In the following century, escaped and free African Americans arrived as well. Historian Arwin Smallwood at North Carolina A&T State University even posits that the Africans likely dropped off by Drake in 1586 might have been the direct ancestors of those Machapunga so adept in war. “They were, after all, soldiers accustomed to the swamps,” he told me. “Both Africans and whites from the Roanoke voyages merged with the coastal Indians to create some of the first mixed-race people in North America long before the 1619 arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown,” he added.
According to a social history of the Mattamuskeet published in 1975 by Patrick Garrow, the tribe’s descendants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “enjoyed a social status only slightly higher than slaves.” As their refuge shrank as Europeans proliferated, the indigenous children were regularly removed for “apprenticeships” designed to place them under the care of whites that erased their culture. “The trend among these families since the Civil War towards increased mixture with black families, as well as the apprenticeship policy in the early nineteenth century, has effectively destroyed all but a dim awareness of their ‘Indianess,’ ” writes Garrow.
When anthropologist Frank Speck visited the area in 1916 with a Mohawk graduate student, he found the Machapunga “are of the Algonquian stock and have intermarried with negroes and whites.” He writes that “persistent inquiry among the settlers of Albemarle and Pamlico sounds” brought to his attention “a few individuals who are descended from Indians” who appeared to be a mix of Indian, African, and European features. He concludes that “the living descendants of the Machapunga, by a liberal estimate, can hardly number more than one hundred.”
Though these people did not speak a word of Carolina Algonquian, Speck noticed they made nets with different-sized meshes to capture specific species, using fibers from a local variety of milkweed, just like Algonquians far to the north. “Until recently,” he adds, “native baskets were made of hickory and oak splints, in the manner prevailing among all the Iroquoian and Algonquian bands of the east.”
Seven years later, Speck mentioned in another academic paper that many of the remaining Machapunga had since left the mainland. “In North Carolina there are a number of uninvestigated bands of mixed Indians,” he writes. “For example, the Machapunga are represented by about one hundred survivors on Roanoke Island.”
* * *
—
Roanoke Island? When I read Speck’s throwaway line late one night, I yelped out loud.
If Lost Colonists joined the Croatoan and moved with the tribe to the mainland and became part of the Machapunga, then their descendants, more than three centuries later, would have returned to precisely where they began. They would have come full circle—back to Roanoke Island. In that Jim Crow era, however, they would have been classified as colored. The putative descendants of Virginia Dare, that paragon of whiteness and symbol of the nation’s Anglo-American heritage, would have been considered black.
Bishop Cheshire, with his loathing of “mongrel remnants,” would no doubt have been vexed. So would the members of the Manteo White Supremacy Club. Because they are no longer available for comment, I asked Peter Brimelow from VDARE.com if he shared my delight at the irony. “Not particularly,” he replied, before launching into a diatribe against the fantasy of the “coming racial nirvana” predicted by immigration enthusiasts.
* * *
—
On a cold and rainy February night in 1862, a small and dangerously overcrowded boat beached near the old earthwork on Roanoke Island. Some twenty men, women, and children scrambled up the sandy bank, 275 years after the Lost Colonists had done the same. The new arrivals were the first of more than three thousand enslaved people to flee their eastern North Carolina masters for the protection of President Lincoln’s troops. What came to be called the Freedmen’s Colony spawned hundreds of tents and houses, including a church and school, along a dusty grid of streets on the island’s middle and north end.
A Union Army minister named Horace James, who was put in charge of organizing the settlement, envisioned the colony as pioneering the next step in the American experiment, what he called “a new social order.” While Raleigh’s people sought gold only to find “starvation and an early grave,” the “magic touch of freedom” now would make the “wave-kissed shores” of Roanoke Island “the abode of a prosperous and virtuous people, of varying blood but of one destiny.” Nearly three centuries after the failure of the Elizabethan effort, Roanoke would spawn “a happy commonwealth.”
As the English had learned long before, however, the new settlers found that the island lacked the resources, like good soil and fresh water, necessary to build a large and thriving community. Nor were the local whites eager to be a minority in James’s “happy commonwealth.” After the conflict, property owners sued to get their land back, and most of the residents of the colony left the island. A few, however, remained to join those already living here to build a small but thriving African American community on the outskirts of Roanoke’s largest settlement. In the 1870s the growing town was dubbed Manteo and made the seat of a county named in honor of Virginia Dare. Known as excellent watermen, the men of color took up fishing and oversaw operation of a lifesaving station on nearby Pea Island (near the site of the long-vanished Port Ferdinando), the only U.S. station staffed solely by blacks.
Arsonists burned the station in 1880. In the 1890s the Manteo White Supremacy Club lobbied for white supremacist candidates, and in 1901 Dare County approved a state measure to disenfranchise blacks. Although subject to the same harsh laws and prejudice as elsewhere in the region, blacks had a larger degree of independence here, where plantation culture had never taken root and government control was weak. While several lynchings took place in the counties immediately to the west, no mob murders of African Americans are documented on the Outer Banks. Greater liberty and economic opportunity drew other Negroes, a category that since 1835 had included everyone of mixed blood, living in the subsistence economy that long characterized much of the state’s eastern mainland.
The Machapunga, as a consequence, were considered black when they moved the fifty miles or so northeast to Roanoke Island from their more isolated mainland villages. “Today, the ancestry of these people is so predominately Negroid that any Indian blood is thoroughly disguised,” another anthropologist wrote about Manteo’s Machapunga in 1960.
On a quiet and unusually warm Sunday morning in spring, I cruised through Manteo’s quaint downtown, with its restaurants named 1587 and the Lost Colony Brewery and Cafe. Most of the tourist action clusters on the east side by the picturesque harbor, where the Elizabeth II, the sixteenth-century reproduction vessel, is docked at Roanoke Island Festival Park.
Across the main highway to the west is the predominantly black neighborhood. Since I was a child, I had passed through Manteo without even suspecting its existence. The houses were older and smaller than those on the whiter side of town, and the streets quieter. I pulled up outside a plain brick church with a small white steeple and a side parking lot crammed with cars. The Church of Three Ships on Sir Walter Raleigh Street is also called Haven Creek Missionary Baptist Church.
If slaves could cross the creek—the Croatan Sound—then they could find haven on Roanoke. Founded in the Freedmen’s Colony during the Civil War, the church’s first official minister was Zion Hall Berry, who claimed full-blooded Cherokee descent (in North Carolina, the term “Cherokee” is often a generic designation for Indian). I could hear a choir in full swing through the half-open windows. Late and underdressed, I loitered outside in the shade until the service ended. It lasted three hours. The pastor, sweating heavily from preaching in the heat, invited me into his tiny office. He was not from the island, and he told me that the community’s main source of knowledge had recently died. The other, a 102-year-old woman, was too ill to chat.
Later I met with Joan Collins and D
arrell Collins at a café down the street. The cousins are light-skinned professionals in the twilight of their busy careers; Darrell is Manteo mayor pro tem and a former park ranger well known for his talks on the Wright brothers, while Joan is retired from the federal government and deeply involved in community activities. Their great-grandfather was in the lifesaving service, and they share a great-great-grandfather in Zion Hall Berry.
“They say he was full-blown Cherokee,” said Joan. She pulled a copy of an old photograph out of her purse. The black-and-white image revealed a large man with a broad face and an intense dark-eyed stare. “We have a side of our family that is very heavy into our Indian heritage,” continued Joan. “They do powwows. The chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe is my cousin.”
Zion Hall Berry, a nineteenth-century preacher, claimed Indian descent and founded numerous Baptist churches across northeastern North Carolina.
By the tone of her voice and arch of her brow, I sensed she was skeptical of the Native American connection, so I asked if she had had her DNA tested. “My father did, and there was hardly any Indian at all,” she said. “Same for my brother and sister—in fact, our balance was a little more white than black, which makes me chuckle. For my powwow cousins, this is their life. But we have heard the stories about Indians since we were young.”
Darrell said that his grandfather had Indian features as well as an uncompromising Native American outlook on survival. “We are descendants of the Skyco tribe,” he said. Skyco is the Roanoke Island community between Manteo and Wanchese, named for the son of the Chowan Indian chief held hostage by Ralph Lane in 1586. Also spelled Skiko, it was his grandfather’s middle name. He would take Darrell and a cousin camping in the swamp to set traps for rabbits and squirrels. “One day we had a campfire going, and we got water on the campfire. My grandfather said that young Indian braves don’t spill water on a campfire, and he tied us up with briars,” Darrell recalled with a laugh. “After that my mother didn’t let us go out in the swamp with him.”
I asked them if they were raised with the story of the Lost Colony and Virginia Dare. Darrell looked at me with a level gaze. “I was raised on stories of Harriet Tubman,” he said.
Before leaving Manteo, I stopped by Roanoke Island Festival Park to say hello to Warren McMaster, the sailor who spends his days in wool stockings and pantaloons aboard the Elizabeth II answering tourists’ questions about the Roanoke voyages. Leaning comfortably against the rigging, with his spare frame and jaunty goatee, he looked very much the Elizabethan pirate. “I tell them this was the first permanent English settlement in America,” he said during a break between visitors. “But that was Jamestown,” I responded, confused. He smiled. “What, are you prejudiced against Indians?” he answered. “That’s what I say. After all, what is more permanent than one hundred and fifteen settlers arriving and staying in the New World?”
On my way out of the park, I sought out an unusual historical marker someone had mentioned to me. After asking around, I finally found the 1994 bronze plaque from the North Carolina Society of the National Society Colonial Dames XVII Century, surrounded by low bushes in the parking lot. The marker was placed “in grateful recognition of the gifts of food, friendship, and assistance with which the native inhabitants greeted the first Europeans to Roanoke Island in 1584.” Though the thank-you came more than four centuries late, it seemed a start at addressing the ghosts of Roanoke.
As I drove north heading toward the Virginia line, I smiled at the idea that the one group in eastern North Carolina with the least interest in being linked with Virginia Dare—African Americans—may in fact be the very ones with the strongest claim to her lineage. Darrell Collins was too polite to say it, but for those who counted themselves black, Virginia Dare was not their history. She was, after all, still an avenging angel of white supremacy for some. That helped explain why I encountered so few blacks at the Fort Raleigh and Windsor festivities.
My destination now was a suburb in the city of Chesapeake named for the Chesapian tribe that gave the bay its name. The Collinses’ cousin and chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe, Marilyn Berry Morrison, lives in a two-story brick house in a tidy development of mowed yards beside a cul-de-sac. She was a statuesque middle-aged woman with light brown skin and two ponytails braided in long leather strands. Two starfish-and-pearl earrings dangled above her bright Indian-print dress.
Zion Hall Berry was her ancestor as well. “He had one wife and nine mistresses,” she said with an easy laugh, retrieving from another room a large framed blown-up photograph that matched the one Joan had in her purse. “That’s truly a Cherokee! Our identity was kept from us,” she added, her voice suddenly serious. “Everyone was afraid that if it was revealed, we would be carted off.”
This White watercolor of Algonquian fishing reveals the immense variety of aquatic and bird life in the Carolina sounds and the skill with which the indigenous people collected seafood, skills that may have been transmitted to the twentieth century. British Museum
To be an Indian, she explained, meant that you could lose your land and be sent to a reservation or, worse, sold to work on a Caribbean sugar plantation. Some descendants of the Lost Colony—or lost colonies—might have ended their days tending cane in a Hispaniola field. While the indigenous people quickly adopted English and Christianity, ancient traditions like night fishing survived. Morrison said that her uncles held a light to draw fish they called “nanny shad” that would leap into the boat. I thought of John White’s drawing of Algonquians fishing with a low fire inexplicably burning in their log canoe.
Medicinal herb remedies were also part of that legacy, such as sassafras to purify your blood or fight measles and chicken pox—European diseases that, along with smallpox, cholera, bubonic plague, malaria, influenza, and the common cold, killed untold numbers of New World Indians. In addition, she was taught to cook with bay, sage, and other local plants; herbs were growing in large pots in the backyard.
Morrison spoke about the sixteenth century as if describing an event from her childhood. “We stood on the shore when Sir Walter Raleigh’s people came, and we treated them friendly. We taught them everything we knew. Then they ran out of supplies and began to steal our food. That’s the hurting thing.”
She leads a group of about two hundred registered members in their uphill struggle to win state and federal recognition as an official tribe. “We are the only race that has to go through so much to prove who we are,” she said, indignation in her voice. She had a point. Still the majority, whites ultimately determine the legal identity of people of color and who can and cannot be classed as an Indian by state and federal authorities.
For several years Morrison organized annual powwows on Roanoke Island as a way to keep alive the tradition of their Native American lineage. Her family’s origins were based on Roanoke Island and Hatteras. She said that a century ago the anthropologist Speck interviewed her great-grandmother, who identified as a Hatteras Indian. “We also have roots with the Mattamuskeet,” she added, using the other name for Machapunga. “When they killed our chief Wingina, some of us migrated to the mainland.”
Chief Marilyn Berry Morrison speaks at a powwow of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe. Morrison calls the Lost Colonists and her tribe, which includes European and African American ancestors, “all one people.” Marvin T. Jones
I asked about DNA, and she said that her father was tested and told her he had traces of Native American genes, but she wasn’t concerned with the details. “I claim Native American based on tradition,” Morrison said, adding that she doesn’t deny her white and black parts.
“We were the Lost Colony,” she responded, when I brought up the Raleigh settlers. “Our surnames, like Berry, appear on the colonists’ list. We are the original melting pot. We are all one people.” But when I pressed, her story wasn’t one of gentle assimilation. “We used them for fish bait,” she sai
d of the colonists. “We enslaved and traded some of them, just as Europeans did to us. We killed the men and took the women and children.” As warriors or soldiers, grown men were more difficult to acculturate.
Morrison opened a hefty binder with the results of years of genealogical work. She collected as many dates and pictures as she could. The faces were a heady mix of kinky hair and straight, dark skin and light. “My dad had gray eyes,” she said. “You just have so many different hues.” My eyes lit on one name that lacked a photograph or birth or death date. “She was my great-great-grandmother,” Morrison said. “She was from Roanoke Island.”
Later I found her tombstone in an overgrown cemetery outside Manteo, a couple of hundred yards from Croatan Sound. A slender column topped by an elegant stone finial recorded her birth in 1876, the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Jim Crow era, and her passing in 1921, the year that the worst race riot in American history left hundreds of African Americans in Tulsa dead. Her name was Virginia Dare Bowser Tillett.
* * *
—
There are people in eastern Europe who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, spent their teenage years in the Third Reich, lived out middle age in the Soviet Union, and died in an independent Ukraine—all without leaving their village. Abandoned in a strange land, the Lost Colonists and their descendants might have undergone similar wrenching changes.
The Secret Token Page 37
