by Lisa Alther
A woman shrouded in black with only her eyes showing glares at me from across the street. She, too, thinks I should be hoeing sugar beets rather than hanging out bareheaded at an ATM kiosk with a good-looking blond infidel.
Steve shrugs at me sympathetically. Then the machine starts spitting out cash. After he collects it, we high-five one another as our somber chaperone shoots daggers at me with her contemptuous eyes. Although I’ve never been an especially fun person, I feel like Lucille Ball alongside this woman. Her grim gaze makes it clear that we should be gone from Konya by sundown.
Driving toward the Aegean, Steve and I pass through a town where Brent reported giving a talk and afterward meeting a young Turkish man. Having learned in the talk about Brent’s extra fingers, the Turk explained that he, too, had six fingers on each hand, as do many Anatolians. He told Brent that they’re called altiparmak — six-fingered ones.
I’ve become an expert on polydactylism (as we experts refer to extra digits). A recessive trait, it tends to appear in inbred populations. But it’s more common in some such communities than others. Ina saw it in several children when she taught special education in rural East Tennessee. Researchers have found it in the Jackson Whites of New Jersey and the Wesorts of Maryland, both “tri-racial isolate” groups similar to the Melungeons.
Native Americans are four times more likely to have extra thumbs than Europeans or Africans. The trait is more common in males and more often found on the right hand. The alti parmak of Anatolia seem to provide yet more evidence of some genetic link between Turks and Native Americans.
Evolutionarily speaking, five fingers are thought to have won out over six because those with six fingers would have been clumsier and therefore less likely to survive to pass on their six-fingered genes. I’ve often wondered if extra fingers might not explain why so many Appalachians are such good banjo pickers.
The earliest mention of six fingers that I’ve come across is in the Bible at 2 Samuel 21:20, “And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in all, and he also was born to the giant.” This giant father was Goliath, and his polydactyl son was killed by the brother of David, the slayer of Goliath.
In India, people with six fingers are sometimes recruited as holy men. On the other hand (so to speak), Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand, and Marilyn Monroe was rumored to have six toes on one foot, and things didn’t go too well for either of them.
Steve and I arrive at a small fishing port on the Aegean called Cesme. A sign identifies its main street as Wise Caddesi. As a result of Brent Kennedy’s efforts, Cesme has become a sister city to Wise, Virginia, and the two towns have won a Sister Cities International Award.
Many men from this Anatolian coastal region fought for the Ottoman sultan in his sixteenth-century sea battles with Spain and its allies. Some never returned and are believed to have been either killed or captured by the Spaniards and turned into galley slaves. Some of these slaves would have served in the Mediterranean, and others would have been transported to colonies in the New World such as Cartagena.
An assistant to the mayor of Cesme takes us to lunch, during which he introduces us to some of his fellow citizens. Many have “the look” that I’ve noticed at the Melungeon conferences: they’re lean, wiry men with wavy dark hair, tawny complexions, and bright blue eyes. When I ask my host about the omnipresent blue eyes, he mentions Alexander the Great, and I get a sinking feeling that I’ve just located a Turkish cell of the Virginia Club.
As we tour Cesme, our guide tells us that his hobby is designing and sewing dresses. Steve raises his eyebrows at me.
We arrive at an ancient stone warehouse on the wharf, from which hangs a sign that reads in English “Melungeon House.” My guide explains that men from Cesme were no doubt among the slaves freed by Sir Francis Drake at Cartagena and then dumped on Roanoke Island, from which they headed inland to become the Melungeons. At Melungeon House, they would have boarded the boats that carried them to their destiny in America. He asks if we think this landmark will attract American tourists. Despite misgivings, I assure him it will.
On a hill above Cesme, we come to lovely rolling woods. A signpost reads in Turkish and in English translation, “This forest area is arranged in memory of the people of Cesme; later named Melungeon, who were taken away to America by the Portuguese people in the sixteenth century.” I can see that once handed a ball, the citizens of Cesme really run with it.
My guide explains that the masts for the ships that carried the soldiers and sailors from Cesme to their destiny in America might have been cut from this very forest. I try to think of a synonym for destiny to suggest for his use in future presentations. But all I can come up with is fate, which sounds so much more dreary.
Our guide drives us back to his house for coffee. A comfortable stuccoed villa with a yard full of flowers, it’s located in a neighborhood that resembles a modest American suburb. From a trellis above his garage hang beautiful clusters of purple grapes. While he cuts us some, I notice a stack of cassettes alongside his tape player. Sorting idly through them, I discover that they’re all by Barbra Streisand. This time, I raise my eyebrows at Steve.
Upon reaching New York, I continue to Tennessee, jet-lagged and discouraged. I don’t know what I hoped to uncover on my journey. Certainly I observed some hints of possible Portuguese and Turkish connections to Melungeons. But there are so many hints, and they’re all so distant in time and space and so impossible to prove. The DNA study offers the only glimmer of hope, but the results won’t be reported for a couple of years.
As I drive to my parents’ house, I discover that Kroger’s, our neighborhood supermarket when I was growing up, has been transformed into a Christian nightclub called the Fire Escape. This makes me feel even more hopeless. Islamic fundamentalists have occupied Rumi’s tomb in Konya, and now Christian fundamentalists have occupied Kroger’s in Kingsport. Where will it all end?
“What in God’s name do Christians do in a nightclub?” I ask my father as I enter his room.
He’s sitting in his recliner before the TV. He shrugs. “Drink Virgin Marys?” He clicks off the set with his remote.
I plop down in a chair.
“Brent stopped by and plucked some of my hairs for that DNA study,” he says, diverting me from the depressing topic of Christians at play.
“That must have been a challenge.” My father is almost bald. He takes pride in this, attributing it to excess testosterone.
“Imagine that,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m eighty-five years old, and I don’t know who I am. And I’m not sure that I care.”
“Me either,” I mutter.
As I head out to the farm, I’m almost too demoralized even to notice the church signs. But I look up in time to read:
GOD LOVES YOU WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT.
WHEN DOWN IN THE MOUTH, REMEMBER JONAH.
HE CAME OUT ALL RIGHT.
IF THE GOING GETS EASY, YOU’RE HEADED DOWNHILL.
GO OUT ON A LIMB.THAT’S WHERE YOU’LL FINDTHE FRUIT.
NEVER GIVE UP, EVEN MOSES WAS ONCE A BASKET CASE.
These messages seem designed especially for me as I wander in this Melungeon wasteland. Then I really start to worry, because only schizophrenics are megalomaniacal enough to believe that they’re receiving personalized billets-doux from the cosmos.
9
Forebear Fatigue
I‘M HELPING SARA LEAN FORWARD in the hospital bed so she can push harder when the baby suddenly slides into the waiting hands of the doctor. This may be old hat to the medical professionals in the room, but I’m still awestruck by the whole thing. I’ve been having flashbacks — to my grandfather holding me after my father’s departure for boot camp, to my mother displaying Michael in the hospital window, to that snowy night during deer season when Sara herself was born.
The nurse hands Brett the scissors, and he clips his son’s um
bilical cord with an unsteady hand.
While sponging Sara’s face, I realize that I’m studying the baby’s hands from the corner of my eye. But an extra digit or two would no longer alarm me. To the contrary, they might qualify him to become a shaman.
As the doctor carries him over to the infrared lamp, the baby gasps the first of what I hope will be several hundred million breaths. Brett follows to watch the nurse clean up his son.
“Is he okay?” Sara whispers, exhausted.
“He’s wonderful,” I assure her.
I’m looking out at Lake Champlain through the window of my new condo. In my arms is my grandson, Zachary, wrapped in a mint-green flannel blanket. His harried mother is showering upstairs. I’ve moved to Burlington, and Zachary and his parents are now living in the farmhouse in which Sara grew up. Our family recycles houses the way others recycle outgrown clothing. My grandparents gave their house to my parents, and my parents gave their cabin to us kids. All our dwellings are crammed to the rafters with ancestral furniture, artwork, and tableware. Each generation serves as curator to all previous ones.
Although it’s still cool, the traffic on Lake Champlain has picked up, and I watch a parade of windsurfers, canoers, kayak-ers, and sailors. Yankees are very busy and fit people, especially in contrast to Tennesseans, whose idea of a cardiovascular workout is to carry a cooler filled with Budweiser to the top row of the NASCAR bleachers.
I once attended a NASCAR race at the track near Kingsport. The BMIs (body mass index) of most spectators probably exceeded their SATs. Many men were shirtless, their bellies hanging out over the waistbands of shorts that rode so low that their butt cracks showed. The women wore halter tops and short shorts several sizes too small.
The incessant whine of the circling cars would have driven mad anyone who wasn’t drunk. The only moment of relief was when one car crashed into the wall. The crowd went wild, like a bullfight audience when the matador is gored, or Romans in the Colosseum when the lions brought down a Christian. As the fans exited after sizzling for hours on the aluminum benches in the hot sun, they resembled a clan of Tomato People, with toothpick arms and legs poking out from round red globes.
I glance at Zachary, who’s sleeping peacefully, his pursed lips making sucking movements, like a slumbering pup whose legs twitch as he dreams of the chase. I study his fine, fair hair and tiny perfect features.
I’ve been reading up on genetics in hopes of understanding the results of the Melungeon DNA study once they’re announced. I’ve learned that we humans share 60 percent of our protein-coding genes with chickens, from which we diverged 310 million years ago. Chickens descend directly from dinosaurs. Humans also share 96 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. And we share 99 percent of our DNA with one another. A handful of the genes that differ governs our visible physical characteristics such as skin, hair and eye color, and body type. Which version we end up with is determined by interconnected processes that aren’t yet fully understood.
Some older texts, with the racism characteristic of their era, maintain that a nonwhite family can “bleach” in four generations. More recent textbooks confirm this basic idea in more scientific jargon. In theory, should a 100 percent non-European mate with a 100 percent European, their child would possess approximately 50 percent non-European ancestry. Should this child, in turn, mate with another 100 percent European, their child would be around 25 percent non-European, genetically speaking. After another such mating, offspring would exhibit roughly one-eighth non-European ancestry. Racists used to insist that such “octoroons” were sterile, like mules (hence the word mulatto). In reality, many children born to octoroons disappeared into the white community. It only appeared that octoroons didn’t reproduce.
But these percentages are only averages. In practice, a child can inherit all, some, or none of an ethnically mixed parent’s minority ancestry, depending on how minor that ancestry is. Two siblings share only 50 percent of their DNA on average, some pairs more and others less. This explains the very different physical appearances of siblings in some families.
Studies have shown that the vast majority of the 35,000 to 50,000 African-Americans who switch their census designations to white or Hispanic each year have 12.5 percent or less African heritage. Some with up to 25 percent are still able to “pass.” But those with more than 40 percent of a non-European heritage normally resemble the phenotype for that heritage so strongly that they don’t attempt to switch to another ethnicity, assuming that they’d even want to.
The average African-American has almost 20 percent European ancestry, and one quarter have Native American ancestry as well. A third of African-American males have European Y chromosomes. (I will later encounter several European-identified men who have African Y chromosomes.) Geneticists have calculated that nearly 40 percent of the Native American gene pool represents other ethnicities. One-third of white Americans have some African ancestry, white Texans possessing on average 5 percent (in addition to what all Homo sapiens share as heirs to our genetic Adam and Eve, who were African). White, after all, is a description not of race but of skin color — and not a very good one at that. Most people with albinism have some pigmentation and, thus, some hint of coloring to their skin. And only mass delusion allows human beings to imagine that exclusive races exist.
If my grandparents were both partly Melungeon, whatever mixture that entailed at the end of the nineteenth century, my father would be about as Melungeon as each of them. Since he married a Yankee, I myself would be half as Melungeon as my father and my grandparents. Since I also married a Yankee, Sara would be around a quarter as Melungeon as her great-grandparents. She, too, married a Yankee, so Zachary would be one-eighth as Melungeon as his twice-great-grandparents.
I study the slumbering baby. I would do anything to make his upcoming life easier and more pleasant. If that entailed falsifying records, changing my name, fabricating new ancestors, and never admitting this to a single soul, would I do it? I certainly would. I’d order a fake British coat of arms off the Internet and join the DAR. And I’d kneecap anyone who tried to rip off my mask.
But would it make Zachary’s life easier not to be taught to honor all the ancestors to whom he owes his existence? Not knowing who I am hasn’t worked that well for me. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to wedge my psyche into borrowed shoes that have pinched and chafed and rubbed it raw.
The Melungeons, whoever they might once have been, are ceasing to exist through outmarriage. Ironically, it’s only during these last twilight years that their putative descendants are discovering and celebrating this complex legacy. I vow to make sure that they don’t vanish before their story is told — if only I can figure out what that story is. I’ve already started writing about a young boy in Galicia, as sweet and innocent as Zachary, who joins a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition to La Florida, where he’s forced to confront the truth about how badly many human beings treat those who appear unlike themselves.
Strolling to the bank of mailboxes outside my condo, I wave to Sara as she drives away with her precious human cargo. On the bumper of a parked car, I spot a sticker that reads
I SUPPORTTHE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS.
Smiling, I reflect on what might happen to my car if I pasted such a sticker on its bumper in Tennessee, where a man’s choice of firearms is as important to him as his wife’s choice of hair color is to her.
Bumper stickers are Vermont’s equivalent to Tennessee’s church signboards, although they usually have a political rather than a religious drum to beat. When civil unions were being debated in Vermont, opponents’ cars sported stickers reading
TAKE BACK VERMONT.
Supporters countered with stickers saying,
TAKE VERMONT FORWARD. Some comedian posted on his bumper the message TAKE VERMONT FROM BEHIND.
Another sticker I saw recently read
VEGETARIANS DO IT WITH RELISH, AND THEY ALWAYS USE CONDIMENTS.
Inside my mailbox, I discover a postcard from a L
ondon friend named Ramsay, who’s traveling in Pakistan. On the front is the word Malangs and photos of three bearded, disheveled old men in multicolored clothing, one draped in chains. The explanation on the back is that Malangs are Muslim mendicants who embrace poverty in order to detach themselves from the chains of materialism.
Ramsay’s message reads, “Does that name sound familiar? Thought you’d be interested.”
I’m very interested. It’s one more brick for my Great Wall of Bewilderment. Earlier in the week my brother John forwarded me an e-mail from a woman named Joanne Pezzullo laying out her theory that the word Melungeon comes from the Old English malengin — “guile, deceit.” She quoted a verse from Edmund Spenser’s 1589 Fairie Queen:
For he so crafty was to forge and face,
So light of hand, andnymble of his pace,
So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale,
That could deceive one looking in his face;
Therefore by name Malengin they him call.
This unflattering description fits right in with Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole’s 1891 description of Melungeons as sneaky rogues. It seems unlikely the largely illiterate settlers of Appalachia would have known The Fairie Queen, but it does illustrate that the word malengin was in common usage in the Elizabethan era to describe an undesirable. And as I observed in my own grandmother, archaic words and speech patterns have survived longer in the Appalachians than in less remote settings. One spring day near our farm, as an older man in overalls was filling my gas tank, the sun went behind a cloud and a sharp breeze blasted down the valley. The man looked up and said, “Hit’s kindly airy, ain’t it?”
Other researchers have discovered that Portuguese plantations in Brazil employed Moors who called themselves “mulangos” or “melungos.” Tim Hashaw claims this term came from malungu, used by Kimbundu-speaking Angolan slaves in both Brazil and Virginia to designate a watercraft and, by extension, a shipmate or comrade.