Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  Another test called the EuroDNA uses the same technique on 320 additional markers to break down the Indo-European component of the AncestryByDNA results into four more categories: northern European, southeastern European (Greek, Turkish, and Italian populations), South Asian (East Indian, Pakistani, and Roma populations), and Middle Eastern (including North African populations).

  In answer to one of my questions, the group discusses the fact that a single Native American ancestor more than six generations back wouldn’t register with this test. In other words, Pocahontas’s input is no longer discernible in her descendants via the DNA tests currently available. However, the input of several Native American ancestors from that far back might be detectable.

  I try to tell my father about what I’m learning, but my e-mails to him keep bouncing back. He uses an Internet provider until his free, introductory hours expire, and then he switches to a new one until their free hours expire, and so on. No one is ever able to contact him via e-mail because his address keeps changing.

  Several dozen messages arrive every day from my DNA group. Many require research in the recommended textbooks I’ve been buying. Participation in this group starts to seem like practice for the afterlife. Everyone interacts as a disembodied essence. Yet there are still very distinctive personalities — know-it-alls, altruists, and windbags. Anyone who shows his or her fangs too insistently is cast into limbo by our moderator, who intervenes in disputes like an avenging archangel. Hell is when your computer crashes and you’re cut off from your comrades altogether.

  My new best friends talk a lot about the individual DNA testing that many are conducting on their families via several commercial labs. As I gain confidence, I decide to try this. I order some test kits, and soon I’m swabbing the inner cheek of every person who opens his or her mouth in my presence.

  One day my group mentions Mongolian blue spots, another physical sign of non-European heritage. I leap up from my desk chair, strip off my jeans, and grab a hand mirror. Contorting myself into a position that reminds me of the days when feminists were using specula to befriend their own cervixes, I study my coccyx. I’ve never seen it before. I’m intrigued. I notice a blue bruise the size of a quarter. For a horrified moment, I wonder if my idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura has returned. Then I conclude that I’ve merely sat down too hard.

  I wait several days. Then I peek again. The bruise is still there, but it’s blessedly not spreading. Day after day I study my bruise, like a Roman oracle consulting fowl innards. I try to maintain the scientific detachment forced on me by growing up in a family of physicians. Finally, I accept the fact that I have a Mongolian blue spot.

  I’m enchanted, but I can’t think how to share this thrill with others. Remembering the Queen Teens fashion show, I’m alarmed by the notion of what I might do at the next Melungeon conference to prove that I may be one of them.

  One sunny afternoon I take time out from my cybercult to throw bread crumbs to some kamikaze seagulls along the lakeshore with an enthralled Zachary. An airplane passes overhead, flashing silver in the sun.

  Zachary points at the plane and crows, “Daddy!” He once went to the airport with Sara to see Brett off on a trip, and he now thinks that all airplanes contain his father. He apparently believes that Brett spends his time, when he’s not around, circling the skies like an eagle.

  As we hurl crusts to the swooping gulls, I realize that tracing ancestry via DNA is based on the belief that Zachary could be descended from these screeching harpies. The wife of the Bishop of Worcester, upon learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1860, is reported to have said, “Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”

  I remember first being introduced to this concept in high school. Our biology teacher, Mr. Burns, took his best students aside one day and quietly asked us to spend a lunch hour with him in his classroom. Disgruntled not to be out at the drive-in restaurants with our pals, we listened glumly while he made us promise that we wouldn’t tell anyone, not even our parents, about what he was going to impart to us. He warned that he could lose his job. Once we’d reassured him that our lips were sealed, he told us in a hushed voice about evolution and natural selection. We were as titillated as though he were describing oral sex.

  Yet in 2001 only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “humans developed from earlier species.” This is the lowest rate for this belief in the industrialized world. The figure is around 80 percent for most other Western democracies. Even thirteenth-century Turks would have agreed with that statement. Rumi himself said, “I died a mineral and became plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”

  Creationists in this country maintain that Adam and Eve were divinely assembled about 6,000 years ago and that subsequent humans are their heirs. Geneticists support our descent from a genetic Adam and Eve whose descendants moved out of Africa to populate the globe some 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. But Adam and Eve are all that creationists and evolutionists can agree on.

  Once our bread supply runs out, Zachary and I return to the parking lot of my condo. I strap him into his car seat, an exercise that confirms my superiority over seagulls, who would never in their wildest dreams be able to fasten all these interlocking belts and buckles correctly. To be fair, though, I require a refresher course from Sara each time I drive Zachary someplace.

  A bumper sticker on a cranberry Altima parked next to mine reads

  SILENCE IS GOLDEN, BUT DUCT TAPE IS SILVER.

  Vermont bumpers are giving Tennessee church marquees a run for their money.

  We arrive at the airport, park in the garage, and walk up to the observation deck where Brett’s father works. He greets us warmly, and then Zachary and I assume our station by a window through which we can watch an endless parade of planes taxi out to runways and take off. This is Zachary’s favorite pastime. I don’t know if it’s because he thinks his beloved father is aboard one of those planes.

  A yellow dump truck comes rolling down a runway en route to a construction site on the far side of the airport. Zachary tugs at my hand, “Gram! Look!” he exclaims. “Truck take off!”

  Ina picks me up at the Kingsport airport, and we head out to her house on the lake, where I’ll be staying until the London geneticist announces his findings on Melungeon DNA. Ina is now almost as stressed out over her ancestors as I am over mine. I’ve persuaded her to order DNA tests on herself and two of her elderly uncles.

  The next day, I take my mother to a luncheon to celebrate the hundredth birthday of one of her friends. When we get back, she goes upstairs to change while I sit down in my father’s room. He’s very pleased with himself. He says he’s persuaded a Baptist prayer group in town to pray for him to win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.

  “I’d ask you to pray for it, too,” he says. “But I get the impression you don’t believe in prayer.”

  “I do believe in prayer,” I say indignantly. “I just don’t believe in prayer to win sweepstakes. I hope God is busy solving bigger problems.”

  “I hope God works on little problems, too, because I don’t have any big ones.”

  He asks how the party went. I tell him it was very pleasant, that my mother spent a lot of time talking about foxhunting to the celebrant’s brother, a retired surgeon from the Mayo Clinic.

  “Foxhunting?” he snorts. “Why, your mother wouldn’t know a fox from a possum!”

  I study him, startled by his ferocity. “That’s cute, Dad. You’re jealous.”

  “It’s just that I hate the idea of your mother as a wealthy widow, running around town in a BMW convertible,” he says woefully.

  Laughing, I reply, “Who says you’ll go first?”

  “I’d better. I’d be miserable without her.”

  This is the downside to a happy sixty-five-year marriage. We who spent our early years in orange crates welcome solitude — c
ourt it, even.

  The red summer sun rises from behind a wooded cliff. The lake below turns the color of fresh blood. I’m standing on Ina’s deck the morning of the Melungeon conference, and in a few hours the Melungeons will know who they are, after three hundred years of wondering.

  My hands resting on the railing, I recall my conversation twenty-five years earlier with Buddy, the Shobes’ half-Melungeon gardener, in which he said he’d been too dark for the whites and too pale for the coloreds. Nowadays, I have a better idea of what he was talking about.

  In fact, I find myself close to tears as the full enormity of what the historical Melungeons experienced finally dawns on me. Regarded as wannabes by Indians, whites, and blacks alike, they were raceless in a racist society. Many spent their lives enduring ridicule and humiliation from others who were certain of their own identity (even if they were wrong).

  Whether my ancestors were among them isn’t really important. But I think about my grandparents anyway, whoever they were, so intent on constructing a secure and comfortable life for themselves — and for us.

  The latter-day Melungeons are gathering under a tent in a park in Kingsport, determined at last to deconstruct the white identity their ancestors struggled to bequeath them. Ina, my mother, and I sit down in folding chairs facing the podium.

  Wayne, the NPR executive who’s president of the Melungeon Heritage Association, takes the podium and welcomes us. He reads a message of greeting and solidarity that the Turkish ambassador in Washington has sent to his Melungeon cousins.

  Dr. Chris Morris, a local rheumatologist who’s also a professor at the East Tennessee State University medical school, takes the podium. He discusses several patients with supposed Melungeon ancestry, including Brent Kennedy, who have now been diagnosed with familial Mediterranean fever. Most have undergone decades of ineffective treatments for Lyme disease, lupus, manic depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, PMS, etc. The National Institute of Health has identified in them a regional variant of this hereditary disease that involves recurring bouts of fever, arthritis, chest pain, leg cramps, and abdominal bloating. Normally it afflicts only Turks, Arabs, Armenians, and Sephardic Jews. Dr. Morris also mentions the discovery among purported Melungeons of several cases of Machado-Joseph disease and Behcet’s syndrome, which are normally limited to those same populations.

  Next, some new kids on the block present research suggesting that the original Melungeons were crypto-Jews and Moors. Beth Hirschman, a Kingsport native, is a professor at Rutgers, and Donald Panther-Yates is a professor at Georgia Southern University.

  Donald describes his descent from a daughter of the Cherokee chief Black Fox, who married the first rabbi of Wheeling, West Virginia. He discusses several routes whereby Jews became incorporated into southeastern tribes, one being the Mississippi Bubble of 1718 when the poor of Paris and some Jews from Alsace-Lorraine were shipped up the Mississippi River, deposited on the shore, and never heard from again. He also presents evidence that many early Indian traders were Jews who took native wives, maintaining that their mixed children married among themselves and assumed positions of leadership in their various tribes. A trader named James Adair wrote a book in the 1760s itemizing the cultural similarities between Jews and southeastern Indians.

  Beth, who reports that her nephew was born with six fingers on one hand and six toes on one foot, talks about stars of David on Appalachian headstones; menorahs used as candlesticks on Appalachian dinner tables; mountaineers bearing surnames cited in official Catholic records as belonging to Judaizers sought by the Inquisition; and her own ancestors named Israel, Palestine, Mecca, Omar, and Zion.

  She compares the Melungeons to the Marranos of northern New Mexico, whose Sephardic ancestors fled the Mexican branch of the Spanish Inquisition by moving northward, where some families retained a knowledge and practice of their heritage while others went native. (Future DNA testing will show that thirty out of seventy-eight contemporary Marrano males are Cohanim, members of the priestly Jewish caste descended from Aaron, brother of Moses. The head of a leading DNA laboratory will report that between 10 and 15 percent of their clients from New Mexico, southern Texas, and northern Mexico have Y chromosomes typical of Jews from the eastern Mediterranean, as do 6 to 9 percent of people with Spanish Catholic backgrounds.)

  The Melungeons’ eyes glaze over. We’re already suffering from Ancestral Overload. But we know we have to make room in our crowded gene pool for this new Sephardic canoe.

  During the break, I spot a young man wearing a T-shirt that reads

  TRI-RACIAL ISOLATE - NEVER!

  Suspecting I’ve found one of the racists who periodically spit venom on the Melungeon chat sites, I question him. He says he has no problem with “tri-racial.” What he objects to is “isolate.” He maintains that the Melungeons have cheerfully incorporated any stranger who ever turned up. And he resents those who portray them as ignorant, inbred hillbillies who’ve never left their own hollows.

  The audience returns to their folding chairs. Tension mounts. There’s none of the cheerful banter or spirited sparring of previous gatherings. We’re about to learn who we are. Many of us have spent much of our lives trying to figure this out. Several look as though they’re in suspended cardiac arrest. I feel a bit that way myself. What if it’s all a big ruse we’ve perpetrated on ourselves, and we’re just standard-issue northern Europeans? It will be like Dorothy awakening from her adventures in Oz to find herself back in Kansas inspecting tornado damage.

  Wayne introduces Dr. Jones, but we’re all well aware of who he is. He stands up from the table and moves to the microphone. A tall, handsome man with dark hair and a mustache, he’s wearing a navy blue blazer and a tie.

  In his clipped British accent, he launches right in: There’s no one specific DNA pattern associated with the tested Melungeons (in the way that there is for, say, the Hazara of Pakistan and Afghanistan, a third of whom share the same Y chromosome as Genghis Khan, according to my DNA Internet group). But the mitochondrial DNA from one hundred Melungeons supports the concept that the name Melungeon could indeed come from the French word meaning “mixed”: 5 percent of the samples are Native American, 5 percent are African, 4 percent are Siddi, and 2 percent are Turkish. (The Siddi are Ethiopians brought as slaves to northern India. Some of their free descendants were absorbed by Roma Gypsy communities.)

  This doesn’t mean that each individual exhibits those percentages, continues Dr. Jones, but rather that the sampled community, taken as a whole, does. Each extended family no doubt has a somewhat different mixture.

  The remaining 84 percent of the mitochondrial DNA samples are generic European. Dr. Jones explains that at the moment it’s impossible to separate the various flavors of European mitochondrial DNA due to tens of thousands of years of mixing there. Consequently, the question of Portuguese ancestry remains unanswered. Nothing in the study either proves or refutes it. But DNA technology is in its infancy and will conceivably be able to resolve the issue in the future.

  The Y-DNA samples from Melungeon men are still being scrutinized. But the twenty that have already been analyzed support the mixed ancestry indicated by the mitochondrial DNA — Indo-European, sub-Saharan African, and Native American. In addition, two Y chromosomes are associated with Turkish populations and one with Arabs. Two are of unknown origin.

  Dr. Jones adds that these twenty Y chromosomes exhibit more genetic variation than was found in a recent Y-DNA study of several hundred men from all across Ireland. The Irish study found four distinct groups, whereas the twenty Melungeon samples alone represent seven groups. It proves, he concludes, that this “tri-racial isolate” community was anything but isolated.

  After a long silence and a few distracted questions, the crowd disperses. There’s very little talking as everyone tries to understand and digest this.

  Ina, my mother, and I drive back toward my parents’ house. The sun is setting behind Bays Mountain in an orgy of flames. Dr. Jones’s findings support a
scenario for the Melungeons in which people with darker skin fled, or were pushed, into these mountains, where they melded with others in the same boat — and with hospitable Native Americans and paler pioneers from northern Europe. Exactly how these people first got from Africa, Turkey, Syria, and India to the Atlantic coast of North America remains unanswered. There could have been almost as many different routes as there were individuals. For one thing, England was purging itself of its undesirables, which included Gypsies, Jews, Turks, Arabs, Africans, Moors — anyone who wasn’t fair-skinned enough to qualify as English.

  But once in the Appalachians, those who looked African or Native American probably drifted away to join those communities. And those who could pass for white did so, leaving behind only those of ambiguous appearance and questionable origins.

  My mother breaks the silence. “So everyone’s theories could be true.”

  “Apparently,” I reply, pulling into the Dairy Queen. “Except for those who insist that Melungeons are only tri-racial.”

  I buy some Buster Bars at the drive-through window. They’re vanilla ice cream on sticks, coated with chocolate and peanuts. It’s my father’s favorite food group. Back at the house we sit down in my father’s room, and I pass out the Buster Bars. As we eat them, I describe the DNA results to him. Since he’s a doctor, he understands the terminology.

  “So what haplogroup was my Y chromosome?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. It was a blind study. Only the tests I’ve ordered on you individually will tell us that.”

  “When will those results come back?”