Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  I’ve decided that to get into the heads of my early ancestors, I need to cross the Atlantic on a sailing ship, a trip all European and African immigrants would have taken at some point. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

  Luckily our ship, the Wind Song, has six sails made from 21,000 square feet of Dacron, which are computerized to make maximum use of the winds. It also has a gasoline motor as a backup. Hence, we’ll arrive in Lisbon in two weeks rather than the six to eight weeks it would have taken my ancestors.

  If their ships blew off course, they could languish for days in the Sargasso Sea at the center of the clockwise circuit of winds and currents that help propel sailing vessels from Europe to America and back again. There are accounts of becalmed ships overrun by rats, which attacked the chickens, devoured the grain, gnawed the passengers’ ears as they slept, and drowned in the drinking water. This may be the actual location of Diane’s legendary Bermuda Triangle, which purportedly swallows errant ships and airplanes whole, like Jonah’s whale.

  Sailors called our projected path the Horse Latitudes because if the journey were taking too long and the grain and water were running out, they hoisted their horses from the hold and lowered them overboard, where they were ripped apart by sharks. And then there are the French Huguenots from Charlesfort, with sails stitched from their linen shirts, who were reduced to dining on one another. As we line the decks to watch the harbor lights fade, flicker, and vanish, I eye my fellow passengers, speculating as to who would yield the most tender steaks.

  The next morning the old salts among us swallow hard-boiled eggs as whole as possible. At the end of the day, they skip happy hour. Amused by their fussiness, I swill frozen strawberry daiquiris.

  By the second morning, I’m as nauseated as a poisoned pup. As I strap on pressure-point wristbands and paste a Dramamine patch behind my ear, I feel like a failure, knowing my ancestors would have had neither. But vomiting all the way to Lisbon is more research than I care to undertake.

  Once my stomach has settled, I sally forth to meet my fellow passengers. Several have made this crossing many times, loving the silence, the billowing sails, and the absence of phones and fax machines. One older man named Truman, a sailor, is headed to Lisbon to walk in the footsteps of Prince Henry the Navigator.

  Although the Wind Song has stabilizers, this marvel of modern nautical engineering fails to impress me. As we merry passengers struggle to dance the night away, we resemble drunk drivers walking a patrolman’s line. In the gym, I pedal a bike like a crazed church organist. But with the tossing of the waves, it feels more like riding a mechanical bull. I go to the beauty shop for a manicure and end up with nail polish all over my hands.

  The captain invites me to dine at his table one evening. This is less impressive than it sounds, since every passenger is invited to do this at least once during the crossing. As he’s infelicitously describing a voyage off Normandy during which his ship capsized and he nearly drowned, I see a rogue wave the height of a two-story house out the window. I point speechlessly with my fork.

  The next thing I know, I’m flying across the dining room amid airborne bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé. I land, miraculously unharmed, and slide across the wooden floor like a baseball player headed for home plate. I pick myself up and dust off my gold lame Nehru jacket, thinking about how much worse my ancestors must have had it in their tiny ships that would have bounced and bobbed like waterlogged corks throughout their entire two-month journey.

  The other problem I haven’t foreseen is the boredom. I read, watch videos, and eat endless platters of gourmet food, none of which would have been available to my ancestors. They counted themselves lucky if their drinking water didn’t turn green. Often a lookout could tell that another ship was approaching by the stench wafting on the salty breezes. Seawater seeped into the bottom holds of all the ships, where it mixed with human and animal waste from above to form stinking cesspools.

  In an effort to entertain myself, I lose all my spending money in the slot machines. Sailors and passengers in the old days reportedly played endless betting games with dice and small disks of clay, though some pious captains didn’t allow gambling on their ships. Slaves, yes, but no gambling. They also danced jigs on deck to stay fit. Whereas my forty-five shipmates and I speed-walk in a circuit around and around the railings, trying to burn off the calories acquired from the overflowing buffet tables that we’ve paid thousands of dollars to access.

  After day upon day with only different shades of blue, with no distinct dividing line between sea and sky, I become disoriented, as though I’m flying an airplane at night with no instruments. In my sleep, I dream of Vermont autumns, the mountains ablaze with flaming maples. I find myself rising early for the sunrises so I can greedily drink in the faint splotches of red, orange, and yellow above the putative horizon. The green of the trees as we approach the Portuguese coast is almost blinding.

  We motor up the Tagus River, our sails furled, past the quays where slaves from Africa would have been unloaded and auctioned off starting in the fifteenth century. Trendy bars and discos have replaced the holding sheds. After disembarking, I stagger across the dock like a sailor on shore leave.

  I drive north through Portugal to Galicia, the homeland of some of the soldiers who manned Captain Juan Pardo’s lost forts. The first thing I notice is granaries on tall stilts. In John White’s watercolors, identical cribs on eight-foot posts are found all over the villages of his Indian neighbors along the Carolina coast. Explorers reported such storehouses throughout the Southeast. Natives sat in their shade during the summer heat and kindled fires beneath them on chilly days to smoke out insects and rodents. Lovers in search of privacy trysted inside them. It’s possible either that Galicians brought such granaries to America, or that they were introduced to Galicia from America at the same time that corn was. However, this does seem an obvious solution for keeping varmints out of your grain, one that could well have developed independently on both continents.

  Northern Spain was the epicenter for the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors. It took seven hundred years. “Santiago” was the battle cry of the Christian warriors, in commemoration of the vast Catholic cathedral on the Galician coast, the destination of countless pilgrims who trekked along the Via Compostela from all over Europe for centuries — and who still do. I pay my respects to this magnificent structure.

  Then I head inland to the Picos de Europa. Some of the 200,000 Berber soldiers who fought the Christians on behalf of the invading Moors were rewarded with land in these mountains. Jewish and Muslim conversos hid out here during the ravages of the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like all mountains everywhere, they provided concealment for desperados of every stripe. As I wind along the narrow roads through the dense forests, I reflect that I might just as well have stayed in Appalachia, so similar are the two regions, apart from the Galician rains that never cease.

  After returning my rental car in Madrid, I hop a plane to Istanbul. A press corps meets me at the airport. They snap my photo and ask me questions about the plight of the Melungeon writer in America. Mental note: disinherit Brent when I get home for no doubt setting this up. He’s visited Turkey several times with contingents of Melungeons. They’re always received like rock stars. They meet with government officials and are interviewed extensively in the newspapers and on radio and television. Apparently some Turks hope that this discovery of a group of Americans perhaps descended from early Turkish soldiers and sailors will encourage the American government to treat Turkey with more respect. Brent clearly hasn’t told them that Melungeons don’t have much impact on American foreign policy.

  My friend Steve, a publisher from New York, is standing off to one side, pretending he doesn’t know me. He and I discovered we were ideal traveling companions a few years earlier when he had a business trip to New Zealand at the same time I was doing a reading tour there. We drove around the South Island for a week, passing much of our tim
e in small towns in which the only attraction was the Christian bookstores that featured such titles as Why God Hates Women. We spent the rest of our time in our rental car, stalled amid seas of sheep that stretched to the horizon in every direction. We sang along with Joni Mitchell tapes while I eyed all the legs-of-lamb on the hoof and Steve eyed the handsome shepherds tending them.

  Steve and I visit the Uniform Room at the Istanbul Naval Museum to inspect the outfit worn by Turkish sailors from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Just as various speakers at the Melungeon conferences have maintained, the turban and the colorful sashes and vest are surprisingly similar to the garb worn by early Cherokee and Seminóle warriors.

  Afterward, we wander around Istanbul, dazzled by the calls to prayer intoned from minarets and by the fragrances of a thousand spices emanating from the markets. We pass a clock shop where I discover that it’s true that the Turkish word for a timepiece is saat. In discussing possible Turkish origins for the Melungeons, Brent has pointed out that a man who met some isolated Melungeons at the turn of the twentieth century said they called a watch a “satz.”

  Some Turkish linguists have listed hundreds of such coincidences. For Alabama, for instance, they’ve proposed the Turkish Allah bamya — “Allah’s graveyard.” For Shenandoah, sen doga — “pleasant natural setting.” A Cherokee chief was named Attaculacula. The Turkish atta-kula-kul means “spiritual father of the red men.” The Cherokee term for themselves, which meant “principal people,” was ani-yun-wiya. Ana-youn in Turkish means “primary people.”

  Leaders among the Creek and Seminóle were given the title hadjo. Hadja in Ottoman Turkish meant “wise leader” or “one who has been on the Hajj” (the pilgrimage to Mecca). The honorific for the second tier of leaders in southeastern Indian tribes when Europeans first encountered them was Mico, tacked on to their town name, as, for instance, Joara Mico. Mico was a title applied to an officer on an Ottoman galley.

  I’m no linguist, and I can’t speak Turkish, so I can only listen to these arguments with interest. But I’m reminded of a church sign back home:

  COINCIDENCES ARE GOD’S WAY OF REMAINING ANONYMOUS.

  Driving southeast toward Capadoccia, Steve and I reach the sugar beet belt. Women in long dresses and headscarves labor all day in the sunstruck fields while the men sit in the shade at tire shops, smoking and chatting. At the end of the day, each man climbs onto his tractor, drives to his field, and waits while his women load his cart with sugar beets. Then he drives his tractor to the sugar beet mill. Steve and I discuss fomenting an uprising among these women, but we conclude that they’re beyond hope. (However, I reflect that in southeastern Indian tribes men cleared the land and helped harvest the corn, but women did the planting and weeding. It had something to do with female fertility. This sounds to me like a Native American manifestation of that old line, “Men put women on a pedestal and then use it as a footstool”)

  We stop at the underground city of Derinkuyu, which was carved into the tufa floor of a plateau by Christians trying to escape Arab raiders in the seventh century. (Tufa is compressed volcanic ash.) It extends eighteen stories downward and hosted twenty thousand people. There are a church, a marketplace, stables, and communal kitchens, as well as living quarters. A huge circular stone slab was rolled across the entry tunnel when enemies were approaching. At the very bottom of the town, there’s reputedly a second exit tunnel though which fleeing citizens could pop back up to the surface like prairie dogs.

  The area contains forty such underground cities, the largest of which housed sixty thousand people. Their function was the same as that performed in Appalachia and Galicia by mountain caves: to provide sanctuary for the pursued.

  Our hotel that night is carved into a tufa cliff. As we drive to dinner, we pass through forests of towering rock phalluses. Erosion has eaten away the surrounding tufa, leaving only these massive open-air Stalagmites, which are topped with slabs of less porous stone that have prevented the erosion of their supporting tufa pillars.

  The entertainment at the hall where we dine is a dance called the sema, performed by a troupe of whirling dervishes. They’re dressed in white robes, which symbolize shrouds for their egos, according to the printed program. And their conical hats represent tombstones. They spin interminably with outstretched arms, heads resting on their shoulders, eyes and mouths half open.

  The program informs us that even as we eat, the dervishes will be achieving union with the Divine. But my Sufi friends in London told me that Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi teacher and poet who invented this dance, claimed he did so simply because his disciples were so lazy that he wanted to get them moving. In any case, it’s safe to assume that these rituals are being performed tonight for tourist dollars rather than for spiritual enlightenment.

  After the dervishes whirl offstage, another robed group comes out. Each places his left arm on his neighbor’s shoulder, and they circle in sedate single steps, turning their heads sharply from side to side and exhaling “hu” and “ha” in unison. The program explains that hu means Him, “the divine presence which is beyond definition.” Ha represents the last syllable of Allah.

  This is startling. Some southeastern Indian tribes addressed their chiefs and their chief’s relatives by crying “hu.” Adults knelt and placed their hands on the ground as they did so. Children were trained to kneel and rest their foreheads on the ground in a posture that sounds suspiciously similar to the Muslim prayer posture. The chiefs in turn greeted the rising sun, their female deity, by shouting “hu.”

  At the end of a traditional dance that purified Cherokee ballplayers for an upcoming game (a circle dance that involved lots of twirling), they’d rush over to the spectators, who’d bless them by calling out “hu.” Before the game, the players would surround the goalpost, holding hands and chanting “hu” three times. Cherokee priests recited their secret formulas in a low murmur, punctuated rhythmically by loud “ha”s. Some evangelists in the southern Appalachians still do the same. The word hoo-ha is currently used in the southern Appalachians to designate a pretentious person or event, or a ruckus. I don’t know what, if anything, to make of these titillating coincidences.

  Following these dancers, a man and woman in fashionable evening clothes perform a very erotic belly dance. I feel like a voyeur at a Times Square peep show. At the climax, the woman reaches into the man’s jacket pocket, withdraws a bottle of raki (Turkish brandy), and dashes it to the floor, where it shatters into hundreds of skittering shards.

  Steve and I watch openmouthed. The contrast between this haughty hottie and those babushka-ed sugar-beet slaves — between the robed dervishes and this gyrating gigolo in his double-breasted tux — sums up the schizophrenia we’ve sensed all over modern Turkey.

  The next day we drive to Konya, the capital of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century and the target of thirteenth-century European crusaders (the forebears of the conquistadors). Prior to the Turks, Konya was occupied by the Byzantines, Romans, Persians, Lydians, Phrygians, and Hittites, all the way back to 7000 B.C. In A.D. 50, Saint Paul preached here and so offended his audience that they ran him out of town. Now Konya is best known as the site of the mausoleum of Rumi, whose masterwork The Mathnawi contains 25,000 rhyming couplets. His sarcophagus lies in a former Sufi monastery that features two domes, three minarets, and a tiled turquoise silolike structure. This monastery also houses a casket said to contain a hair from Muhammad’s beard.

  The fundamentalist Islamic guards at the tomb, looking like Aladdins who’ve lost their lamps, welcome Steve. But they eye me with distaste, despite the long sleeves and scarf I’ve donned for their benefit. Clearly they think I should be out hoeing sugar beets. They remind me of the scowling men who line the parade route during prochoice marches in Washington, seething with hatred for women who refuse to conform to their demented rules.

  I recall a bracing quote from Rumi himself: “Don’t let your throat tighten with fear. Take sips of breath all day and night before
death closes your mouth.”

  Drawing a deep breath, I summon the image of Inez Milholland on her white horse, leading Greatgrandma Pealer through the deranged mobs in her fruit-and flower-bedecked bonnet. I march past the surly guards right up to Rumi’s coffin, which is shrouded with a stiff velvet cloth heavily embroidered with gold.

  One reason I like Rumi is that his poetry seems to flow from the same source as Cherokee beliefs. For instance, he says, “What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.” Ever since Dr. Ozdagan pointed out at a Melungeon conference that Turks and Native Americans are cousins from the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, I’ve been doubly intrigued, wondering if the two systems might be streams from the same river. Many researchers describe Sufism as Islamic mysticism. But my Sufi friends in London assured me that its roots are much more ancient than Islam. But could they be fourteen thousand years ancient, so that the belief system crossed the Bering Strait with those who became Native Americans? Or is Dr. Ozdagan correct to entertain the possibility of a more recent infusion of Muslims into American Indian tribes? Or both?

  Scarfless, I watch Steve insert his cash card into an ATM slot. Our cards work at some banks and not others. When they do work, they yield the equivalent of only about five dollars. So we play every ATM we find as though it were a slot machine.