by Lisa Alther
A Spanish exploring party in north Georgia in 1597 was told by Indians at a town called Ocute “that across a sierra… four days journey north from there were people who wear short hair, and that the pines were found cut with axes, and that it seemed that similar signs could not be but from Spanish people.”
In 1653, an exploring party financed by a Virginian trader named Francis Yeardley reported meeting a Tuscaroran chief at his hunting camp in North Carolina. He told them of a wealthy Spaniard who’d lived in his home village for seven years, along with his family of thirty, among whom were seven Negroes.
John Lederer, a German explorer born in Hamburg in 1644, traveled from Virginia into the North Carolina wilderness on three occasions. He wrote in his journal in 1670 that “two days journey and a half from hence to the Southwest a powerful Nation of bearded men were seated, which I suppose to be the Spaniards.” He decided not to advance farther into the Carolina Piedmont because he “thought it not safe to venture myself amongst the Spaniards, lest taking me for a spy, they would either make me away, or condemn me to a perpetual Slavery in their mines.”
In 1674 Abraham Wood, another Virginian trader, wrote that an employee of his named Needham (who was later murdered by an Indian) was told by some Indians in Cherokee territory that “eight days’ journey down this river lives a white people which have long beardes and whiskers and weares clothing, and on some of ye other rivers lives a hairey people.” (Indian males had sparse facial hair, which they usually plucked.)
Could any of these hairy people have been descendants of Pardo’s abandoned soldiers? All would have been within a couple of weeks’ walk from Newman’s Ridge. Could they have been the progenitors of the Melungeons? And if they weren’t connected to either Pardo or the Melungeons, who were they, and what became of them?
I arrive at a town called Old Fort, which sits near the foot of the Swannanoa Gap into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Believing it to be connected to the Berry site’s Fort San Juan because of its name, I stop. There’s a small museum, built of ocher river rocks by the WPA. It sits alongside a rushing stream.
Inside, the docent, a small, neat, elderly woman, informs me that the town is named not for Fort San Juan but for Davidson’s Fort, which was built there around 1770 as a refuge for European settlers heading into Cherokee territory via the Swannanoa Gap. The Piedmont tribes had already been shoved off their land. The Catawba, earlier known as the Ushery, had lived in several large towns on the Catawba River. Their population had been reduced by war, slavery, rum, starvation, and disease from an estimated 10,000 at the time of their first contact with Europeans to some 400.
The Cherokee were the next target, despite a 1763 treaty that barred Europeans from crossing the crest of the Blue Ridge into their territory. However, when some Cherokee sided with the British during the Revolution, American patriots claimed this as an excuse to launch a scorched-earth assault against Cherokee towns and to open up their homeland to European squatters.
The curator says that in 1690 James Moore, secretary of the colony of South Carolina, came to the Old Fort area with an exploring party. Some local Indians told him that Spaniards were operating silver mines some twenty miles from there. The remains of Fort San Juan are twenty miles northeast of Old Fort.
I mention how unpleasant the conquistadors’ lives must have been — worse than backpacking along the Appalachian Trail with the Girl Scouts (as I’d spent much of my youth doing) — because you had either to kill or be killed every time you turned around.
She says, “Well, they were all running either toward something — like the gold and silver that Cortez found in Mexico and Pizarro found in Peru — or they were running away from something.”
She explains that some of de Soto’s and Pardo’s soldiers were conversos desperate to escape the Spanish Inquisition. (Conversos were the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity to evade persecution. But many continued to practice their original faiths in secret, which left them vulnerable to charges of heresy.)
In 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. One hundred fifty thousand fled to Portugal, which was already 20 percent Jewish. But after an earthquake in Portugal in 1531, for which the Jews were inexplicably blamed, the Inquisition began there, too. Thirty-two thousand heretics (which included Protestants and Muslims as well as Jews) were burned in Spain. In Portugal, 40,000 were tried and 1,800 were burned. Muslims were persecuted throughout the sixteenth century and were finally expelled in 1609.
An estimated one to three million Jews and Muslims left Iberia altogether, many hiking through the Pyrenees to France. Others hopped any ship they could find. Some were thrown into the sea or dumped on desolate coasts or sold as slaves or murdered for the gold in their teeth. The lucky ones found refuge in London, Amsterdam, Sicily, North Africa, Constantinople, China.
“So you can see,” the curator concludes, “why those who could join an expedition to the New World would do so. Unfortunately, the Inquisition followed them to Mexico. But that might explain the willingness of some to remain up here in wilderness forts, surrounded by annoyed Indians.”
“Are you a schoolteacher?” I ask.
She laughs. “Law, no, honey, I’m just an old woman.”
We also discuss the various Melungeon origin theories. I point out that the most common Melungeon surnames sound English, not Spanish. But some of the given names are more ambiguous. One is Navarrh, harking back to the ancient Basque kingdom of Navarre in what is now northern Spain and southern France.
Another such name is Mahala. Mahala Mullins was a well-known Melungeon moonshiner in the last half of the nineteenth century who was reputed to weigh around four hundred pounds. One tale maintains that her cabin straddled the Tennessee-Virginia state line. When the Tennessee revenuers arrived to arrest her, she merely waddled to the Virginia side of her house, and vice versa. Another tale claims that she was never arrested because she was too obese for the revenuers to get her out the door. One deputy explained that she was “catchable but not fetchable.” When she died, her kin had to remove one side of her cabin so she could attend her own funeral.
A third potentially Hispanic given name is Cañara, which was passed down to the men in Brent Kennedy’s family for generations. The elderly woman opens an atlas and points out Cañara, a district just south of Goa, the Portuguese part of India, and Caneiro, a Portuguese village near Coimbra. For good measure, she also points out the Canary Islands, which provided the Americas with many immigrants.
I muse that even if some of de Soto’s deserters and Pardo’s soldiers were Portuguese or Spanish conversos, even if they survived the destruction of their forts, even if they lived happily ever after with native wives and mixed children, even if they were murdered and their offspring withdrew to form their own tribe — there’s still nothing to link them to the Melungeons.
She nods agreement and says, “Well, honey, no one’s figured out the Melungeons for three hundred years now. So I don’t reckon we’ll do it this afternoon. But it sure is fun trying!”
She may be having fun, but I’m slowly losing what’s left of my mind. As we part, she says, “Thank you for coming. It’s not often I get to talk with someone as smart as I am.”
“Not even half,” I reply.
Passing through the Swannanoa Gap, I descend into the mountain-rimmed bowl in which Asheville now sits. In Pardo’s time, an Indian village called Tocae was located here. I cross the town and exit from this bowl along a road that parallels the French Broad River, which flows northwest into Tennessee. Before the Civil War this road was a trail of packed earth called the Buncombe Turnpike. Drovers used to conduct vast herds of hogs down from the mountain forests, where they’d fattened on the rich mast of acorns and chestnuts. Their destination was the South Carolina plantations too addicted to cotton culture to raise their own food. The towns along this turnpike had huge pens on their outskirts to house the visiting hogs and cattle. Farmers came
down from the hills with wagonloads of corn to feed them, while the drovers roamed the towns looking for food, liquor, women, or just a hot bath.
Some of these hogs may have been descended from de Soto’s original drove of three hundred, since he left pigs in the Indian towns as a future food supply for visiting Spaniards. Many no doubt escaped from the bewildered Indians and also from the expedition itself as it wandered through the southern wilderness for four years.
This is the land of the balds, the grassy mountaintops that remain mysteriously bare despite being below the tree line. When viewed from a high spot along the Appalachian Trail, they stretch into the distance like a string of tawny pearls. On misty mornings they float like islands on a sea of pale pink clouds. Farmers used to herd their cattle to the balds to graze in the summertime. General Lee sent exhausted cavalry horses from the Virginia battlefields to these coves and balds to recuperate.
This is also the land of the “pilots,” the courageous mountain guides who led escaped slaves northward before the Civil War. During the war, they conducted some of the estimated one thousand fugitives who hid out in the caves in these mountains — Confederate draft dodgers and deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners — across East Tennessee to the Union lines in Kentucky. They were the South’s unheralded equivalent to the French Resistance during World War II.
The French Broad alternates between slow-swirling pools and rapids that run white with foam. I reach one dark, shadowy stretch that used to be a sacred site to the Cherokee. It was said to be home to the Uktena, a horned serpent with a third eye in its forehead that hypnotized and destroyed anyone who gazed upon it. The queen’s niece from Cofitachequi made her escape from de Soto near here, along with the African slave who reportedly loved her.
It was also in this area that Captain Pardo’s astonished troops encountered a bare-chested Indian man who, wearing the long hair and short skirt of a woman, was walking alongside the women. Prior to being introduced to homophobia by Europeans, many native tribes were said to revere such men (as well as women who fought as warriors). They believed that the Great Spirit had fashioned these people specially, giving them the strengths of both sexes. Some served as priests and medicine men. The Spaniards labeled them sodomites and used their mere existence as an excuse to murder or enslave their entire tribes.
I reach the little town of Marshall, twenty-five miles northwest of Asheville, which some believe to be built near or atop the ruins of an Indian town called Cauchi, where Pardo’s troops constructed Fort San Pablo. (Others place Cauchi farther south near the town of Canton.) The French Broad races past Marshall, picking up speed as it descends toward the Tennessee Valley, where the ruins of Pardo’s Fort San Pedro and the Indian town of Olamico are said to lie beneath Douglas Lake.
Now Marshall is just a sleepy county seat with a courthouse and a train station renovated for bluegrass concerts. I stop at a restaurant run by a Moroccan. His couscous is the best I’ve ever eaten.
Heading back to Kingsport, I wind along a narrow road above a placid creek. In the tree branches overhead, I spot scraps of clothing, a bald tire, and a rusted tricycle, testimony to the power of this quiet little stream when it’s engorged with flood waters.
I pull over at a sign announcing the site of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, a Civil War My Lai. The story goes that some Union sympathizers were denied their share of salt at hog-killing season by the Confederates who ran the store in Marshall. This was a death sentence, since farm families relied on preserved pork products to get them through the winter. Some versions maintain that the store had no salt to sell because Union troops had closed the route to Saltville, the Virginia town that supplied that area.
The Union men rode to town, broke into the store, and took some sacks of salt. The store owner’s wife caught pneumonia while protesting this midnight raid and died. The distraught store owner led some Confederate soldiers from Knoxville to exact vengeance.
Unable to locate the perpetrators, they tortured their wives and mothers, hanging them by their necks until they were almost strangled and then cutting them down. One young mother was tied to a tree overnight in the freezing cold while her naked baby lay screaming in the doorway.
Finally wringing the whereabouts of their menfolk out of the women, the soldiers tracked them down and marched them toward Knoxville. A short way along the road, they ordered them to kneel in the snow. Then they shot all thirteen, including several old men and young boys.
I arrive at the outskirts of Kingsport and pass the His Grace Is Sufficient Mobile Home Park. On down the road I discover that the Quality Body Shop has erected a signboard like those at the churches. It reads,
YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE?
This need for public testimonials seems to be spreading around town like fleas on hounds.
As I pass the Christ the King Motel, I realize that I’m harmonizing at the top of my lungs with a gospel quartet on the radio: “Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? ARE YOU WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB?”
It occurs to me that I may be spending too much time in Tennessee. Everything I’ve fled is starting to seem normal again. The problem with not knowing who you are is that you become an empty vessel. Any charming charlatan can fill you with his own brand of hemlock. That’s probably why most people cling so desperately to the identity that’s been handed them, even when it’s false.
I pull into my parents’ driveway. Walking in the back door, I find my father in his recliner, talking on the phone. Because of his back he can no longer ski or play golf or tennis. Mostly he sits in his chair in a lovely, sunlit room he’s had built onto one side of the house, where he reads or watches TV or listens to classical music or talks on the phone. He’s been known to chat for half an hour to a wrong number.
Sometimes he rides his motorized chair to the den to organize his sweepstakes forms or to work on his computer. Occasionally he rides his chair around the block or careens across the backyard spraying dandelions with weed killer.
His back troubles began many years ago. He used to have so much pain that he’d kneel and rest his elbows on the operating table between operations. The nurses spread the word around town that Dr. Reed prayed between operations. Soon he was swamped with every ailing Christian in town.
I listen to him explain to some unsuspecting fundraiser that if his organization wouldn’t spend so much money on phone calls and mailings, they’d have that much more to devote to their charitable activities. My father sends small contributions to many charities, hoping they’ll call him so that he can explain this.
Smiling, he waves to me. Meanwhile, he’s telling the fundraiser that 12 percent of his foundation’s solicitations goes for administrative expenses. In contrast, the Salvation Army spends only 2 percent on administration. He says regretfully that this is why he’ll be giving to the Salvation Army, rather than to the poor sap on the other end of the phone.
7
The Bermuda Triangle
WHILE DIANE TRIMS MY HAIR in preparation for a Melungeon conference at Brent Kennedy’s college, she tells me about all the women we know in common whose undyed hair makes them look so much older.
I reply that my gray gives me a credibility I lacked when dark-haired.
Diane says nothing, but I can feel her thinking that although she’s blond, there’s never been any question of her credibility. She’d no doubt agree with Dolly Parton who, when asked if she minded “dumb blond” jokes, replied, “Law, no. I know I’m not dumb, and I know I’m not blond.”
Diane sighs. But she cheers up once we start discussing recent plane crashes — one off Long Island, another off Nova Scotia.
“You know what’s happened?” she asks.
I make the mistake of shaking my head, nearly losing a lobe to her snipping shears.
“El Niño has blown the Bermuda Triangle north.”
As I digest this, I’m alarmed to find myself wondering if it might not be true. Once you’ve seen the Lake Champlain monster,
anything seems possible.
One allure to life in Kingsport is that my haircuts cost half what they do in Vermont, which is in turn half of what they cost in New York City. Of course, New York stylists pass along tidbits about the stars whose locks they tend as an incentive for their favorite nobody clients to return. This is how I know things I’ve promised never to reveal about several celebrities foolish enough to impart their darkest secrets to unethical hairdressers. However, no New York hairdresser has ever shown me the antics of a Chinese fighting fish or explained the symbiosis between El Niño and the Bermuda Triangle.
Armed with clipped but undyed hair, I head for Wise with my brother Bill, who’s visiting my parents from California. He’s tall, lean, and muscular. Probably because John and I tortured his teddy bear when he was a toddler, he’s become a karate master who could kill either of us with a flick of his wrist.
We find two thousand people gathered beneath a large tent. For two days we listen to reports on and energetic discussions of Melungeon-related topics. Although some participants look like escapees from a NASCAR race, almost everyone amazes me with his or her knowledge of world history and personal ancestry. I’m so outgunned here that my pistol doesn’t even leave its holster.
Bill seems interested in the data, but he’s a true scientist. From the distracted, dreamy expression on his face I suspect that he’s ingesting the information but reserving judgment on its accuracy and implications.
