves descendants take up a collection, each contributing $20 for postage and supplies. Thanking her “kissing cousins,” the woman folds the bills and slips them into her Paloma Picasso handbag.

  At the end of the afternoon the woman climbs into her Cadillac and waves good-bye to her assembled kinfolk, who wave gaily back, intoxicated by the hours of family reminiscences and by the platters of seafoam fudge divinity. They never hear from, or of, this woman again.

  Dad returns glumly to his sweepstakes forms, muttering that his 1-800 operator friends would never behave so dishonorably.

  6

  Wilderness Forts

  MY VERMONT FRIENDS SHAKE THEIR HEADS and murmur among themselves about the waste of a fine mind. They can’t fathom my ancestor worship. They’ve meditated at ashrams, so they know that the past is dead and the future yet to come. That the key to contentment is to be here now, not there then. The only problem I have with the present moment is that it’s so brief, whereas the past endures for as long as there’s a single soul left to remember it, however distortedly

  A Swiss friend living in Vermont confesses that she doesn’t get it. She’d thought America was the land of the future, freed from the European obsession with the past. Why do I want to gaze backward?

  I try to explain that southerners, like Australian aboriginals, feel we scarcely exist except as an extension of our ancestors. We spend much of our lives in rapt contemplation of the Dream-time. It’s no wonder we lost the Civil War.

  But secretly I’m beginning to agree that my preoccupation with the past is interfering with my participation in the present. I don’t know whether my cousin Brent’s belief that our shared ancestors are Melungeon is accurate or not. Are Melungeons just those from families with the traditional surnames who lived in the traditional strongholds? Our family includes several surnames that Brent maintains are Melungeon-related — Burton, Fields, Hill, Martin, Phipps, Reeves, Sizemore, Swindall, Tolliver, Vanover, White. But only one of my ancestral surnames, Boiling, is found among the five that all researchers would agree are Melungeon — Mullins, Collins, Gibson, Goins, and Boiling. Of course, the daughters from those families would have taken their husbands’ surnames, so the heritage would have spread. And although we don’t live on Newman’s Ridge, my grandparents grew up just over the border from it in Virginia. And I grew up just down the road in Kingsport.

  Were you Melungeon only if your neighbors thought of you as such? I have no idea what my ancestors’ neighbors called them behind their backs, any more than I know what my current neighbors may call me. My cousin Greg said that some Vanovers were labeled Black Dutch. Some say this term denotes the Dutch who, prior to immigration to America, mingled with the Spanish soldiers who invaded the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, or with Sephardic refugees in Amsterdam who fled the Spanish Inquisition during this same period. Others maintain that Roma (Gypsies) from Germany sometimes called themselves Black Dutch (Deutsche) to explain away their darker coloring, as did Germans from the Black Forest and the Danube region who were descended from African legionnaires stationed there by the Romans. Still others
claim that the label Black Dutch, as well as Black Irish, was invented to disguise European families that had mixed with Africans and/or Indians on the early frontiers of this country.

  If my ancestors were Melungeon, when did this mixing occur and among whom? It’s like trying to unravel a sweater knitted by a homemaker hopped up on crystal meth. My current exit strategy from this quagmire is to examine each Melungeon myth in turn, anoint the least nonsensical, and then get on with my life. First, the Spanish explorers. Then the shipwrecked Portuguese. Finally, the Lost Colony. With a dollop of Pocahontas on the side.

  Partly in order to facilitate this research, I accept a job teaching southern fiction at East Tennessee State University. I rent a condo in Johnson City, where the university is located, twelve miles southeast of Kingsport. I can’t stay at the cabin on our farm because it’s been rented out for a couple of decades to prevent vandalism. But I drive out there anyway, for old time’s sake.

  The dirt road down to the cabin has become deeply rutted and impassable without four-wheel drive. I park up top and descend the hill on foot. The renter has erected a couple of Quonset huts, which are crammed with collapsing VW bugs and corroded International Scouts. Two VW vans are decaying in the grass alongside the huts.

  The metal roof of the cabin is rusting, and the shutters have fallen off. The white paint on the siding has faded and is peeling. Woodpeckers have excavated large holes through the siding down to the logs beneath in their quest for insects. The porch where we used to sit and watch the pond is stacked with debris, and the torn screens are flapping in the breeze. Mats of wild grapevines and kudzu entangled in the trees along the dam have blocked the view down the valley. The yard is mown, but everything else has run riot. Tattered black plastic covers piles of rotting firewood.

  Peeping through the windows, I can see that the cabin itself is packed to the rafters with junk — furniture, piles of newspapers and magazines, who knows what. A pathway has been cleared from room to room.

  My old friend Melancholy lays his gnarled hand on my shoulder. It was a mistake to come back to this farm. It was a mistake even to return to this area. Almost everyone I used to know is dead or gone. Our cabin is a wreck. My only companions down here will be ghosts — the ghosts of friends and playmates, the ghosts of my grandparents, the ghosts of ancestors I never even met. I plop down in the grass and consider crying.

  Then I remember one of my mother’s favorite sayings: “I’ll but lie down and bleed awhile and then rise up to fight again.”

  Smiling reluctantly, I stand up and hike the hill to my car. From the top, this House of Usher doesn’t look quite so dismal. The valley is green and full of grazing Holsteins. The North Carolina mountains still roll away to the horizon in a palette of blues and grays. I decide to persuade my father to ask the renter to leave so we can restore the pond and cabin to how they used to be. Never let it be said that I desert old friends.

  Once classes at the university begin, I discover that reinforcements have arrived in the Valley of the Dead. Although almost no one from my past is still around, the area is full of delightful new people. Some have come from far away — Birmingham, Florida, New Orleans, New York, Paris, Detroit. But others were here all along. We just ran in different circles and didn’t know each other.

  Hoping to start my Melungeon project off on the right foot, I revisit Ground Zero — Sneedville. A sea change has occurred since I visited twenty-five years ago. Apparently the shift was already under way then, although not evident to outsiders. The first stirrings of Melungeon Pride began with the various liberation movements of the 1960s. In 1965, the Kentucky author Jesse Stuart published a novel called Daughter of the Legend about a young lumberman from lowland Virginia who meets and marries a beautiful Melungeon woman from a fictionalized Newman’s Ridge. (Stuart himself purportedly fell in love with a Melungeon woman in college but abandoned her because of opposition from his family. This novel may be his penance.)

  Toward the end ofthat decade, advisers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and from Carson Newman College teamed up with some Sneedville citizens, including a school administrator and a Methodist minister, to explore ways to bring economic opportunities to Hancock County. They decided to stage an outdoor drama based on early Melungeon history called Walk Toward the Sunset.

  Local workers built an amphitheater at the foot of Newman’s Ridge. A specialist in such outdoor dramas was hired to write the script. Area Melungeons and college drama students enacted it under the direction of a theater professor. Despite opposition (including a bomb threat on opening night) from some residents who feared further ridicule, the drama was performed for six years. Although not ultimately a financial success due to lack of local lodging and dining facilities and a summer of gas rationing, the production did draw spectators from all over the United States. Most importantly, its version of Melungeon history instilled a new appreciation for their ancestry in Melungeon descendants themselves.

  Atop Newman’s Ridge, I discover a new church called the Coins Chapel built at the old cemetery containing the weathered tombstones of Mullinses, Gibsons, Collinses, and Goinses. I spot some attractive new houses along the main road. People appear to be returning to this ridge with its spectacular views. Or else those who never left have accrued enough money to upgrade their ancestral farmhouses.

  Driving through Sneedville, I spot a young man on the main street wearing a T-shirt that reads “Proud to Be Melungeon.” The local sheriff is parked by a curb in his cruiser. His graying hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Apparently he hasn’t watched Easy Rider and doesn’t realize that he’s adopted the wrong persona. As I leave town, I notice on the marquee of the Baptist church an announcement that the Jews for Jesus will be presenting a program that Sunday on Christ’s role in Yom Kippur. Although this sounds worth sticking around for, I have to teach the next day, so I head home.

  When I get to Kingsport, a homecoming parade for Dobyns-Bennett is under way on Broad Street. Parking, I climb out of my car to watch the band march past. The music and the formations are much more sophisticated now than when I played my family clarinet in the fourth row. It was all we could do to blare out Sousa marches while tromping straight ahead in wavering rows. But this band with its jazzy tunes and elaborate interweavings has been invited three times to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.

  The flag swingers now wear diaphanous gowns instead of uniforms. Their flags are larger, the staffs longer, the fabric filmier, and the colors more vivid. Furthermore, their ranks have swollen from half a dozen to maybe forty or fifty. The builds of some flag swingers are closer to Miss Piggy’s than to Farrah Fawcett’s. Who says progress isn’t possible? If only I weren’t fifty-five years old, I might at last stand a chance in the auditions.

  Another big difference is that some band members and flag swingers are African-American. The city schools were integrated shortly after I graduated. Among the crowds lining Broad Street are several young white women holding adorable babies with café au lait complexions. These infants are dressed in miniature Levis and Nikes or jumpers and Mary Janes. Everyone is admiring them and making faces at them to elicit smiles.

  The social mixing that racists feared would accompany integration is happening. On the surface no one seems concerned. African-American students are included in all the school activities in at least a token fashion. But African-American boys dominate the sports teams and are charming and experienced in their dating behavior. Some choose white girlfriends, which can still incite resentment among the white boys and the black girls — and panic among some parents. A few of these girls end up having babies, whom the white grandparents sometimes raise (and dote on after their initial hysteria).

  The parents of some students are also in mixed marriages — both white women with black men and vice versa. What was once a secret scandal has become unremarkable, if not yet commonplace.

  I spot an open white BMW convertible next in line behind the band. Along the top
of the back seat sit three attractive middle-aged women wearing cardboard Burger King crowns. A sign on the side of the car reads

  HAS-BEEN HOMECOMING OUEENS.

  D-B tradition allows one crasher per parade, and apparently this float of aging beauties is it for this year.

  I recognize one of the queens as a new friend named Ina. She’s a principal at D-B. We grew up five miles apart, but we never knew each other until recently because we attended different schools. She lived along the railroad tracks that passed my grandparents’ house, and she, too, used to marvel over the names painted on the boxcars.

  I feel as though she’s stepped out of the pages of Kinflicks because she was head majorette at her high school, the one who twirled the fire baton at halftime. She was also homecoming queen in 1961 and an attendant to both Miss Burly Tobacco and Miss Holston Electric. The difference between her and Ginny Babcock, the main character of my novel, is that Ina has a brain and a sense of humor.

  I wave and she waves back, twisting her hand as Queen Elizabeth does to the plebeians on her parade route.

  I start reading in English translation the endless Spanish chronicles of de Soto’s 1539 expedition through La Florida. The most florid and least reliable of the four versions was written by Garcilasco de la Vega, the son of an Incan woman and a Spanish conquistador. His 1591 account is based on interviews with participants conducted nearly half a century after the actual events. He may be the first published Melungeon author in history.