by Lisa Alther
I explain where Nags Head got its name: in the nineteenth century, town residents reportedly hung lanterns around the necks of their mules and led them up and down the dunes on stormy nights so that ships at sea, struggling amid the swells, would mistake the bobbing lights for those of another ship and would believe themselves in open water — until their ships ran aground on the reefs, where the locals could plunder them.
The Outer Banks are hardly more than spits of sand thrown up from the maw of the ocean, but they provide a barrier behind which stretch quiet bays. According to John White’s lovely watercolors, the various Algonquin tribes speared fish from dugout canoes in these estuaries. The existence of these dunes and shoals explains why North Carolina developed more slowly than Virginia or South Carolina. Islands appear and disappear under the pounding surf, and inlets open and close like the shells of oysters. This coast offered no real deepwater ports such as Newport News or Charleston.
The trade winds and currents in the Atlantic carry ships in a giant clockwise oval from Portugal, past the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, then up the eastern coast of Florida. Veering eastward above Bermuda, the currents continue to the Azores and back to Europe. If a storm hits a ship off the Florida or South Carolina coast, it can be driven northward onto the Outer Banks, which are nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic. An estimated 10,000 people have been shipwrecked there over the centuries, and nearby houses from colonial days are said to be framed with beams salvaged from wrecked ships.
As for the fate of the passengers, who knows? No doubt many drowned. Of those who crawled ashore, some may have been killed by natives. Others were most likely saved for slavery or adoption.
Some old-time Melungeons reportedly insisted they were descended from stranded Portuguese sailors. The Portuguese were the world champion sailors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and some undoubtedly ran aground along this coast. It would have been a long, hard four-hundred-mile trek from the Outer Banks to Newman’s Ridge. Early exploring parties could cover as much as twenty miles per day on good days, so a drive that had just taken us seven hours might have taken them a month. Or Melungeon progenitors could have moved inland more gradually — a few dozen miles farther west with each generation.
“The only thing that’s clear anymore,” I tell Ina and Nellie, “is that most of what we learned in school was garbage. The Southeast wasn’t an empty wilderness when Europeans ‘discovered’ it. It was crawling with nearly two million Indians and an unknown number of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Africans. I’m quite annoyed to have been the innocent repository of so much misinformation.”
I glare at them, since they’re both teachers. Then I tell them about a hundred Huguenots in South Carolina who survived Spanish attacks by fleeing to Indian villages. About a group of African slaves who escaped inland from a colony established in 1526 south of the Outer Banks by a Spaniard named Ayllon. About a dozen more examples of people roaming the Southeast who weren’t supposed to be here at all, according to my history texts.
Ina glances at Nellie in the backseat. “Sorry,” she says to me with a shrug. “But we’ve got our hands full chasing down drug dealers.”
We drive two hundred miles southwest to Lumberton, the main town for the Lumbee Indians, whose name is said to have originated from the Lumber River on which many now live. A nearby settlement of French Huguenots encountered them at their present location in 1709. The Lumbee claim descent from the Croatan, the Hatteras, and the Lost Colonists. Many researchers scoff at this notion.
The approach to the town is bleak. Down-at-the-heels trailers dot the fields. Pawnshops and deserted flea markets alternate with defunct car dealerships. Many signs are in Spanish, reflecting the recent influx of Hispanic migrants into the Southeast. The customers in a supermarket parking lot appear as ethnically varied as pedestrians in midtown Manhattan.
We park near a courthouse with huge white pillars out front. While Ina and Nellie stroll around town, I grab some books from the back of my car, which has begun to resemble the Bookmobile that used to creep along the roads near our farm when I was a kid, the way the ice cream truck did in town.
I look up a list of the most common Lumbee surnames and compare them to the roster from the Lost Colony. Thirty-seven of forty-eight Lumbee surnames appear on the Lost Colony list. Some are so common that they’d be found anywhere in the South — White, Jones, Johnson, Smith, etc. But others are more unusual — Bridger, Berry, Sampson, Viccars, Dare. A few of the most distinctive Lumbee names — Oxendine, Locklear, Chavis, Lowry — aren’t on the Lost Colony roster, suggesting that those families may be more recent arrivals.
But for me the Lost Colony has just been found. Like any sane settlers who were starving and under attack, they joined a friendly tribe and had babies with Indian spouses. Eventually their descendants moved inland, no doubt hoping to escape the depredations of advancing settlers. And the current generations are now farmers and tradesmen in and around this small North Carolina town that appears to be a cross between Gone with the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath.
But clearly the concept of lily-white throats brutally slashed by tawny savages suited the xenophobic English sensibility better than the notion of cheerful miscegenation. When Englishman John Lawson concluded in 1709 that the Hatteras were descended from the Lost Colonists, he said darkly, “Thus we see how apt Human Nature is to degenerate.”
However, none of the Lumbee surnames corresponds to the five traditional Melungeon ones. And, again, it would have been a difficult slog into the unknown, along a route densely populated by other Indian tribes, to reach Newman’s Ridge. It’s possible, I guess, but it seems a long way to go just to find bad farmland.
On the journey back home, somewhere near Hickory, we pass a truck that has painted on its sides
DIXIE COFFINS: MEETING THE DYING NEEDS OF THE SOUTH FOR 50 YEARS.
Ina tells about her sister-in-law’s sister, who loved Coca-Cola so much that her family laid her out in her coffin with one waxen hand clutching a Coke can. I suppose it’s no different from ancient burials in which warriors were armed for the afterlife with their finest weapons, or pharaohs with their favorite concubines.
Ina also tells about the death of her sister’s mother-in-law. Her sister’s husband was himself already dead (shot by his mentally ill brother), and he’d been buried alongside his father. When his mother’s will was read, it was revealed that she’d left all her assets to her daughters and nothing to the three children of her dead son. So Ina’s sister hired a backhoe operator to dig up her husband’s coffin and move it to her own family’s graveyard in another town. When the bereaved daughters arrived to place flowers on their mother’s new grave, they found only an empty crater where their brother used to be.
As we cross the Blue Ridge toward home, we start seeing reminders of that most famous death of them all. On several hilltops, surrounded by drifts of redbud and dogwood blossoms, looms a large cross flanked by two smaller ones. Wooden crosses have also been erected outside many of the country churches. Some are draped with purple shawls and have a crown of briars encircling the upright.
These churches have their best Easter quips posted on their marquees:
JESUS DIED ON THE CROSS SO THAT YOU MIGHT GET A LIFE.
1 CROSS + 3 NAILS = 4 GIVEN.
BODY PIERCING SAVED OUR SOULS.
GOD GRADES ON THE CROSS, NOT THE CURVE.
THE RABBIT’S FOOT DIDN’T WORK FOR THE RABBIT EITHER.
On our return, I tell my parents about Ina’s sister’s moving her husband’s coffin for spite. My father announces that he’s decided to be cremated. This is big news because the Southern Baptist church in which he was raised doesn’t approve of cremation. Since they interpret the Bible literally, some Baptists expect to leap into heaven with their earthly bodies intact. If you’ve been cremated or have donated your organs, you’ll have a problem. Although my father is not a literalist himself, his childhood conditioning by Baptist preachers used to b
e strong enough to make him prefer burial just in case.
When we ask him what’s changed his mind, he says that in the first place, he’s put on weight and outgrown his only decent suit. If he’s cremated, he won’t have to buy a new one. And he’s just learned that urns from two cremations can be buried in one plot. So if he and my mother are both cremated, not only can he inhabit the same plot as she for all eternity, he can also sell the extra plot — and prices have tripled since he bought it.
8
Sea Cruise
I‘M SITTING ON THE PORCH OF OUR RENOVATED CABIN, watching Len, who’s wearing a baseball cap over his flowing locks, assist the one-armed turtle man from North Carolina. They’re trying to drag a struggling turtle the width of a serving platter out of the pond. Last night they stretched a trot line baited with chicken necks across the pond. This morning fourteen forty-pound snapping turtles were thrashing from the hooks. I shudder, thinking about my recent laps in those waters.
The trick is to grab the tail, which Len has just accomplished. The turtle’s scaly legs are clawing at thin air as his jaws chomp wildly, longing for a hunk of Len’s leg. Len hauls the writhing creature up the bank to the dam, lays him on the ground, steps on the front of the shell to pin his neck, and pounds in his head with the edge of a board. Then he drops the twitching reptile into a gunnysack and ties it shut.
The turtle man will make big bucks selling these monsters to fancy restaurants for savory soups and stews (which I’ll never eat again). If he ever gets out of the mud, that is. He’s mired in it to his knees. Having just one arm, he can’t pull himself out. I haven’t had the nerve to ask him if he lost his arm to a snapping turtle, but I admire his determination. It’s like Demosthenes trying to be an orator with a speech impediment.
Grabbing the man’s arm, Len drags him up the face of the dam on his belly. But his boots remain behind, buried in three feet of sticky clay. In some future century, an archaeologist will unearth them and speculate about an ancient cult that worshipped a boot-wearing god named Red Wing.
I wonder if I can ask the turtle man to return the empty shells. The Cherokee used to paint them and use them for bowls. I can already picture one piled high with taco chips at my next Superbowl party.
As Len and the now-barefoot turtle man attack their next victim, I pick up my banjo and pluck out a new melody that’s been running through my head. My teaching job has ended, but I’m still in Tennessee. I haven’t written fiction in a couple of years. I’m writing country songs instead. The working title for my latest is “When a Blueblood Lady Loves a Redneck Man.” It’s about a swanky woman who sells her Cadillac and mink to hit the road with a long-distance trucker. Watching Len, I’ve finally discovered a rhyme for Cadillac: gunnysack.
It may be the proximity to Nashville, or it could be the air pollution from Tennessee Eastman. Everyone I know is writing country songs. My brother John has written one called “My Tears Spoiled My Aim” about a man in prison for shooting at his wayward wife. His only regret is that he missed her because he was crying.
Those not writing songs are playing or singing them. I attended a dinner party hosted by the dean who arranged my teaching job. It was held at his handsome eighteenth-century log house on the historic Watauga River. He’s a former college football star and a gifted poet. After dinner, he pulled out a guitar and began playing “Me and Bobby McGee.” Then an English professor sang a Scottish ballad a cappella in a beautiful tenor. A couple of fiddles, a bass, a dulcimer, a mandolin, and a dobro materialized. Soon all the guests were belting out country classics.
You can’t escape music down here. It’s piped into gas stations as you pump your gas and into fast food restaurants as you gobble a quick burger. Once when I was at Wal-Mart, a live gospel band began playing “How Great Thou Art” at the front of the store. Some of the shoppers, greeters, and checkout clerks stopped in their tracks to harmonize on the chorus:
Then sings my soul,
My Savior God, to Thee,
HOW GREAT THOU ART,
HOW GREAT THOU ART!
Afterward, everyone cheered and applauded. My humble errand at Wal-Mart had been incorporated into a Christian operetta.
As I drive up the hill, I can see Len and the turtle man cutting another turtle loose from the trot line. The cabin down below looks better than it ever did. Once the renter finally carted away his junk, two master carpenters named Bobby and Allen worked on it for months, removing the siding and replacing the chinking between the logs. They added a modern bathroom and renovated the kitchen. Paul bulldozed the jungle that had overtaken the yard and the dam.
I drive to Kingsport to see if either of my parents wants to go to a Melungeon meeting in Wise. When I get to their house, I find that John is visiting from Chapel Hill. I invite him to come socialize with his six-fingered cousins, but he declines. The Melungeons annoy him. As an academic, he dislikes untutored enthusiasm and overactive imagination parading as fact. Besides, as a Britophile he wants to be Scottish. He’s bought a tie in the hunting tartan of Clan Donnachaidh, to which the Scottish Reids belong. (Even so, John is popular in Melungeon circles because he was the first to propose that Melungeons greet one another with high fives and the phrase “Gimme six!”)
I accuse him of cherry-picking his ancestors, just as our grandmother did. He replies that since everyone has 1,024 ancestors ten generations back, we may as well concentrate on the ones we already know about and not worry about the rest. After all, life is short and the grave is deep.
I see his point, but I still want to know who the 1,000 non-Scots were. So I drive to the meeting alone, up the expressway into the coal fields, a route my grandparents and three-year-old father took in reverse in 1918 in a Clinchfield, Carolina, and Ohio passenger car.
Arriving at the tent on the University of Virginia campus, I find several hundred people listening intently to Wayne Winkler, the head of public radio for East Tennessee, as he talks about growing up in Pennsylvania with a Jewish mother and a Cherokee father from Sneedville. He, too, has wavy dark hair, blue eyes, and olive skin.
While visiting his father’s relatives near Sneedville in 1968, he read a newspaper article about Melungeons. When he asked where he could see one, his relatives fell silent. Finally his mother told him that his father’s family was Melungeon, and so was he. He soon discovered that the term was considered an insult in that area because it implied African ancestry. But he himself, having grown up in a northern city during the civil rights era, was delighted with his new heritage. He composed an essay on the topic, which he submitted every time he was assigned a paper. He always got an A because his teachers were so startled by his material. When he told his future wife he was a Melungeon, she looked at him as though he’d said he was a leprechaun.
Wayne summarizes the various academic studies on Melungeons, the first in 1946 by William Gilbert in a survey of the ten largest tri-racial groups in the United States. In the early 1950s Edward Price, a professor of geography at the University of Cincinnati and at Los Angeles State College, traced the migrations of Melungeons from Newman’s Ridge to neighboring regions and explored their ancestral connections to the other tri-racial groups. Calvin Beale, a demographer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, coined the term tri-racial isolate for these groups in 1957, estimating their population at 77,000 in seventeen states.
In 1969 William Pollitzer and William Brown, anthropologists from the University of North Carolina, released the results of a gene frequency study on 177 Melungeons from Hancock County, which indicated that they were “about 90 percent white, almost 10 percent Indian, and relatively very little Negro.”
A reanalysis of this data in 1990 by James Guthrie using newly available techniques confirmed these findings. But Guthrie stated that they supported either an English and African heritage or Portuguese heritage, since Mediterranean populations very early incorporated an African component. He cited similarities between the genetic makeup of Melungeons and that of populations in
the Canary Islands, Portugal, Spain, Libya, Malta, Italy, and Cyprus, speculating that Melungeons are primarily Portuguese with about 5 percent each of “Black and Cherokee.”
After this talk Brent Kennedy, who will be mobbed all day long by people who’ve read his book and discovered they’re related to him, comes over to greet me, smiling and calling me “cousin,” a word that means less than it used to now that I’ve seen how many cousins he has. Brent has just enough time to hand me a sheet of paper before a new group of cousins swamps him. It’s like a family reunion from hell.
I sit down and study the paper. It’s an archival list of settlers who came from Barbados to South Carolina around the time of Charleston’s founding in 1670. The surnames of several of his and my ancestors appear on it. Sizemore appears under the heading “Portuguese Jews,” Phipps under “Freedmen,” and Reeves in the “Prisoners” category.
Toward the end of the day, Brent takes the podium to announce that a British geneticist named Kevin Jones, a professor at the University of Virginia at Wise, will be conducting a DNA study that may finally give some definitive answers about Melungeon origins. He explains that he’ll be collecting hair samples from members of the traditional Melungeon lineages. Although this will take two years to complete, the audience heaves a collective sigh of relief. Science is riding to our rescue. Certainty will one day be ours. We depart, smiling and hopeful.
The ship motors out of the port in Barbados in the dark with the theme from the movie 1492 blaring over a loudspeaker. I stand on deck, watching the cane fields on the shore blaze, sending up swirling shrouds of sweet-smelling smoke. When I first saw these raging conflagrations on the trip from the airport to the boat, I was reminded of the nineteenth-century slave revolts. But the taxi driver assured me it was just the easiest method for clearing the fields after the harvest.
Barbados is a smoking gun in more ways than one. After receiving Brent’s list of South Carolina settlers from Barbados, I read some histories of the place and discovered that it was a seventeenth-century British dumping ground for what one historian termed “whores, rogues, drunks, and others who made civil life unpleasant for the upper classes.” These people worked shoulder to shoulder with African and Indian slaves in the tobacco fields. I found accounts of prominent Creole families named Reeves and Haynes, both surnames in my father’s family. But since I didn’t know about this Barbadian connection while planning my trip, I didn’t allow time to follow up on it in the libraries and courthouses. In any case, so many smoking guns surround me that it feels as though I’m trapped in the Mekong Delta awaiting a medevac helicopter.
