by Lisa Alther
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Lisa Alther
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Doris Ulmann photograph TwoMelungeon Boys from The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann (Penland, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1971). Used with permission of the Doris Ulmann Foundation, Berea College, Kentucky.
Frontispiece: author’s family tree, courtesy of author
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-176-4
For my parents,
John Shelton and Alice Greene Reed,
and my grandparents,
William Henry and Hattie Elizabeth Reed,
with gratitude for all the love
and all the genes
Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird,
the birds round about are against her;
come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field,
come to devour.
—Jeremiah 12:9
Contents
Introduction
The Virginia Club
My Inner Hillbilly
Insects in Amber
Wannabes
Blood Sport
Wilderness Forts
The Bermuda Triangle
Sea Cruise
Forebear Fatigue
Teletubbies for Christ
Chief Sit ‘n’ Bull
All-American Stir-Fry
Acknowledgments
Selected Reading
Introduction
MANY PEOPLE ARE BORN believing they know who they are. They’re Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don’t share that enviable luxury.
My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.
In my life since, I’ve often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I’m one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.
But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I’ve ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.
I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I’d inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.
Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.
Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.
Growing up, I’d heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent’s showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father’s family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.
For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I’d learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others — all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.
In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.
I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers — and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I’d been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.
For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I’d finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere — and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world.
1
The Virginia Club
MY YOUNGER BROTHER BILL is clutching his teddy bear, the noose still knotted around its neck. My older brother John and I sit on a carpeted step in the front hallway as the gray-haired babysitter with crooked brown teeth informs us that the Melungeons will get us for having hung the bear from the upstairs
landing, just out of Bill’s reach in the downstairs hall.
“What’s the Melungeons?” I ask.
“The Melungeons has got six fingers on each hand,” she says. “They grab mean little chilrun and carry them off to their caves in the cliffs outside of town.”
John and I glance at each other uneasily.
When my parents get home from their tea dance at the country club, John and I wait for Bill to tell on us, but he doesn’t. He’s a good kid. The Melungeons won’t be interested in him when they arrive.
In her silvery cocktail dress and the spike heels that make her look like a toe dancer, my mother is very glamorous. The top of her head comes to my father’s chest. He’s the tallest man we know. He claims he has race-horse ankles. He’s madly in love with my mother and is always coming up with corny new ways to tell her so.
Tonight, right in front of the babysitter, he says, “Kids, isn’t your mother just as pretty as a carnival queen at a county fair? If I put her in a pageant, she’d win the four-hundred-pound hog. But how would I get it home?”
Her face freezes halfway between a smile and a frown as she tries to decide if this is a compliment. She was a model at the University of Rochester. In my favorite photo, she’s wearing a satin evening gown, standing inside a giant wine bottle, her black hair bobbed. But at home she resembles Harriet Nelson more than Loretta Young because she hates to buy clothes. My parents share a horror of spending money. Having grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, they say you never know when the next ax will fall.
Since my mother is from upstate New York, she doesn’t gush like normal mothers. She used to teach high school English, so she’s always coaching us to pronounce “cow” in one syllable. Our friends look at us as though we’re lunatics whenever we say “cow” as she recommends. But our cousins in New York still mock our southern accents when we visit them in the summer. They say southerners are stupid. Our Tennessee playmates say Yankees are rude. But I’ve met plenty of rude southerners and stupid Yankees.
My mother’s hobby is curling up in an armchair with the library books from which she’s always quoting. When she makes us take naps so she can read in peace, she announces, “I’ll but lie down and bleed awhile and then rise up to fight again.”
Once at supper, as she was carving a chicken, she looked up and said, “Children, always remember to stab low and pull up.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That way you sever the aorta.” She illustrated this in the air with her knife.
In the car on the way home from dropping off the babysitter, my father, a doctor, confirms that some babies in East Tennessee are born with extra fingers, which are usually removed at birth. He indicates on my hand the joints from which they can sprout.
Before turning out my light that night, I look under the bed and in the closet for lurking Melungeons. I’m often bad, and apparently the Melungeons, like Santa, have their ways of finding out. At least I know how to stab low and pull up.
Lying in the dark, I convince myself that I’m safe as long as my body is completely covered by the top sheet. It’s summer, and we don’t have any fans. We don’t buy things that aren’t on sale, and who ever heard of a fan sale in the South? The air that drifts through my window, carrying the screeching of the night insects, is hot and humid. But the thought of being seized in my sleep by six-fingered cave dwellers is so appalling that I endure the sweaty sheet. I become alarmed as I try to figure out how to stay encased in my magic sheet if our house catches fire and I have to jump out the window.
John, Bill, and I are crammed into one seat on the Ferris wheel. Spread out below us are the throngs of milling townspeople and the lights from the carnival tents and rides. As we hurtle toward the ground, I can see my mother standing outside the ticket booth. She’s frowning. I wave as we swoop past her and head skyward, but she doesn’t notice.
When we stagger off the ride, my mother tells us that we have to go home because her baby will soon be born and she needs to go to the hospital. Back at the house, my grandmother arrives, and my mother departs with my agitated father.
The next morning my grandmother informs us that we have a new baby brother named Michael. Shrugging, we race outside to ride our bikes in the driveway.
Toward dusk my father drives us to the hospital. Children aren’t allowed inside except as patients. So we sit cross-legged on the lawn while the frogs in the valley take turns burping. My mother comes to her third-floor window and tilts a blanketed bundle in her arms so that we can see Michael. He looks like an unpromising playmate, but we do our best to act excited.
My mother vanishes. Then she reappears without the bundle. She opens the window and tosses foil-wrapped candies down to us. They turn out to be chocolate-covered cherries — my favorite — so the evening hasn’t been a total waste.
One day in Miss Goodman’s second-grade classroom my nose starts bleeding. I lean my head back, but it doesn’t help. Miss Goodman sends me to the nurse. She can’t stop the bleeding either, so my mother comes to get me.
That night I wake up to find my pillow soaked with blood like in some horror movie. Can this be the revenge of the Melungeons that I’ve long been expecting?
As my mother changes the sheets, my father packs my nostrils with cotton. I smile because, while explaining what he’s doing, he’s finally called me Betsy. I’ve changed my name to Betsy because Lisa, pronounced “Liza,” is too weird. My only ambition is to be exactly like every other student at Lincoln Elementary, none of whom is named Lisa, pronounced “Liza.”
Tucking me in, my mother says, “There! Isn’t it nice to have fresh, clean sheets?”
“Dot in the biddle of the dight,” I mutter.
The next morning my mother drives me to the hospital, explaining that my father is already there, reading about my nosebleeds in the medical library. She rolls me in a wheelchair to a room and helps me undress. Black and blue bruises cover my entire body, like one of those tattooed natives in National Geographic. I put on a gown that ties in the back and climb into the high, narrow bed.
My father, wearing green scrubs, booties, and a cap, comes in. He tries to act silly, but he looks tired and worried. His doctor friends and my grandfather come and go in their scrubs, poking at my bruises and murmuring to each other. Nurses arrive to remove the bloody cotton wads from my nostrils and to pack them with fresh cotton. I can feel the blood seeping down the back of my throat. Sometimes it makes me gag.
This continues for what feels like several years. But it’s probably just a few weeks. I don’t really know. Day after day the light outside fades to black. Then the night gives way to dawn. I lie there, dissolving squares of strawberry Jell-O in my mouth and repeating the name of my illness in my head — idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. It has a rhythm like a poem. It’s nice to have a name for what’s happening to me. I never imagined my body could let me down like this. I never imagined until now that my body and I weren’t one and the same.
Sometimes I raise an arm to inspect my bruises. The new ones are black or midnight blue. Then they turn to shades of purple. When they’re almost healed, they fade to yellows and greens. It would be beautiful if it weren’t my arm.
One morning, I realize that the nurses and orderlies have been calling me Lisa. I’m still a Betsy, trapped in the bloodless body of a Lisa, but I’m too weak to protest. With a sigh I bid Betsy farewell and let her go.
My father and his friends decide that I need a transfusion. But I have rare blood, and no donor can be found except my grandmother. As my father explains this, I feel a stab of panic. I picture myself as her blood flows into me: my hair turns silvery blue; I develop wrinkles on my face and a slight stoop. I express these concerns to my father, and he laughs for the first time since this all began.
In the end, the blood of another doctor matches mine. After the transfusions my own blood starts to clot again. No one knows why. I am pleased to be a medical mystery.
Soon I’m back in Miss
Goodman’s classroom, listening to our Bible teacher recite the Twenty-third Psalm. When she gets to the part about the valley of the shadow of death, I understand that’s where I’ve been.
But the only lasting consequence is the realization that I need to choose another career. My father describes each day’s operations to us at the dinner table. He also tells about a man in jail who swallowed a spoon so he could escape as they drove him to the hospital. Once he’d escaped, he realized he had a spoon in his stomach and needed to go to the emergency room, where the sheriff was waiting for him. My father has so much fun at the hospital that we all want to be doctors, too. But who ever heard of a doctor who’s afraid of blood?
My parents have bought a three-hundred-acre tobacco farm eighteen miles from town. We spend our weekends peeling ancient yellowed newspaper pages off the chinked log walls of a cabin at one end of our new valley. My father has hired a man with a bulldozer to make a dam so we can have a swimming pond. The water from the spring in the hillside keeps draining into underground caves, leaving only a mudflat. My mother calls it Shelton’s Folly.
John and I form the Electric Fence Club. To join, the younger kids are required to touch the electric fence, which they do, to their regret and our delight.
My grandmother has to drag my grandfather out from town to see our farm. My grandfather was orphaned in southwest Virginia when his father died of pneumonia and his mother of gallbladder disease before he was six. Like an episode from Oliver Twist, the uncle in charge of the estate sold their farm and squandered the money.
My grandfather, one of eight children, was raised by an older sister named Evalyn who was married to a farmer who put him to work in the fields. My grandfather ran away when he was a teenager, hiking a hundred miles through the mountains to join two older brothers in Kentucky. He worked as a logger to put himself through medical school. He has earned his lack of enthusiasm for rural living.
We own a brown Saddlebred named Nora, who used to be a show horse before she got too old. She plods grimly around the pastures with us kids on her back swatting her with switches. Once my grandparents arrive, my father insists that my grandfather take Nora “for a spin.” When my grandfather first practiced medicine in the Virginia mountains, he kept a stable of six horses for house calls into the hills, so we figure he must know how to ride.