by Lisa Alther
One such spot is Newman’s Ridge. It looms over Sneedville, the county seat for Hancock County, the poorest county in Tennessee, with 29.4 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line.
I drive my parents’ Buick up and down the rutted dirt roads across the face of Newman’s Ridge, searching for Melungeons. Fifty years earlier, several hundred people lived here. Now all I find on the densely wooded cliffs are a few vacation cabins, a deserted church, and the ruins of some farmhouses and outbuildings in fields overrun with briars and saplings.
The only signs of life I discover are a couple of new ranch houses on the main road and a well-tended cemetery on a slope overlooking the Cumberland Mountains, which stretch ridge upon ridge toward Virginia. Wandering among the headstones, some merely flat rocks with names and dates scratched onto their faces, I find several of the traditional Melungeon surnames — Mullins, Collins, Goins, Gibson. Whatever their hardships while alive, these Melungeons are enjoying in death some of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen.
I drive into Sneedville, park, and stroll around the streets past the usual feed store, drugstore, grocery store, hardware store, and funeral home found in any rural county seat. In the eighteenth century, this spot was a favorite meeting place for trappers and hunters, who called it Greasy Rock. The few people I pass look just like the farmers who used to gather on Broad Street in Kingsport on Saturday mornings. I don’t see a single extra finger.
I phone a woman with a Melungeon last name, a friend of a friend. She lives close by and comes down to meet me on the main street. An attractive woman in a tailored suit, she looks like an escapee from the Virginia Club. We sit down over coffee in a small restaurant and discuss the weather and our mutual friends. Eventually I tell her about my proposed article, asking her if she’s Melungeon and whether I could interview her.
She gives me a look that would wilt a stalk of celery. Too late I remember how to operate in the South: you must never ask a direct question. Most southerners have plenty to hide, but they consider it rude to refuse a request. Therefore, as in China, good manners here consist of never putting another in the position of having to say no.
“My family is descended from de Soto’s exploring party in the sixteenth century,” she replies icily and with finality.
As I drive back to Kingsport with no material for my article, I remember too late having been warned that calling someone a Melungeon in Sneedville is like calling a black person a nigger. I’ve been impersonating a Yankee for so long that I’ve forgotten the southern codes, which have remained remarkably intact, like insects in amber, despite the widely bruited homogenization of America. In New York, a murderer will walk right up and shoot you. In the South, he’ll bring you casseroles until he gets to know you, and then he’ll shoot you.
Shaking off my chagrin, I review the more exotic Melungeon origin myths — shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, de Soto’s deserters, survivors of the Lost Colony. I conclude that life on the isolated farms of Appalachia is stultifying and that romantic tales about one’s glamorous forebears make it less dreary.
When I’m trying to write fiction, I prefer to lock myself in a small room without a view. I turn off the phone and unplug the TV. If I can bear the wait, characters eventually emerge to relieve my boredom, like a child’s imaginary playmates. No doubt a similar process of sensory deprivation has produced these unlikely Melungeon myths.
After my arrival this trip, I rode around Food City with my father in a motorized cart, to spare his bad back. Grocery shopping can take him several hours because many store employees and customers are his patients, and they all want to regale him with tales of their latest ailments.
He introduced me to an old woman with no teeth, who was stocking a shelf in the pasta aisle. He told her I was a writer in town to research some magazine articles.
She said companionably, “Well, I reckon readin’s good, ain’t it?”
Because many Appalachians have been, and are, illiterate, a rich oral culture has evolved. The International Storytelling Center is only a few miles from our farm, and their festivals draw thousands. People need their stories, true or not, and the Melungeons are no exception.
As I drive back to my parents’ house, I run a gauntlet of churches in competition over which can post the most clever sayings on its illuminated signboard out front.
Today the Bethel Presbyterian sign reads
A SHARP TONGUE CAN CUT YOUR OWN THROAT.
Across the highway I pass the Belvue Christian church, whose message is
IF GOD FILED A 1040, COULD HE CLAIM YOU AS A DEPENDENT?
As I ponder this question, I study the marquee at St. Luke’s Methodist next door:
TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED THE PRESENT.
The Glenview Baptists across the street warn
THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH. REPENT BEFORE PAYDAY.
I like that one, but I decide that today’s winner is the New Covenant Free Pentecostals down the block with their
IF YOU GIVE SATAN AN INCH, HE’LL BECOME YOUR RULER.
I’m sitting in the backyard of some of my parents’ friends whom I particularly like. Throughout my childhood they always bought whatever junk I was selling for school fundraisers — magazine subscriptions, Girl Scout cookies, chocolate bars, greeting cards. I tell them about my doomed Melungeon article and my failures in the field as a journalist.
Mrs. Shobe stands up and disappears. She returns with her elderly yardman in tow, announcing that he was born in Hancock County to a mother whose maiden name was Collins.
I stand up from my lounger to shake his hand. A tall, lanky man in bib overalls, he has straight white hair and high cheekbones. The whites of his eyes are bright around navy blue irises, and his face looks as though he’s been sweeping chimneys.
We sit down and chat interminably about the habits of rhododendrons.
Finally Mrs. Shobe asks, “Buddy, are you a Melungeon?”
I blush furiously. She’s from Louisiana. She must not realize that this is a question one doesn’t pose.
“Half Melungeon,” he replies pleasantly.
“Where did your people come from?” she asks.
“I don’t know nothing about it.” He describes moving as a child from Kentucky to Virginia, where his parents sold him to a farmer for twenty-five cents a day.
“Sold you?” I echo faintly.
“I worked for him from sunup to sundown ever’ day of the year but Christmas.”
“When did you go to school?”
“Didn’t never go to no school. Wouldn’t nobody take me, not the whites nor the coloreds, neither one. I was too dark for the whites and too pale for the coloreds.”
He describes his children — one in Indiana, a second in Maryland, and a third an airplane mechanic in Louisiana. “Seem like that they don’t much care to come home no more,” he says sadly.
Back in Vermont I write my article about going in search of the Melungeons and finding that the only ones still on Newman’s Ridge are lying in their graves. The younger generations have fled the stigma, blending imperceptibly into the American mainstream. Once Buddy’s generation is gone, there will be no more Melungeons. I mock my quest for these legendary mixed-race people when I myself am of Dutch, French, German, Scottish, Irish, English, and perhaps Native American heritage.
I close with a quote taken from a newspaper interview with a Melungeon bank president in Sneedville: “Any mystery our people ever had is gone — or at least any way of solving it. We are all immigrants in this country.”
May the Melungeons rest in peace, I think as I push the envelope containing the article through the mail slot at the post office.
As I write about the snake handlers for the New York Times, I realize that although I don’t miss church, I do miss God. Eating, breeding, and interior design are terrific, but if this is all there is, why bother?
This thought plunges me into the melancholy familiar from my college years. To combat it I c
heck out an armload of books from the University of Vermont library on the various world religions.
As I read about the Puritans and their almost pornographic fixation on original sin, I begin to suspect that I’ve inherited my melancholy from my mother’s Puritan forebears. The Puritans seem as relentless as Southern Baptists in their preoccupation with the fires of hell and as obsessed as the snake handlers with evil. Virginians slaughtered Indians because they wanted their land, but Puritans slaughtered them because they saw them as Satan.
I find Hinduism with its cast of plotting gods and goddesses amusing, especially in contrast to the cool austerities of the Buddhists. Those two are the East Indian equivalent of Baptists and Episcopalians.
But it’s the Cherokee who grab me by the throat and won’t let go. Maybe it comes from having spent too much time on farms, but I’ve always suspected that each creature contains a spark from the same flame. Whether you call this flame God or the Great Spirit doesn’t matter. And the best part is that you don’t have to handle snakes or even set foot in a church to experience it. You live it every day by the way in which you treat the other creatures who are essentially yourself. The cruel merit pity rather than hatred because their behavior is proof that they haven’t yet located this crucial core within themselves.
This notion of God as Mr. Rogers seems much more soothing than that of God as a bipolar Santa who dispenses rewards and punishments to His cowering elves based on whether they’ve been naughty or nice.
Clinging to this sunny theology as though to a rope lowered to a suffocating miner in a collapsing shaft, I return to my neglected novel. I finally get to be a flag swinger by turning my main character, Ginny, into one. Always a recycler, I invent a Melungeon boyfriend for her, one who becomes a snake handler. Nodding to my preoccupation with extra fingers, I make Ginny’s father lose one in an accident. I give her mother idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. And I get rid of Ginny’s lesbian lover by decapitation as she rides a snowmobile under a barbed wire fence, just as I myself once rode my pony under a wire clothesline.
By the end of Kinfolks, I foolishly believe that I’ve exorcised my past and am now free to start afresh.
4
Wannabes
MY DEBAUCHED SOUTHERN SELF wants to spend the money my novel has earned on a new Jaguar. But my thrifty Puritan self, knowing that I may never earn another penny from my writing, wants to invest it so I can pay myself a salary and continue to write what I please. Having finally realized that I’m a bi-sectional, I decide to honor both selves by salting some away for the famine and using the rest to take Richard, Sara, and me to London for a couple of years. I’ve always wanted to live in a foreign country, so I persuade Richard and Sara that they do, too.
We rent an apartment in Hampstead across the road from the Heath, the eight-hundred-acre park that overlooks the city. I expect to fit right in here because of the eleven lines of Greatgrandma Pealer’s family that hailed from England and because of Grandmom Reed’s ancestral land grants from James I.
But in a nightmare flashback to my own childhood, Sara immediately comes home from school in tears because her British classmates have mocked her accent.
“Tell them that if it weren’t for people who talk like you do, they’d be speaking German,” suggests my brother John, who’s visiting.
Eventually we make some friends. Sara’s is an urchin named Phoebe, who conducts her around the neighborhood along the tops of the walls that divide the backyards. Phoebe regularly steals all the fruit from our fruit bowl and teaches Sara how to shoplift.
I fall into a nest of feminists — socialist feminists, Marxist feminists, cultural feminists, radical feminists. Although they spend lots of time arguing about their differences, I can’t tell them apart. They all seem like bright, attractive, excessively rational young women. But the only thing they share, ideologically speaking, is a hatred of America as the seat of power for the capitalist patriarchy.
Sometimes I serve as their whipping boy. “You Americans this, that, and the other …,” they snarl, with no seeming awareness of whose British ancestors first taught Americans the wiles of empire-building.
I’m intrigued because I’ve never been accused of being an American before. I point out that just as England isn’t London, so America isn’t New York City or Hollywood. Just as the English have Cornwall and Yorkshire, so do Americans have Tennessee and Vermont. But when I mention having taken Sara to London’s first McDonald’s, they go into a group cardiac arrest that nearly ends the budding friendships.
Sometimes leaving a place behind lets you see it more clearly. As Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote Willa Cather, “One must know the world so well before one can know the parish.” With three thousand miles between Tennessee and me, I start to remember things about my childhood that I’ve conveniently repressed — the iron staircase up the side of the State Theater, the water fountain at J.C. Penney’s labeled “Colored,” the ghetto of redbrick apartment buildings across the railroad tracks.
I remember my father’s describing a Ku Klux Klan march up Broad Street when he was a boy during which he and his friends identified the marchers by their shoes. And I recall finding a tattered Ku Klux Klan manual in a box in our attic. When I brought it downstairs, my appalled mother said the box had been left there by one of my grandmother’s cousins.
I also recall, before my wedding, a party at the house of some family friends at which one of the caterers turned out to be Henrietta. Henrietta was our cook until I was six. Cooks in those years also cleaned house and looked after children. Henrietta even went with us to New York to visit my mother’s family. When Michael was born, she quit, saying four children were too many.
I hadn’t seen Henrietta since, and I scarcely remembered her. But when I spotted her in her white uniform, setting a casserole of garlic grits on the buffet table, I rushed over and threw my arms around her. Her arms remained at her sides. I backed away, as shocked as she by my behavior. But my body must have stored up a record of her many kindnesses to me when I was small.
I explained who I was.
She replied, “It’s nice to see you again, Miss Lisa.”
She turned and walked back into the kitchen. I just stood there, wondering if there had been a hint of irony in her “Miss Lisa.”
Looking back on this from London, I can certainly understand any irony. My family paid her the going rate of $20 per week to take care of us, while her own children stayed home alone. Ever since my Wellesley years I’ve been exempting Appalachia, and therefore myself, from racism, but I’ve been mistaken. Our town’s pleasant life was made possible by the underpaid labor of our black citizens. The only roles in which I ever saw them were as maids, janitors, or yardmen.
I start a new novel to sort out these troubling memories, naming it Original Sins. But for me, unlike for my Puritan forebears, original sin isn’t something that infects a baby at birth. It’s imposed on him or her by the surrounding community insofar as they rank one another by superficial differences such as skin color, accents, possessions, or genitalia.
Gradually the politics of my new friends begin to seep into this novel about a small mill town in East Tennessee. I start regarding the Model City as a colony of Yankee industrialists, exploited for its cheap labor, abundant raw materials, and lack of environmental protection laws. These capitalists, fleeing the unions of immigrant workers up north, were lured to Kingsport by J. Fred Johnson’s promise of a plentiful supply of “100 percent hardworking, God-fearing Anglo-Saxon workers,” as promotional materials described the parents and grandparents of my friends and classmates.
By threatening the whites in town with the availability of the blacks, the benevolent plant managers on Watauga Street, with whom my grandmother played bridge and my grandfather played golf, kept wages low and profits high. Like Squanto, who taught the Pilgrims to grow corn, and Sacagawea, who guided Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, and Pocahontas, who saved Jamestown from starvation, my beloved grandparents wer
e actually Uncle Tom Toms.
I reflect on the demented caricatures of these “100 percent Anglo-Saxon” mountaineers in the funny papers and on television — Deliverance, Heehaw, The Beverly Hillbillies, Li’l Abner. If you can dehumanize your victims, as American soldiers did the Vietnamese, you don’t have to feel quite so guilty about exploiting or destroying them.
Original Sins features five characters who grow up together — two sons of a mill worker, two daughters of a mill manager, and a son of the manager’s maid. Three leave town, and two stay. The question I struggle with in foggy Londontown is why those who leave a place leave and why those who stay, stay. Why did certain fish decide to crawl out on dry land? Why did my grandparents desert the coalfields of Virginia? Why did I abandon the beautiful Tennessee river valley they bequeathed me? After 592 pages I conclude that people leave a place because they don’t fit in.
One of my new friends from London longs to see the American South, so she joins me on a visit to Kingsport. We meet my grandmother for lunch at the country club. I have to hand it to my grandmother: she doesn’t even blink at my friend’s spiky magenta hair and dangling labrys earrings.
We sit at a table by a window overlooking the Holston River. My grandmother points out her house on the opposite cliff. Then she asks my Marxist comrade if it’s difficult to find reliable servants in London these days.
Back in London, I meet a family of Afghanis through mutual friends. The father has published several books of teaching stories taken from the Sufi tradition, and his sister has collected and recorded folktales from traditional cultures all over the world. The Sufi stories feature animals in the same role as do Cherokee tales — to illustrate the antics of an individual’s psyche. The two sets of tales from opposite sides of the globe seem almost like branches of the same tree. A couple of stories are identical in both traditions, apart from adaptations to the local environments.