by Lisa Alther
James Guthrie discusses some residents of the Anatolian maritime empire of Miletus, who fled a Persian invasion in 494 B.C. to settle on the island of Melun in the Seine. In 52 B.C., Julius Caesar reported driving these “Melungeons” from the island, some of whom were last seen sailing west into the sunset.
C. S. Everett maintains that Melungeon came from the Italian melongena, meaning “eggplant.” He claims it’s an epithet still used by Italian Americans to describe someone of African heritage because of an eggplant’s dark skin. And he points out that there were Italian settlements in central Virginia in the late eighteenth century.
A genealogist named Pat Elder has proposed the Old French melanjan, which also means “eggplant,” as the origin of Melungeon, explaining that Baron Francois de Tubeuf tried to establish a French colony on the Clinch River in southwestern Virginia near a large Melungeon settlement in 1793. Elder also suggests “mal-injun” as a possible source for the term, hinting at the hilarity to which the whole topic eventually reduces those of us who explore it. It’s a certifiable syndrome known as Forebear Fatigue.
Returning to my office, I log on to the Internet and discover that the contemporary Melungeons are restless. Brutal battles are being waged at the various chat sites. A girl gang of professional genealogists is attacking Brent, claiming he’s not a real Melungeon because his ancestors aren’t listed as FPCs on the censuses. Brent has pointed out that censuses were conducted by local people, who’d have given the neighbors they liked or feared the benefit of the doubt since the consequences of being designated an FPC were so dire. He’s also presented them with citations from records earlier than those they’ve consulted that do list some of his ancestors as FPCs. And he’s explained that much of the Melungeon mixing presumably occurred before record-keeping, or even literacy, existed on this continent.
These belligerent genealogists are also insisting that the Melungeons weren’t in fact the “white Indians” found living in East Tennessee by John Sevier in 1784, and that no one claimed Portuguese ancestry for the Melungeons until 1848, when it was fabricated to explain away their dark complexions in an attempt to avoid classification as FPCs. They maintain that there’s nothing mysterious about Melungeon origins, that they’re descended from a group of mulattos who migrated west from Louisa County, Virginia — and they’ve got the paper trail to prove it.
They also chide Brent for broadening the definition of Melungeon to include every mixed-race wannabe in America. And they ridicule the idea of a Turkish component in the Melungeon makeup, portraying Brent and those pursuing similar connections as cultists, cranks, and crackpots.
Their hostile tone baffles me. There’s something about the Internet that turns perfectly nice people into harridans. It may be the absence of facial expressions and tones of voice. Unsure of whether they’ve made their point, people shriek it into cyberspace.
I discover that several more splinter groups have split off from the Melungeon totem pole. One wants to apply for state recognition of individual Melungeons as Indians so they can qualify for various scholarships and grants. The mainline Melungeons are opposing this, preferring to emphasize the multiethnic nature of Melungeon heritage.
Another group is accusing those who champion the Portuguese and Turkish origin theories of racism for trying to explain away their darker coloring as something other than African. Yet most Melungeons I know are scouring the census records and throwing cocktail parties whenever they locate ancestors designated “mulatto.” In fact, a baffled African-American reporter for a Washington, D.C., newspaper has recently confessed in print that she’s never before encountered white people so eager to be African.
Yet it’s clear from the Internet chat sites that not everyone with a Melungeon surname is eager to be African. Some are downright appalled. Others are furious about the DNA study. Since we don’t know who the Melungeons are in the first place, they point out, who’s to say that those sampled for the study are representative? And in a fit of I’m-more-Melungeon-than-thou, some with documented ancestry back to those who bore the traditional Melungeon names and who lived on Newman’s Ridge in the nineteenth century are raging that Melungeon wannabes are trying to abduct their hard-won heritage. Still others are furious that certain diseases like sarcoidosis and thalassemia have been labeled Melungeon, fearful of what this might do to employment prospects and insurance coverage.
Everybody’s mad about something, and I’m no exception: I’m mad at my grandparents for dying without telling me what they know about this mess. My head is reeling from the strain of trying to sort out all the old information and fit in the new.
But Brent keeps trying to levitate above the fray. He always acknowledges everyone’s point of view, however demented, often referring to the Middle Eastern tale of the elephant. Each of us is exploring an ear or a leg, but it’s all part of the same elephant, he insists in a voice that usually goes unheard above the din of clashing opinions.
It’s an elephant, all right, the elephant in the room that our grandparents wouldn’t discuss. But now nobody will shut up about it. In the 1990s, captive elephants killed 65 people and injured 130. Before this flap is over, our Melungeon Murderous Mary is going to trample us all to pulp.
I find myself unable to renounce either lesbian weddings on Lake Champlain buffalo farms or mud-wrestling matches between monster turtles and one-armed trappers. So in the autumn I now head south to Tennessee with the ducks and the snow geese, to the land where men in their personals ads say that they’re seeking a girl who can bait her own fishing hooks. And when the ice breaks up so that Lake Champlain resembles a giant frozen margarita, I shoot back up the Shenandoah Valley to Vermont, land of the silent sunset sailors and the solo skiers who vanish into the darkening woods. If some of my ancestors were Native American, I’ve reclaimed their nomadic ways. I’m like a dog that turns around and around before lying down, but that never actually lies down.
Consequently, I don’t have a lot of friends. People tend to want others to pick one team and play on it to the death. Most of my pals are misfits like myself, standing with each foot firmly planted in canoes headed in opposite directions. I used to think that a real friend was someone who, had I been Jewish in Germany, would have hidden me from the Gestapo. Now that I’m a senior citizen, I know that a real friend is someone who will drive you home from your colonoscopy
Upon my return to Kingsport, I borrow my parents’ new car for the next leg of my disjointed journey. And when I reach Jamestown, I’m newly amazed by human tenacity. I can imagine few less appealing sites for a settlement. The point on which the triangular fort was built in 1607 is low and swampy, promising bad water, soggy gardens, humidity, insects, and disease. Most Jamestowners were as devoid of survival skills as were the Lost Colonists. During one especially bad winter that they christened the Starving Time, they ate rats, saddlebags, and each other. In three years the population declined from 500 to 60.
The other problem was the Powhatan Indians, thirty-two Algonquin tribes with an estimated 14,000 to 22,000 members, the most powerful being the Pamunkey, Nansemond, Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Chickahominy, and Appomattock. Like the tribes around Roanoke Island, they took pity on the inept colonists and tried to help. At first. Pocahontas (my grandmother’s alleged cousin), a daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Nation, even married a Jamestown man named John Rolfe, organizing her tribe to carry food to the starving Englishmen.
But as usual, the English soon wore out their welcome by ignoring Pascal’s sage observation that all the troubles of mankind could be avoided if only everyone would sit quietly in his own room. The Powhatan eventually attacked the English in 1622 and 1644, and the English attacked back, razing their villages. As with all conquistadors, what tipped the balance in favor of the English were horses, metal breast plates, muskets, germs — and the initial hospitality of their victims. By 1670, there were 40,000 Englishmen in the Tidewater and only 4,000 Indians.
And by the end of the seventeenth c
entury, only 1,800 Powhatan remained. If they failed to wear striped coats in territory the English had claimed, the English were encouraged to shoot them. Many Powhatan had already fled west to the mountains. Throughout human history, those threatened with extinction have always headed for the hills.
Driving around the Northern Neck of Virginia, I’m intrigued finally to lay eyes on my grandmother’s Mecca — the Tidewater. So often did we face east and worship it that I’m a little disappointed. It’s just pleasant, rolling farmland drained by several tidal rivers that probe inland from the Chesapeake Bay, like the fingers of an outstretched hand.
In the early years in Virginia, manual labor was performed by indentured servants shipped from Britain, an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 of them convicted felons. After a fixed period of four to seven years, they were set free to make their own way. Or not. Of every ten indentured servants, one became a farmer and one an artisan. The other eight either died or became day laborers or vagrants. Many headed west to “unoccupied” land. Because Indian hunting grounds weren’t under cultivation, they were regarded as unoccupied, despite the fact that the game in those forests provided Indians with much of their sustenance.
In the beginning, some Africans were also manumitted after fixed terms of service. Or their masters freed them in their wills and left them land. Or the slaves raised and sold crops and livestock on the side and bought their freedom.
In his study of 280 families that comprised 80 percent of the free African-Americans in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Virginia and North Carolina, Paul Heinegg found that all these families but one originated from unions of white women with black men, both slaves and free. The one exception resulted from a white master and his black slave woman — an arrangement that became the rule rather than the exception later on.
The first boatload of African slaves arrived at Jamestown in 1619, and the situation for blacks began gradually to deteriorate. Plantation owners preferred slaves to indentured servants because they didn’t have to free them just as they were getting the hang of hoeing tobacco. In addition, a bout of plague in London diminished the supply of white servants.
Over the course of world history, slaves hadn’t necessarily been dark-skinned. They were simply those defeated in war or seized in raids. But an act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1639 prohibited Negroes from bearing arms. In 1662, another act proclaimed that all children were free or bound according to their mother’s condition. In other words, if a child had a free mother, he himself was free, even if his father were enslaved. If he had a slave mother, he was a slave, even if his father were free (and even if his father were white). This act also imposed a large fine on any Christian who fornicated with a Negro.
By 1680, the term white had come into common usage as a racial category. A law prohibiting white-black marriages was passed in 1691. In 1723, more laws passed banning manumission and denying Africans the vote. Dark skin increasingly became a badge of slavery — dark skin of any origin. The annals of Jamestown list East Indian, Turkish, and Moorish servants and slaves, in addition to Native Americans. The free descendants of the early unions between Africans and Europeans, between natives and Europeans, became vulnerable to seizure and sale. Many headed for the hills.
A Melungeon origin tale concerns two men, Vardy Collins and Buck Gibson, said to be Cherokee from Virginia who borrowed white men’s names. Vardy darkened Buck’s skin with charcoal and sold him to a farmer. Buck ran away, washed off the charcoal in a creek, and caught up with Vardy. Then they headed for the hills with the farmer’s money.
In a Best Western hotel near Richmond that night, while reading a biography of Pocahontas, I first realize that receiving a land grant was not the Big Deal the Virginia Club used to make of it. It was simply the way governments persuaded citizens to move to dangerous territories they wanted to annex. If you planned to farm in America, you either bought land from another farmer or from a speculator, or you received a grant from some government for performing a task like fighting in a war. Or you paid the passage for an indentured servant and received a chunk of land as a bonus. If you had no money and had performed no worthy deed, you either hired yourself out as a tenant or a laborer, or you squatted on seemingly unoccupied land, paid the taxes or not, and hoped for the best.
I also learn that as of 1976 Pocahontas had an estimated two million living descendants, with more being born every day. Studying her family tree, I start twitching. With growing dread, I pull out my own ancestral charts. Normal people carry laptops when they travel. Southerners carry their family trees.
Checking and rechecking, I reach the appalled conclusion that my grandmother was — in fact — descended from Pocahontas. And so was my grandfather, since they share an ancestor named Jane Boiling. Jane Rolfe, Pocahontas’s granddaughter, married Robert Boiling, the grandfather of Jane Boiling.
Jane Rolfe died after giving birth to Jane Boiling’s father, John. Her husband, Robert Boiling, then married an Englishwoman. Those Boilings descended from Pocahontas through Jane Rolfe and her son John are called Red Boilings. Those descended from Robert’s English wife are called White Boilings. So my grandparents were Red Boilings. That makes my father a double Red Boiling. It also makes him a fourth cousin to his own mother, as well as a fourth cousin, once removed, to himself. In addition, it makes Brent Kennedy, who’s also descended from John Boiling, my double ninth as well as my third and fourth cousin. Scribbling on a pad, I calculate that thirteen generations back I had 8,192 ancestors. Two were Pocahontas. I’m finally going mad.
I stumble into the bathroom and stare into the mirror. If some of my genes are from Pocahontas, they’ve left no trace, except for a complexion that makes me look embarrassed, which I often am, particularly by this new discovery. I’m starting to feel like the lunatic I once encountered at a genealogical chat site on the Internet who traced his ancestry back to Romulus, one of the twins sired by Mars and suckled by a she-wolf, who grew up to found Rome.
Returning to my biography, I discover that Pocahontas had a cousin named Nicketti, an alleged daughter or granddaughter of Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan’s brother. Opechancanough, chief of the Pamunkey, organized the massacres of the British in 1622 and 1644. Nicketti married a Scotsman referred to only as Trader Hughes. Around 1720, they opened a trading post in Monacan Indian territory on the Otter Creek, which flows into the James River near present-day Lynchburg, Virginia.
A faint bell rings in my addled brain. I drag out my charts again. My worst suspicions are confirmed: one of my grandfather’s older brothers was named Robert Hughes Reed. And several Vanovers married Hugheses in southwest Virginia. My grandmother had four cousins named Nicatie and a second cousin named Pocahontas Phipps. According to the biography, nicketti means “dewdrop” in Pamunkey, and my grandmother also had a second cousin named Spicie Dewdrop Vanover.
Full of remorse for mocking my grandmother behind her back for so many years, I lie awake much of the night. If the six-finger rumor is true, if the Pocahontas rumor is also true, if the Lake Champlain monster actually exists, what other myths are true? Is the one about the Vanovers being Black Dutch true? Was Abby Easterd Vanover actually a Cherokee? Could Betty Reeves have really been a Portuguese Indian? Maybe they weren’t trying to explain away darker skin after all. Maybe they were simply passing on what had been handed down through the generations.
On the theory that where there’s smoke, there are mirrors, I assemble what I’ve learned about the Portuguese — apart from Betty Reeves; apart from the Sizemores, the Portuguese Jews from Barbados; apart from Brent’s family name Cañara, found in Portugal and Goa; apart from Juan Pardo’s converso soldiers; apart from the 1990 gene-frequency study proclaiming the Melungeons Portuguese; apart from the theory that the word Melungeon came from the Portuguese “melungo.”
One of de Soto’s four chroniclers was Portuguese. He was referred to only as the Gentleman from Elvas, a town in Portugal. (Elvis also being … oh, never mind.)
A tr
aditional Melungeon surname is Goins. In some old records, it’s spelled Goans, which various researchers have connected to Goa, the Portuguese colony in India. Some maintain that when the early Melungeons said they were Portuguese Indians, they meant East Indians, not Native Americans.
Two Virginian explorers named Batts and Fallam found a “Portugal” living among the Saponi Indians in 1671.
Refugees from a group of tribally mixed Indians who lived at a British fort in Virginia called Christanna around 1714 later settled in North Carolina, where they were referred to as the Portuguese community.
A man named William Mallory Johns, who was born in 1765 of a white father and a Monacan mother, was nicknamed “Portugue.”
Among the early slaves brought to Virginia were Creoles descended from Portuguese slave traders who’d mated with African women in the West Indies and at the slave factories on the African coast. Some referred to themselves as Portuguese and were known by such names as Antonio, Bashaw Farnando, Emanuel Driggus (from Rodriggus), John Francisco, Domingo Matthews, Anthony Longo. Some slaves converted to Christianity and anglicized their names on board slave ships because prior to 1667 Christianized slaves were freed. Others anglicized their names after otherwise gaining their freedom. Antonio, for example, became Anthony Johnson, and John Francisco became Francis Payne.
During this period, even Spaniards in America were claiming to be Portuguese (if not English) because Portugal was a sometime ally of England, whereas Spain was her nemesis. The victorious do write the history, erasing the vanquished. And sometimes the vanquished help them do it.
These are all the Portuguese clues I can summon, and I can’t see that they add up to much of anything, except for proving that a lot of people who were Portuguese, or who claimed to be Portuguese, or who others claimed were Portuguese, were running around the Tidewater in colonial days.