The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  Like the mythical Virginia Dare, the statue led a restless existence. Its peculiar journey from Rome to the bottom of the sea and then to Salem, Boston, New York, and Washington didn’t end with the death of the artist, who bequeathed it to North Carolina. Placed in Raleigh’s Hall of History under the portraits of uniformed Confederate generals, the statue’s state of undress provoked a public scandal. A newspaper later noted “a Marble Lady, clad only in fish net,” that had done time “in the dingy basement of the Supreme Court.” It was said to have suffered from vandals who smeared lipstick on her stone mouth.

  Carved in Rome, lost in the Mediterranean, recovered, and displayed up and down the U.S. East Coast, Maria Louisa Lander’s statue of Virginia Dare now stands in the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island. Tania Gail

  State officials finally sent Lander’s sculpture to Roanoke Island for display at the new Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. Park rangers, however, blanched at displaying the statue of an adult who in fact might have died in infancy, so it was again sent into storage, where it was again submerged in a deluge. No one seemed to know what to do with this full-grown woman in her revealing outfit who wasn’t quite a real historical figure.

  Eventually, Lander’s creation was pawned off on playwright Paul Green, who wrote the outdoor drama The Lost Colony that is performed just down the path and through the woods. Shipped west to his estate outside Chapel Hill, the sculpture remained for years in its box. He finally donated it to the newly created gardens.

  She might have been a Grecian nymph, except for the shell necklace pulled close against her throat and a similar bracelet around her upper arm, in the style that John White pictured Carolina Algonquian women wearing. Her fine features were purely European, but she wore a fringed and beaded dress made of tightly woven fishnet. A marble heron sat contentedly at her feet. Dare’s hollow eyes looked north to the Albemarle Sound, which was so close I could hear the light thump of waves against the sand. A hundred yards east, invisible through a patch of dense woods, stood the Fort Raleigh earthwork.

  After surviving fire, water, abuse, and neglect, she seemed at ease on the forest’s edge. There wasn’t another soul in sight, but someone had paid Virginia Dare a visit on the morning of her birthday. In her pale marble arms, Lander’s statue held a large green-and-white spray of Hosta plantaginea, also known as August lily, which demurely covered her bare breasts. The plant, with its sweet fragrant late summer bloom, is a favorite food of roving deer.

  | CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Swamp Saints and Renegades

  Virginia Dare’s lonely travails in the dark forests of Roanoke still mirror whites’ anxieties amid the growing numbers of black and brown people with whom they share a country. They inspire women yearning for independence. But I was surprised to discover that there are also Native Americans who lay claim to the virginal huntress.

  I stumbled on this odd fact while chatting with Lowery, the Episcopal priest. He was instrumental in a recent campaign to elevate the status of Virginia Dare and Manteo, the first Anglicans baptized in North America. These two players in the Roanoke drama are now not just wines. They are saints.

  He told me that the push to place the English baby and the Carolina Algonquian man on the list of Episcopal “saints and worthies” in 2015 was for him deeply personal. “I grew up with the story that we were partially descended from the Lost Colony,” he added. “My father was a Lumbee Indian.” As a child, he was told that the Raleigh settlers wandered inland and joined this Native American tribe on the North Carolina mainland about two hundred miles southwest of Roanoke Island.

  “These were the ‘broken tribes,’ ” Lowery explained. Documents are few, but anthropologists suspect that in order to survive, bands of Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan speakers from across the region, decimated by war and disease, retreated to this swampy sanctuary in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. English became the lingua franca as their ancient traditions faded amid repeated calamities. This loose collection of peoples even lost their old tribal designations; Lumbee, which means “dark water” in Siouan, is only the latest of half a dozen names applied to the thirty-five thousand people enrolled in the state-recognized tribe; another thirty thousand claim Lumbee identity. That makes it the largest Indian group east of the Mississippi, and yet it remains one of the least known as well as one of the most impoverished.

  Early English settlers avoided this part of North Carolina with its marshy soil that was difficult to farm, prone to frequent flooding, and plagued by rampant malaria. One of the earliest mentions of the area’s inhabitants is in 1754, when an English visitor noted “a mixed crew, a lawless people” living in “vacant lands being inclosed in great swamps.” The swamps afforded protection from the invaders as well as rich sources of game and fish.

  Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders eventually arrived, bringing their slaves to help drain the marshes and lay out fields. West Africans were soon speaking in the Celtic tongue of their masters while harvesting tobacco. Huguenots, Protestant refugees from France, also drifted into the area two centuries after their ancestors’ ill-fated attempt to settle just south of here in the 1560s. Spanish castaways might have flavored the unusual mix, and escaped slaves found here a safe haven from white owners. Though deeply rural, the area was more diverse than even some American cities of the day.

  Just before the Revolution, the last North Carolina royal governor complained of “a number of free negroes and mulattoes who infest the country and annoy its inhabitants.” Mulattoes referred to any persons lacking “pure” blood—that is, those from mixed backgrounds. There was no mention of Indians, but mulattoes could be the product of Native American and African American, as well as European, unions. Many of the inhabitants fought on the American side in the Revolution; in the early years of the new nation they could own land and vote, though they could not testify against a white person in court.

  Those policies changed dramatically in 1835, just as Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony first assumed prominence. While the scattered bands of Indians in eastern North Carolina escaped the grim fate of their Cherokee cousins to the west who suffered the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, their rights were severely curtailed. They were lumped in with the group generically called “free persons of color.” North Carolina’s new constitution denied them access to the ballot box and made it illegal for them to carry guns without a license, an onerous regulation for a people who hunted for a living. They were even forbidden to serve in the military. Resentment at their second-class status simmered.

  During the Civil War, the Confederate Home Guard killed a Lumbee father and son who refused to dig battle trenches with black slaves. The victims’ son and brother Henry Berry Lowrie witnessed the brutal murders and launched a violent rampage that lasted for nearly a decade. “In a sense, Henry Berry Lowrie was the making of the Indians,” wrote sociologist Guy Johnson, who researched the tribe in the 1930s. “He was their martyr and hero, and he focused attention on their grievances in a dramatic way.”

  Seen as a Robin Hood to locals and as a dangerous thug by the state, Lowrie led an armed band of blacks and poverty-stricken whites, as well as Lumbee, that robbed and killed wealthy whites throughout Robeson County, the Indians’ heartland. An undated photograph shows a handsome and dark-haired young man with eyebrows that nearly meet over a piercing gaze, a broad nose, and a beard as thick as a beaver’s pelt; he was said to have striking gray-blue eyes. Lowrie told one reporter that “we don’t kill anybody but the Ku Klux,” referring to the white supremacist group that targeted people of color. The New York Herald noted “his roving propensities” came from his Scottish background, his “cunning and fortitude” from his Indian ancestors, and his “docility and ferocity” from his Negro roots. This multiracial background combined with his capacity for organization and violence sparked panic among the region’s whites.

  A regiment of federal t
roops and a hefty reward failed to secure his capture. Lowrie even blew up the county safe and stole the twenty-eight thousand dollars set aside as reward money for his capture. “If you will pardon my language, he had real big hairy balls,” said the Reverend Lowery, who added that he is the renegade’s fourth cousin four times removed. “It was put out that he shot himself while cleaning his gun, but in my family they say he went to California and died in 1925.”

  A major source of Lumbee ire was the state’s refusal to let their children attend white schools. Instead, they were forced to depend on the underfunded and substandard schools for blacks, dooming their children to an impoverished future. In the 1880s, as the push to roll back minority rights obtained in the wake of the Civil War gained strength, the state legislator representing Robeson County, Hamilton McMillan, came up with a clever solution to address the crisis while weakening his political opponents.

  Lumbee Indians were solid Republicans in their day, as were other minorities who favored the party of Lincoln. McMillan was a white Democrat. He began to research an old story—one he said he had heard told among the Indians—that the Lost Colonists settled with the Croatoan Indians, who in turn wandered southwest to join other refugees in the swamps. The list of settlers with the John White expedition includes a Henry Berrye, and McMillan claimed that Henry Berry Lowrie was his direct descendant, three hundred years later. He argued that the Indians of Robeson County had rescued the abandoned English colonists from starvation and therefore deserved the gratitude of whites.

  Lumbee Henry Berry Lowrie launched a rebellion in southeastern North Carolina after the Civil War. In the aftermath, the tribal claim to have taken in the vanished Roanoke colonists was thrust into the limelight.

  The Democratic-controlled legislature, eager to avoid further rebellion in the troublesome county, agreed with McMillan’s assessment. The Indians were given the new name of Croatan and granted their own school system. They were forbidden to marry “a person of negro descent to the third generation inclusive,” a restriction identical to that applied to whites. This was a gift rather than a punishment, because it raised the legal status of the Croatan above that of African Americans.

  The strategy worked; many of the Indians switched their allegiance to the Democratic Party, weakening the already marginalized Republicans. “It was all tied up with race,” Lowery told me. “The deal was that if we voted Democratic then, we could have our own schools. The whites got the cream, the Lumbee got the milk, and the African Americans got the broken bottle.”

  When the tribe asked the U.S. Congress to grant them full federal recognition, however, the claim that “your petitioners are a remnant of White’s lost colony” fell on deaf ears. Congress declined, as it has ever since, despite numerous attempts.

  McMillan’s successful campaign, however, was not simply a cynical political maneuver. Even after his 1885 legislative victory, he grew ever more fixated on proving the Lost Colony connection. Three years later he compiled a small book with the prodigious title of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony: An Historical Sketch of the Attempts of Sir Walter Raleigh to Establish a Colony in Virginia, with the Traditions of an Indian Tribe in North Carolina, Indicating the Fate of the Colony of Englishmen Left on Roanoke Island in 1587.

  Extracting information from the taciturn Croatan proved no easy task. “After the year 1835”—the year they were denied fundamental rights—“these Indians who murmured greatly at the injustice done them in being classed as ‘mulattoes’ or ‘free persons of color’ became suspicious of white men and at first we found difficulty in eliciting any facts relating to their past history,” McMillan notes. Much of his argument centers on their oral tradition. His most moving passage is a speech that he reports an elderly Indian gave at the inquest investigating the Lowrie murders during the Civil War.

  “We have always been friends of white men,” the Native American is said to have told the court. “We were a free people long before the white men came to our land. Our tribe was always free. They lived in Roanoke…One of our tribe went to England in an English ship and saw that great country,” an apparent reference to Manteo. “We took the English to live with us. There is the white man’s blood in these veins as well as that of the Indian…We moved to this land and fought for liberty for white men, yet white men have treated us as negroes. Here are our young men shot down by a white man and we get no justice, and that in a land where our people were always free.” Aside from the name Berry, McMillan noted numerous other surnames similar or identical to those of the final Roanoke settlers. He also claimed that when white settlers finally penetrated the area in the mid-eighteenth century, they found a large tribe “tilling the soil, owning slaves and practicing many of the arts of civilized life,” and speaking an “almost pure Anglo Saxon English.”

  His claims take a more bizarre turn, however, when he adds that the Native Americans had communication not just with the Lost Colonists but also with other “more civilized races” such as Persians who “established a colony in the West Indies a thousand years ago” and twelfth-century Welsh settlers who explored the forests of North Carolina.

  While he convinced a majority of North Carolina legislators, McMillan won few converts to his theory in academia. Historians dismissed his more eccentric notions and complained that his claims about the Roanoke voyagers lacked documentary evidence or clear sources. Even his assertions about Indians “practicing many of the arts of civilized life” had little obvious basis. There were no court records of the eloquent inquest speech. Ethnologist James Mooney, the reigning late-nineteenth-century white expert on Native Americans, wrote the description of the Croatan Indians for the 1907 Hand Book of American Indians North of Mexico. He dismissed the Lost Colony connection as “baseless.” The Croatan, he concluded, were a mix of Indians, early white settlers, runaway slaves, “and probably also of stray seamen of the Latin races.” While not wholly discredited, McMillan’s assertion failed to gain traction in the following decades.

  A reporter for Appleton’s Magazine visited several Croatan households on a 1907 tour with McMillan. Normally reluctant to speak with white strangers, the Indians welcomed the former legislator and his guest. One Jim Diel “spoke in a high, almost falsetto voice, peculiar to all these descendants of the Lost Colony, who still use the old Saxon English.”

  When the reporter asked about Virginia Dare, he received blank looks. “But say Virginia Darr, and there will be an eager ‘Yes, yes—we know Virginia Darr, she is our mother way back.’ ” They also claimed her transformation into a white doe was an ancient Indian legend told by their ancestors. (That seems unlikely, because the story of the white doe mimicked much of a Wordsworth poem written in England a century before.)

  The Croatan, however, soon turned against their new tribal name. Local whites shortened “Croatan” to “Cro” and used it as a nasty epithet. “They pronounced it with a sort of sneer,” writes Johnson. “It soon became a fighting term, and for many years it has been virtually taboo in the presence of Indians.” Today it remains an insult that can lead to bloodshed. In 1911, the tribe successfully petitioned the legislature to change their name from Croatan to “the Indians of Robeson County.” They were, notes the sociologist, willing to give up their Lost Colony roots “for the removal of the curse of ‘Croatan.’ ”

  After two more name changes, the tribe settled on Lumbee, and in 1956 Congress acknowledged the group as descended from “the earliest white settlements” in Robeson County, noting the similarities in Lost Colony surnames, but stopped short of confirming them as Lost Colony descendants. The legislation granted it a measure of national recognition as an Indian people, but not as a tribe, which would have provided extensive federal aid.

  The claim that their ancestors aided the Roanoke settlers no longer seems to bolster their cause among whites. The tribe is centered within one of the nation’s poorest counties, with alarming levels o
f unemployment, violence, and addiction. Other Indians often view Lumbee with suspicion. “They are infiltrators,” confided a Cherokee friend of mine. “They are not ‘factual’ Indians.” Some African Americans dismiss the Lumbee claim to Native American identity as a convenient way to avoid the societal burden of being black. U.S. Senator Sam Ervin, the North Carolina lawmaker later famous for his role in the Watergate scandal, called the tribe “the most neglected minority group in the history of the nations.”

  * * *

  —

  The heart of the Lumbee community is the little town of Pembroke, set in a landscape of marsh and forest laced with canals and creeks and dotted with small farms. Though it lies between the busy beaches of the Outer Banks and the crowded highways of Charlotte, Pembroke feels far removed from the modern Sunbelt. Driving into town one fall morning, I passed the Lost Colony Trading Post, a gas station hawking Chinese-made moccasins, its sign fading and cracked. Then I crossed the iced-tea-colored Lumber River—the Anglicized version of the Siouan name—still swollen from a recent tropical storm that inundated much of the county and forced thousands from their homes.

  Nine out of ten Pembroke residents call themselves Lumbee. The community, originally named Raleigh, grew up around the Croatan Normal School, founded in 1887 to train teachers in a single modest brick building. Now it is the vibrant campus of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Parking beside the entrance to Old Main, I saw a statue of a diminutive and bearded white man in a dashing cape, Hamilton McMillan. Inside the administration building is a museum as well as a conference room, where, on the morning I visited, a Lumbee youth group shook rattles, banged on drums, and sang Native songs to launch the annual Southeast Indian Studies Conference.