by Lisa Alther
One of the Virginian eugenicists behind these plans was a medical doctor named Walter Plecker. In 1912, he became the first registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics in Richmond, which recorded births, marriages, and deaths in the state. He, along with others, worked behind the scenes to pass the mandatory sterilization law. This law was especially important to him because he maintained that it was “feebleminded” whites who were most prone to mate with Indians and Africans. “The worst forms of undesirables born amongst us are those whose parents are of different races,” he wrote.
In a tone bordering on hysteria, he continued that unless these “defective” people could be prevented from reproducing, “We have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.” He regarded the United States as “the last stronghold of the white race.”
Plecker also worked for passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law in 1924, along with such friends as John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. Until early in the twentieth century, a Virginian had been considered “colored” if he or she had one “colored” grandparent. Even the Nazis were more lenient in their definitions, designating Germans as fully Jewish only if they had at least three Jewish grandparents.
But in 1919, the Virginia code was tightened to read, “Every person having one-sixteenth or more of negro blood shall be deemed a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more of Indian blood shall be deemed an Indian.” How it could take only one-sixteenth of a certain heritage to make one person a Negro, whereas one-fourth of another heritage made someone else Indian, remained unclarified.
In 1924, the so-called one-drop rule, officially the Virginia Racial Integrity Law, tightened the requirements for whiteness even further: “The term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian, but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.”
This last provision allowing those who were one-sixteenth or less Indian to be white was for the benefit of the some 20,000 descendants of Pocahontas who were scions of the First Families of Virginia — the Jeffersons, Lees, Randolphs, et al. Their proclaiming themselves Indian while the “one-drop rule” was being implemented in their home state was not unlike Marie Antoinette’s donning her shepherdess costume prior to the French Revolution.
To make matters even more mind-numbing, the different southern states had different standards for determining race. In South Carolina at this same time, for example, anyone with one black ancestor five generations back was legally black, regardless of physical appearance. In Missouri, Mississippi, and Florida, a “colored” person was anyone with one-eighth or more Negro blood. Meanwhile, in South America, one drop of European blood made someone European.
But the passage of bills and their actual implementation are two different matters. In reality, many Virginians, especially those in the mountains, had no idea whether or not their ancestry included Indians and Africans. Illiteracy was rampant, and lives were short and focused on survival.
History books label the years 1880 to 1925 the Great Age of Passing. Two-thirds of the southerners listed as “mulatto” on the federal censuses lived in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Those who looked white enough struggled to become officially white, whatever their actual ancestry, in order to sidestep the Jim Crow laws passed around the turn of the century. Those remaining under the most dire threat from the new laws were those with darker skin or telltale surnames that had been listed as “mulatto” or FPC on the censuses from the mid-nineteenth century.
But Walter Plecker’s efforts to stem the destruction of civilization didn’t end with the passage of these restrictive bills. He began a program to remove the corpses of people he considered nonwhite from white cemeteries. In his twisted logic, he reasoned that since all the Indian tribes in Virginia had intermarried with Negroes (in his unsubstantiated opinion), and since one drop of Negro blood now made a person Negro, there were no longer any Indians left in Virginia. Therefore, anyone claiming to be Indian was, in effect, acknowledging African ancestry and then trying to hide behind Pocahontas in order to disguise it. With reasoning like this at the highest levels of government, it’s a wonder the entire population of Virginia didn’t become feebleminded as they tried to make sense of it.
“Like rats when you’re not watching,” Plecker explained, “they have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white as racial classification.” His mission became to expose these “rats.” What the Ku Klux Klan, resuscitated in 1915, was accomplishing in other southern states via lynching, Plecker was determined to accomplish in Virginia via the more genteel tools of documentary genocide and mandatory sterilization.
Like the Grinch stealing Christmas, Plecker notified a white woman in Pennsylvania that the man her daughter was about to marry had black blood. He also wrote to a new mother, “You will have to … see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia. It is a horrible thing.”
When someone finally challenged him about one such letter, he wrote to his pal John Powell, “I have been doing a good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could never be legally sustained.”
Not content to limit his pathology to Virginia, Plecker gave the keynote speech at the Third International Conference on Eugenics in New York in 1932, which was attended by Ernst Rudin, a German who eleven months later helped write Hitler’s new eugenics law.
Dr. J. H. Bell, the new superintendent of the Virginia Colony, wrote in 1933, “The fact that a great state like the German Republic … has in its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this idea.”
Of the birth and marriage records Plecker assembled in Virginia, he wrote proudly in 1943, “Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.” In that same year, Plecker sent a letter to all the health and educational professionals in Virginia warning that those he called “mongrels” were moving from county to county, trying to change their racial designation from colored to Indian or white as they went. He listed their surnames by county. All the traditional Melungeon names appear on the list, as do some Melungeon-related names, including four in my grandparents’ families.
The last vestiges of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law weren’t overturned until 1975. In 2002, Governor Mark Warner and the Virginia General Assembly apologized to the 8,300 victims of the eugenic sterilization policy. Some who are still living said that although the apology was very nice, it was a case of too little, too late.
My grandparents lived a hundred and fifty miles from Lynchburg when my grandfather was practicing medicine on horseback. They left Virginia for Tennessee in 1918 when my father was three years old. Were they aware of Plecker’s bureaucratic noose tightening around the necks of ethnically mixed people? As a doctor and a schoolteacher, they’d have received memos from the Bureau of Vital Statistics about its activities. Did they feel personally threatened? Did they feel alarmed for their friends and neighbors, their relatives and in-laws? Could that be why my grandmother, although ostensibly proud of her Virginia heritage, rarely went back there from Tennessee? Could this be why we never met, or even saw photos of, my grandparents’ relatives? Did my grandparents move to Tennessee because it was more racially relaxed, having hosted many abolitionists before the Civil War and many Unionists during it — and never succumbing to the fad of forcibly sterilizing its citizens? Or did they simply see an opportunity for advancement when J. Fred Johnson and George Eastman invited my grandfather across the border to open a hospital in Kingsport?
The latter seems more likely. But recently I found reissued copies of my grandp
arents’ birth certificates from the Bureau of Vital Statistics. My grandfather’s is signed by Walter Plecker himself. Both list my grandparents as “white.” However, the Dickinson County commissioner, whose signature confirmed their whiteness, was William Vanover, my grandmother’s grandfather, himself the grandson of Abby Easterd, our family Cherokee.
The early Melungeons could probably never have imagined a day when it might feel safe to acknowledge being a “mongrel.” But is it really safe even now? After all, German Jews considered themselves loyal Germans for many generations prior to the Holocaust, and Muslims lived in Spain for eight centuries prior to their expulsion in 1609.
Heading back across the James River, I speculate on what would make someone behave as vilely as Walter Plecker. He was a son of the South, his father and male relatives having fought for the Confederacy. He was reared by a black slave named Delia. After emancipation, she remained with the family and was married in their parlor.
Plecker was quoted as saying, “As much as we held in esteem individual negroes, this esteem was not of a character that would tolerate marriage with them…. The birth of mulatto children is a standing disgrace.” A fundamentalist Presbyterian, he wrote in an essay, “Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality.”
His newspaper boy said of him, “I don’t know anyone who ever saw him smile.”
Rigid in other ways, he reportedly ate a single apple for lunch every day. And he refused to look when he crossed a street, expecting cars to stop for him. In 1947, a car — hopefully one driven by a “mongrel”— didn’t stop, and he died two hours later.
Trying to figure out why Plecker found “mongrels” so threatening, I decide that he must have felt a visceral, physical affection for Delia, who’d cared for him as an infant. And this attraction may have appalled him. Just so, gay bashers are said to be unhinged by their attraction, unconscious or not, to other men. Just so did the sin-obsessed residents of Salem burn some of their fellow citizens as witches. Such people project their own tendencies onto others and then try to destroy those tendencies by destroying their designated scapegoats. As the poet Rumi puts it, “People of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.”
Also, many people know who they are only by knowing who they aren’t. They’re not black, so they’re white. They’re not gay, so they’re straight. Should you introduce such people to a “mongrel” or a bisexual (quelqu’un qui va á voile ou á vapeur, as the French put it, “someone who travels by sail or by steamboat”), they experience an identity meltdown because they’re forced to realize that their ironclad categories are permeable. By designating anyone with a single drop of African blood as African, Plecker was, in effect, copying his Virginian forebears by denying that any interracial mixing had ever occurred or that any sexual taboos might have been violated.
The early Cherokee revered creatures that crossed boundaries — snakes that lived both on and beneath the ground, birds that inhabited sky as well as land, frogs and turtles that occupied land and water. Many native tribes regarded women who fought as warriors and men who dressed as women and did women’s work as sacred for the same reason. Their existence confirmed, rather than undermined, the identity of the other men and women in the tribe.
I detour so as to avoid Liberty University, where Jerry Falwell is busy inoculating Southern Baptist youth with his own venom, which will confer upon them an immunity to tolerance of anyone who isn’t a straight white male Jesus freak. Falwell’s hatred even extends to Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby on PBS. He’s identified it as homosexual, claiming that purple is a gay color and that the triangle on the top of its head is a gay symbol. He also insists that the magic bag it carries is a purse. The next thing you know, Reverend Falwell will be sterilizing the Teletubbies.
In 2002 the National Enquirer (always my source of choice) reported on a circle of gay students on the Liberty campus. The girlfriend of one dragged him to the authorities after she overheard a rumor that he’d had an assignation with a male staff member. He confessed to this allegation. The administrators insisted he was lying, so he described in detail the sheets on the bed of the staff member in question. Then an assistant pastor, a bodybuilder who directed the band, resigned.
Asked to comment, Falwell said, “I was told he had problems in this area that you speak of.”
The bodybuilder, however, denied being homosexual. His father, the dean of Liberty’s theological seminary, said his son was leaving only because “he feels the Lord may be leading him in a new direction, a music path.”
Early in the seventeenth century King James I of England said of the Anabaptists, the cousins of contemporary Baptists, that they “thinke themselves only pure, and in a manner, without sinne, the onely true church … and all the rest of the world to be but abominations in the sight of God.”
This is the King James for whom Jamestown was named, the same James who supposedly gave land grants to the Tidewater ancestors of the Virginia Clubbers. He’s also the King James who organized the English translation of the Bible that still bears his name — and the King James who had a long romance with the Duke of Buckingham.
I drive back into Kingsport, consulting the competing church marquees for some much-needed guidance after my upsetting afternoon at the Hospital from Hell. The Presbyterians say,
SEARCHING FOR A NEW LOOK? GET A FAITH LIFT.
I lisp this to myself. Not helpful. The Methodists ask,
WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? IN THE SMOKING ORTHE NON-SMOKING SECTION?
Also unhelpful.
The Belvue Christians say,
HONK IF YOU LOVE PEACE AND QUIET.
This cheers me up.
The Baptists suggest that
FORBIDDEN FRUIT MAKES MESSY JAMS.
I crack a smile.
But it’s the Free Pentecostals who give me the lift I’m seeking:
GOD LOVES SPIRITUAL FRUITS, NOT RELIGIOUS NUTS.
Sitting on the porch at the cabin trying to digest my grim journey like a python swallowing a rat, I watch the steers suddenly gallop to the upper end of the valley, bellowing and rolling their eyes like stars of the silent screen. They look like they’re auditioning for a John Wayne movie.
Then I spot the cause of their panic: a coyote slinks across the valley and disappears behind the dam, on his way to his den in the woods at the top of the hill. A whole mob of them arrived in our area recently, following the interstates from out west, snacking en route on roadkill, their equivalent of fast food.
Len has told me that the mother cows, placid cud-chewers of our childhood, have become black belt karate masters, lashing their hooves like cudgels at coyotes that try to dine on their calves.
I wonder if this coyote feels bad that the steers stampede whenever they see him coming. Or is he proud to have such power? Like Walter Plecker and Jerry Falwell, the coyote probably takes perverse pleasure in striking terror into the hearts of our hybrid cattle. I sometimes hear him and his slavering pack on their hillside late at night, yipping and howling at the harvest moon as though at a burning cross.
11Chief Sit ‘n’ Bull
SPRING SUN POURS THROUGH MY WINDOWS, and Lake Champlain is lapping at my doorstep. But I haven’t gone outside in several days. I’ve become as addicted to my computer as a gambler at the Cherokee casino to his slot machine. I’ve joined an Internet discussion group that specializes in the use of DNA testing for genealogical purposes. The results from the Melungeon study will be released in a few weeks, and I intend to be ready.
Many members of my new focus group are doctors, geneticists, and professional genealogists. At first I was intimidated, so I “lurked.” I read their postings, but I didn’t join in. Eventually, though, I began to feel like a voyeur at a porn site, so I started posing an occasional timid question.
In time, I absorbed the fact that three types of DNA tests are available for genealogical purposes. One samples mitochondrial DNA, multiple c
opies of which are found in every cell, where they govern metabolism. A mother passes her mitochondrial DNA to all her children. It dead-ends in her sons, but her daughters pass it on to their children. Since it mutates very slowly, it’s useful in tracing population migrations. But it gives an individual information only about his or her distaff side, all the way back to a mitochondrial Eve who lived in Africa around 150,000 years ago.
A second type of test is for males only. It uses the Y chromosome, which a man inherits from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on, back to a Y-DNA Adam. Y-DNA mutates more quickly than mitochondrial DNA and is, therefore, useful in tracing more recent ancestry.
If you visualize someone’s ancestry as a fan, mitochondrial DNA and Y-DNA provide data about only the outer stay on either side. Ten generations back, each individual’s fan has 1,024 separate stays, and these tests will have sampled only two. To learn about the center of the fan, a test called the AncestryByDNA has been devised, which samples non-sex-related DNA markers from the nucleus of a testee’s cells.
My discussion group explains that the test is an exercise in statistics. The markers it samples are not those that determine physical characteristics but are, rather, taken from the “junk” DNA located between genes on the chromosomes. Although this type of DNA has no as yet determined function, these markers are found in varying proportions in the four major population groups — Indo-Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, and East Asians. Since so much global mixing has occurred, only one marker so far discovered occurs in just a single group. The others are found in different proportions in all the groups. For example, a particular marker might appear in 15 percent of Indo-Europeans, 60 percent of Native Americans, 10 percent of East Asians, and 5 percent of sub-Saharan Africans. The averages of these readings from 176 markers are computed by a complex formula. The testee is then given the percentages of the four populations represented by his or her sample.
My group discusses the controversial nature of this test. It has difficulty distinguishing East Asian from Native American because the two populations separated so recently that not enough mutations have accumulated to make the readings for each truly distinctive. Also, because of all the panglobal mixing, the confidence contours for the reported percentages are quite wide. Single-digit readings could represent smoke from some distant ancestral campfire, or they could be just statistical “noise.”
