Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  I fall into an exhausted stupor around dawn.

  I drive slowly westward across Virginia, through rolling pastures and dense forests that were occupied by ten thousand Monacan Indians in the mid-eighteenth century, the largest tribes being the Saponi, Tutelo, and Manahoac. Unlike their archenemies the Powhatan, the Monacan didn’t usually fight the Europeans. They just kept dodging out of the path of the ever-advancing English juggernaut like wandering war refugees.

  In 1714, a few hundred of them lived at the above mentioned British fort, near present-day Lawrenceville. By this time most Indians who dealt with Europeans had taken European names. Many adopted the names of neighbors they liked or officials who had helped them. Those who’d been enslaved sometimes used their masters’ names, as did African slaves. Three surnames at Fort Christanna were Collins, Goins, and Bowling, all traditionally Melungeon, Bowling perhaps connected to the Red Boilings and perhaps not.

  A Virginian surveyor named William Byrd stopped off at Fort Christanna in 1728 and hired a Saponi named Bearskin as a hunter for his party. During the trip, Byrd interviewed Bearskin, reporting that his tribe believed in a supreme being who created the world, protected the good, and punished the evil. They also believed in a heaven and a hell. Bearskin’s lengthy description of heaven, recorded in Byrd’s journal, sounds identical to the paradise of Islam, with beautiful and obliging women, plentiful game and corn, and a mild climate. This offers another vague hint of a possible connection between southeastern Indians and Muslim Turks or Moors.

  The road I’m meandering along was built atop an old trading trail called the Occaneechi Path that extended from the Tidewater to the North Carolina Piedmont tribes. In the seventeenth century, traders trekked along it with trains of as many as one hundred horses, bearing trade goods (beads, cloth, rum, iron tools, rifles, and ammunition) on the way over, and furs and hides on the trip back. Bear, beaver, bobcat, deer, fox, mink, muskrat, panther, raccoon, squirrel — those bales of skins represented an entire Noah’s ark of southeastern animals. The returning trains also included Indians captured from enemy tribes by Indians friendly to the British. These captives were consigned to slave markets on the coast.

  The men who handled the traders’ horses on these trips were welcomed at the native villages by young women who wore their hair short to indicate that they were “trading girls,” available to the men in exchange for beads, cloth, and ribbon. The tribes encouraged these women because their presence was a lure. Since these Indians were matriarchal, any babies from such matings would likely have been accepted by their mothers’ clans. Some became guides, interpreters, and hunters for the traders. Others no doubt identified with their English fathers, leaving their native villages behind and trying to pass for Englishmen.

  The Virginia traders competed with other English traders who traveled north from Charleston, South Carolina, and with French traders who came east from their trading posts along the Mississippi. The natives played them against each other. The most successful traders were those who married native women and lived at least part-time in their villages, even though some deserted these wives and their half-breed children when their trading days ended. The explorer John Lawson explained that the Charleston traders fared better than the Virginians because more had taken Indian wives “whereby they soon learn the Indian tongue, and keep a Friendship with the Savages.”

  By late afternoon, I reach the banks of the New River in southwestern Virginia near the North Carolina border. Before a treaty ceded this area to Europeans in 1768, it belonged to the Cherokee, who used it primarily as a hunting ground. By then it was also occupied by some of my grandmother’s ancestors — the Bryants, Cooleys, Hanks, Howells, and Rudys.

  A battle erupted between some Indians who owned peach orchards here and some European squatters. But which side were my ancestors on? Or were they on both sides? This was a wilderness with no towns. Since many Europeans were living illegally on Indian land, they were in no hurry to travel to distant county seats to register deeds they didn’t have. Births, marriages, and deaths during these years were usually recorded in churches, but church here consisted of a circuit rider’s occasionally preaching in a private home and then moving on. A few families recorded such information in their Bibles, but many settlers were illiterate.

  At dusk, I park my car alongside a road that runs down into a wide flat valley with a creek along the far boundary. Forested hills rise up on every hand. Some Black Angus are grazing alongside the creek. At the end of the valley sits a farmhouse lit by a few dim lights. A dog by a barn barks and then stops.

  I stand there in the soft twilight, letting the fact sink in that ancestors of mine, whatever their ethnicity, once farmed this rich bottomland. One might have stood right where I’m now standing to enjoy this peaceful view. Or some might have fought in these pastures for the right to remain on this beautiful land.

  I spot an old log structure well back in the woods behind me. Hoping to snare a souvenir of this spot, I walk over, unlatch the wooden door, and wrench it open.

  I find myself face-to-face with half a dozen wooden shelves, all of them stacked with bulging black plastic garbage bags. Their necks are twisted shut and tied with twine. Failing to heed the warning that curiosity killed the cat, I slide a bag off its shelf. It’s quite light. I poke it like a child trying to guess a Christmas gift. The contents feel like shoe boxes.

  Despite having learned in charm class at J. Fred’s not to rifle the possessions of others, I untie the twine, open the bag, and pull out what does turn out to be an empty cardboard box. On its cover in large black letters is printed

  LIVE LOBSTER: DO NOT OPEN!

  The box looks brand-new, as though it’s never contained anything at all, much less a lobster. The entire bag is filled with these boxes, as are, presumably, all the other identical black plastic bags.

  All of a sudden I realize that if I don’t get back to the main road in about thirty seconds, I’m a dead woman. I stuff the box into the bag and the bag onto the shelf. I close and latch the door. Glancing around in every direction, I dash to my parents’ car, climb in, slam and lock the door, turn the car around, and race back to the highway.

  Appalachia used to be known for its moonshine. Someone who came too close to a still, even if he didn’t realize it, might get shot. Most farmers grew lots of corn, and one way to preserve it was to turn it into white lightning. When Prohibition ended, a new cash crop was needed, and marijuana filled the bill. Some grew it in the national forests so that their own land wouldn’t be confiscated if the DEA discovered their plots. Others retrieved bales from Central America tossed from private planes, chopped and repackaged the leaves, and distributed them.

  More recently, Appalachia has become a haven for methamphetamine labs. All you need is a stove, some saucepans, neighbors with no sense of smell, and a list of ingredients you can buy at Wal-Mart. I don’t know whether those lobster boxes were intended for marijuana or crystal meth, but I do know that the nearest ocean is three hundred miles away.

  I spend a nervous night in a Motel 6 in Galax, Virginia, thanking my lucky stars that I haven’t been chopped into tiny pieces, packed in lobster boxes, and FedExed around the country like some modern-day Osiris.

  Two teens in Johnson City were less fortunate. According to the prosecution, a trucker shot them, perhaps in a drug deal gone wrong. He cut off the boy’s head and hands and dumped them into a lake so that no one could identify his corpse. He failed to take into account that a hand would float to the surface for a trolling bass fisherman to hook.

  Meanwhile, the trucker allegedly moved the bodies from his mother’s house into a self-storage shed. Then he split for New York in his diesel rig, assigning his aged mother and aunt the job of cutting up the girl’s body and the rest of the boy’s with a hacksaw and a chain saw. This chore took the frail old women a long time — too long. The corpses began to stink. Another alert self-storer noticed the stench and phoned the police. The trucker was charged wit
h murder, and his mother with corpse abuse.

  I fall asleep and dream of dismembering a boiled lobster and dipping its meat in melted butter.

  After an artery-stupefying breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy, I head south. The ancestors of both my paternal grandparents had one thing in common: they were all living near the New River, on both sides of the Virginia-North Carolina border, by the last decades of the eighteenth century. And half a century later most had moved northwest into the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains along the Kentucky-Virginia border.

  Because of conflicting charters, a thirty-mile strip from the Atlantic coast to the Blue Ridge was claimed by both Virginia and North Carolina, which were granting and taxing the same plots of land. The region gradually filled up with people the governor of Virginia characterized as “loose and disorderly.” They settled wherever they found vacant land and often refused to pay taxes to either state. Nor did they consider themselves subject to the laws of either regarding firearms, fornication, manumission, miscegenation, or voting rights.

  When the boundary survey was finally completed in 1779, the resulting state line was crooked. A sliver nearly two miles wide at the inland end was again claimed by both states. In addition, the territory across the Blue Ridge (where Kingsport would be built 150 years later) was variously claimed by the Cherokee, North Carolina, Virginia, the State of Franklin, and also by Tennessee once it gained statehood in 1796. A similar free-for-all atmosphere lured droves of the “loose and disorderly” from farther east to join the de-tribalized Indians already living there. This entire area was, understandably, called the Squabble State. Some court cases over land disputes weren’t settled until the end of the nineteenth century. These, then, were my ancestors and their fabled land grants.

  I arrive in West Jefferson, North Carolina, the seat for Ashe County. It’s a thriving mountain town nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. I drive to a handsome, crumbling old brick courthouse on a hill and consult various deed books. Except in the will of her husband Cornelius Vanover, I find no whisper of Abby Easterd, my supposedly Cherokee four-times-great-grandmother, nor of any Easterds at all. But I do notice that a Phipps ancestor of both my grandparents lists a young woman as a tith-able slave in a 1782 tax list. Five years later he has a white wife the same age, a small child, and no slave. It may be a coincidence, or it may be an example of how people doctored documents to suit their shifting circumstances.

  The area that is now Ashe County belonged to the Cherokee until a 1777 treaty ceded it to North Carolina and/or Virginia. My ancestors named Easterd, White, Stamper, Hill, and Phipps were living here by 1777. Were they Cherokee? Were they refugees from displaced Virginia or North Carolina tribes? Were they the mixed descendants of English and/or French traders? Were they European squatters, formerly indentured servants who’d fled the coast in search of land? Were they slaves escaped from the Tidewater, or free descendants of the early unions between indentured Englishwomen and African men? I don’t know, and I don’t see any way to find out, short of a DNA study on my father. But the Melungeon study for which he’s already a subject is a blind one. The participants won’t be told their individual results.

  After leaving West Jefferson, I drive along a valley that winds among some steep hills. I pass a sign reading

  MULATTO HILL ROAD

  Braking, I turn off and follow the road to the top of a ridge, from which I spot the ruins of a couple of cabins and wide expanses of pastureland rimmed with forest.

  I’m surprised this word is still in use. Mulatto sounds cruel to the modern ear. The term ceased to be used on Virginia censuses in 1920 because that state was by then coming to recognize only black or white, no shades of brown that might imply interracial mixing.

  Eventually I reach the Blue Ridge Parkway. I amble a hundred miles down it, through some of the most breathtaking scenery on earth, to the reservation for the eastern branch of the Cherokee Nation, located near the most precipitous part of the Smokies. The town of Cherokee is like any other mountain town with a Holiday Inn and Burger King. The only differences are the complexions of some of its citizens and the museum and traditional Cherokee village set up for tourists.

  The Cherokee are an Iroquoian tribe, thought to have been driven to the southern Appalachians in the mid-fifteenth century by warfare. When de Soto encountered them in these mountains in 1540, they appeared less prosperous and more egalitarian than their lowland neighbors, who were living in villages that featured elevated mounds on which only priests and chiefs lived. But by the eighteenth century, the Cherokee had absorbed so many refugees from the Virginia and Carolina tribes and had so prospered from the fur trade with Europeans that they’d become the largest and strongest tribe in the Southeast.

  More than any other tribe, the Cherokee attempted to adapt to English ways. Many wore European clothing, learned to speak English, and converted to Christianity. They developed a Cherokee alphabet and published their own newspaper. Most Cherokee became literate in their own language. Some Cherokee planters lived in plantation houses and owned slaves. Others operated gristmills and river ferries.

  A few sent their sons north to an interdenominational Foreign Mission boarding school in Cornwall, Connecticut. In a grim comedy of Christian hypocrisy, two young Cherokee, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot (whose Cherokee name was Buck Watie), sons of prominent tribal leaders, fell in love with white women, one the daughter of a school administrator and the other a daughter of the town physician. After a huge ruckus, these couples married. The agents of the school called these marriages “criminal” and complained that the doctor’s daughter, Harriet Gold, had “made herself a squaw.” Livid, they shut down the school. European men had raped Indian women for centuries, but an Indian man’s marrying a European woman for love sparked outrage.

  Meanwhile, white settlers wanted Cherokee land and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Many simply settled on it and fought off any Cherokee who objected, as did those who originally settled around my family farm. The Cherokee resistance to this land grab was led by a chief named John Ross, himself only one-eighth Cherokee by blood. After countless political manipulations, 16,000 Cherokee were rounded up at gunpoint and put on barges, or marched on foot, to Oklahoma — past the roadside graves of those who had gone before them. Some 4,000 died en route. In Oklahoma, the survivors were soon joined by 44,000 Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminóle who’d been deported from other southern states.

  But the forebears of those living today on the Cherokee reservation in the Smokies stayed behind, most legally through arrangements made with the North Carolina government prior to the Removal. Many others subject to removal refused to leave. Some were hunted down by federal soldiers and marched off to stockades, as gangs of white men swarmed down from the woods to loot their belongings, steal their livestock, dig up their ancestral graves for buried jewelry, and burn down their cabins.

  Many Cherokee women married to European men also stayed behind in North Carolina and Tennessee with their mixed children. This category may have included my four-times-great-grandmother Abby Easterd, her son Cornelius Vanover, and his son William.

  I go into a bookstore and buy a paperback that gives the various government rolls of members of the Cherokee Nation. You must prove a family connection to a name on one of these lists in order to be a card-carrying Cherokee. Flipping through it, I don’t find any Easterds or Vanovers. I do find a family called Eas-tuh. But the similarity of sounds may be just a coincidence. I also find some Hanks, Hills, and Howells, and one family called Coo Lee, but I don’t know if they have any connection to my grandmother’s ancestors with those surnames, and I don’t know how to find out.

  This road appears to be another cul-de-sac. I’m starting to loathe that rogue babysitter who first croaked the word Melungeon at me. If she weren’t already dead, I’d charge her with child abuse. This project, undertaken with such enthusiasm, is proving as never-ending as Cher’s farewell tour.

  I drive over to t
he flashy new Cherokee casino that looks as though it belongs in Atlantic City, not in the heart of the Smokies. The only Cherokee I spot are parking cars. Within, the banks of slot machines are as swathed in clouds of cigarette smoke as the mountain peaks outside are in mist. I sit down at a machine with a cup of quarters and wind up donating them all to the Cherokee Nation. It’s the least I can do, since my ancestors, if any were Cherokee, managed to sidestep the Trail of Tears.

  Like patients on life support, the other players are hooked to their whirring slot machines by cords around their necks, from which hang cash cards that are inserted into the machines. As they draw deeply on their cigarettes, these white folks stare at the spinning wheels of fortune with glazed eyes. Many will die from lung cancer, completely broke. Their money is paying for schools and clinics for the Cherokee. It’s also paying for land. The Cherokee are slowly buying back some of what was taken from their ancestors by the ancestors of those who are now losing their 401(k)s in the one-armed bandits. Perhaps there is a God after all — one with an antic sense of humor.

  When Spaniards first arrived in what is now the United States, an estimated five to twenty million natives were already living here. By 1700, over 90 percent had died from alcohol, slavery, starvation, war, and disease. In one of history’s grim ironies, many survivors survived because of European genes that gave them immunity. Yet on the 1900 federal census, only 250,000 were willing to identify themselves as Indian.

  However, on the 2000 U.S. census, some 4,119,301 people defined themselves as Indian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. The Cherokee are the largest tribe listed, with 281,069 members. An additional 448,464 people checked “Cherokee” as well as some other category or categories. Wannabes or not, reinforcements have arrived. Some are most likely descended from tribes in Virginia and the Carolinas whose remnants were absorbed by the Cherokee, but there’s no way to prove this. Even DNA testing can’t yet distinguish among the different tribes and may never be able to do so, since so much amalgamation has occurred.