Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  *

  Quarterless and in the parking lot, I can’t remember where I’ve parked my parents’ new car. I think it was blue. I rarely notice brands or styles. My only concern is that a car get me where I want to go. I wander through rows of vehicles with plates from all across the nation, feeling increasingly frantic. How in the hell can I find this car when I don’t even know what I’m looking for? I realize that this is an apt metaphor for my search for my wretched ancestors.

  I force myself to stand completely still. Taking a deep breath, I ask myself what Ina with her ice test or my grandmother with her eyeglasses scam would do in my place. They might wait until 4:00 A.M. when everyone else will have departed, leaving my parents’ car sitting alone in the lot. They might phone home and ask my parents for the make and color of the car they’ve been driving for three days. This seems too humiliating for a grown woman. But being grown is my problem: this incident is further proof that I’ve stopped growing and have started my decline.

  After a long period of reflection, I shake myself like an awakened hound. I circle the area in which I think I parked, my finger punching the button on the car remote that opens the trunk. Eventually the trunk of a Buick with Tennessee plates pops open. I still can’t remember what color it is.

  When I arrive at my parents’ house, I don’t tell them about losing and rediscovering their new car. I do tell them about Pocahontas, however, and I hand my father a piece of paper on which I’ve written out the generations leading back to her. As he studies it, my mother suggests that I might want to lay a bouquet on my grandmother’s grave in apology. I nod contritely.

  Back at the cabin, I sit on the porch in the twilight and listen to the frogs down at the pond. My neocortex is reeling with absurd scenarios as it diligently attempts to make sense of the aimless ramblings of my faceless forebears. Shipwrecked Portugúese and marooned Turks, Pocahontas and Spicie Dewdrop Vanover, escaped Africans and fleeing conversos — the whole thing is at least as far-fetched as ancestral land grants from King James I. I realize that I, too, am prey to the family affliction of mythomania.

  Despondent at having wasted so much time on such utter nonsense, I watch the night erase the narrow valley while fireflies flash Morse code messages back and forth. The pulsing of the frogs gradually cheers me up, and the steady beat of their moist oratorio sets me to composing some mocking limericks about my hopeless quest. I get out my banjo and pick out a tune to accompany them. By bedtime I’ve finished a song I christen “The Red, White, and Black Blues.” The chorus goes:

  I don’t know where I’ve come from, and I don’t I know who I am.

  My granny says Virginia, but she’s just into glam.

  They say I can’t be everything, they say I gotta choose.

  And that’s why I got those red, white, and black blues.

  10

  Teletubbies for Christ

  THE GRASS IN THE FRONT YARD of the cabin is still damp with dew. Zachary and I are toddling through it, examining clover blossoms. I’m trying to keep him quiet so his parents and cousins can stay asleep inside. A gang of calves is darting around the neighboring pasture like a shoal of hyperactive minnows.

  I start pulling some weeds in the rock garden. When I look up, Zachary is squatting by the electric fence in his blue shorts and sandals. On the other side stands a small black calf. He and Zachary are staring at one another, both thunderstruck.

  Suddenly the pack of roving calves sweeps past like the hoodlums in West Side Story. The black one pirouettes and dashes after them. Zachary stands up to watch him go, a tragic expression on his face. Then he stretches out a hand and folds and unfolds it in farewell.

  I contemplate what’s in store for him — a lifetime of other creatures departing before he’s ready and vice versa — and there’s nothing I can do to make it any easier for him. Or for myself.

  Zachary’s four young cousins burst from the cabin in their bathing suits. They race to the pond and clamber into my grandfather’s old rowboat. Zachary and I trot into the cabin and don our suits.

  By the time we reach the beach, his cousins are swarming the floating dock, cannonballing and then scrambling back up the ladder. Standing in water to his knees, Zachary watches his glamorous older cousins wistfully. I strap a life jacket on him, and he and I float slowly toward the dock. My assignment as he flails his arms and legs is to support him and propel him forward so unobtrusively that he thinks he’s doing it himself, thereby gaining the confidence that will one day allow this to happen.

  A flash of triple deja vu. I swam in this pond as a child. I taught my sister Jane, the mother of two of those cousins, to swim here. I also taught Zachary’s mother to swim here. Now I’m teaching Zachary. The pond remains while the children who swim in it grow up, grow old, and one day die. Yet the pond will endure, as new crops of children arrive to churn these placid waters.

  A church sign pops into my head:

  BABIES ARE GOD’S PROMISE THAT THIS WORLD WILL CONTINUE.

  These mini-sermons are eggs laid in my unconscious that hatch and burrow into my awareness when I least expect it, like hookworms. The evangelicals have taken over Kroger’s, and they’re making inroads into my psyche. What if I one day find myself falling to my knees by the roadside, like Saul en route to Damascus? I always think of the Rapture as the Raptor. I don’t want to experience it. Hot flashes are bad enough.

  Ina, Nellie, and I are sitting on Ina’s deck, high above the lake in which the hapless fisherman hooked the human hand. This probably isn’t what Jesus had in mind when He asked His disciples to become fishers of men.

  Ina is playing her mandolin, and I my banjo. We’re singing a campaign song about one of Nellie’s relatives, a populist governor of Alabama in the 1940s named Big Jim Folsom. When his opponents taunted him on the stump about his moral failings, he’d reply, “Anytime you bait a trap with a good-looking blond, redhead, or brunette, you’re going to catch old Jim every time.” Folsom finally lost the governorship during a campaign in which he appeared on TV drunk. When he tried to introduce his sons, he couldn’t remember their names.

  Our song, which accuses Big Jim of having fathered a child with an innocent country girl, is called “She Was Poor, but She Was Honest.” We reach my favorite verse:

  Now he sits in legislature,

  Making laws for all mankind,

  While she roams the streets of Selma, Alabama,

  Selling grapes from her grapevine.

  We finish just as a float boat passes below. A float boat is a carpeted platform on pontoons with padded, vinyl-covered seats and a canopy overhead. Many families on this lake own one. This particular one is teeming with fun seekers swilling beer, shrieking with laughter, and singing out of tune to a portable radio blaring a Tim McGraw song about the good old days when people ate fried bologna sandwiches and didn’t speak in vocabulary borrowed from drug lords. A chubby man in baggy red swim trunks, who’s standing over a smoking grill, is conducting this choir by waving a hot dog clutched in tongs.

  The boat rounds the bend, and the hubbub fades into silence. It’s like a scene from a Fellini film. I chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” asks Nellie,

  I describe the view out my condo window onto Lake Champlain, where somber Vermonters swim, paddle, windsurf, and haul heavy sails to the top oftall masts. Yankees work very hard at playing.

  “I’ve finally figured it out,” I announce.

  I’m constantly trying out my theories of regional distinctions on them because no two people could be more southern, though at opposite ends of the spectrum. Nellie grew up on eleven thousand acres, tended by a black mammy, whereas Ina grew up in a setting so remote that it lacked electricity and running water. Weighing over ten pounds at birth, Ina was a Five-Chicken Baby, delivered at home by an obese country doctor who devoured roasted chickens throughout a delivery. Neighbors judged the difficulty of a birth by how many he consumed.

  Ina and Nellie are waiting for my pronouncement. My
most recent aphorism is that southerners like to puff people up, especially if they hate them, whereas Yankees like to put them down, especially if they like them.

  “The main difference between the North and the South is that southerners enjoy being ridiculous, whereas Yankees like to feign dignity,” I announce.

  “It’s the weather,” replies Ina. “The heat addles our brains.”

  “And you have to keep drinking to stay hydrated,” adds Nellie.

  “But everybody on that boat was probably Baptist,” I observe, “and Baptists aren’t supposed to drink.”

  “Many Baptists are Baptist only on Sunday,” explains Ina, herself a recovering Baptist.

  I smile grimly. Golf on Sunday is just the tip of the iceberg of southern sin. My high school classmates have recently started reminiscing about alcoholism, physical abuse, and mental illness. It seems our sunny little town was actually a snake pit, and the charming snakes were adults I liked and respected.

  Ina has told me about Kingsport’s answer to the Bowery, the apartments across the street from the train station, entered through a battered green door, where men drank, gambled, and whored their paychecks away, while their wives or children stood in the doorways begging them for grocery money.

  Recently an article in Nellie’s newspaper exposed a drug and prostitution ring conducted out of a storefront on Broad Street. The kingpin had disguised it as a grocery store by placing several dozen cans of baked beans on the shelves. The police asked the businessman next door if he hadn’t found it strange that a grocery store would display only a few cans of beans.

  The businessman replied, “Well, hell, I thought he had him a bean store!”

  That’s how I feel about these revelations of private crimes that should have been obvious to us all: I thought we had us a bean store.

  But this phenomenon isn’t restricted to any one region or religion. If you live long enough, all your fondest illusions about humans being created in the image of God will crumble into dust.

  I’m sitting in Diane’s chair while she describes how a champagne-colored rinse she calls her “special” will take on my particular shade of gray. I promise to think about it. She warns me to make a double appointment so she’ll have enough time to apply the dye. I worry that my resolve to remain hoar-headed is waning.

  Her cell phone rings, and she puts on her headset. After listening for a while, she starts giving advice in a low voice. Since my last appointment, she’s apparently started channeling Oprah. Unfortunately, I can hear only one side of the discussion.

  I study her in the mirror as she snips away, talking into her mouthpiece about how to handle abusive men. She’s tall and slender with a fair complexion. It’s hard to know what color her hair might be without her special rinse, which has turned it the attractive pale champagne that I’ve begun to covet. Does she really have Indian ancestry, or is she another wannabe? Do I — or am I? Is this Pocahontas thing for real, or is there an error, deliberate or otherwise, in the research?

  I force myself to face the likelihood that I’ll never know. My grandparents are dead, so I can’t wring confessions from them. My father is content to be either Indian or Melungeon, but he’s as clueless as I am. I could spend the rest of my life in musty courthouses clawing my way through deed books and tax lists. But records don’t exist for the earliest years on the frontier. And I’ve already discovered that some that do exist deceive. The DNA study may reveal something about Melungeons in general, but nothing specific about my family. The Melungeons are finally getting me, just as that babysitter warned. I can neither solve their mystery nor ignore it. It’s like having high cholesterol.

  Close to hyperventilating, I calm myself with the words of Jeanette Carter, daughter of Sarah and A. P. Carter, who recorded the first country music songs in the 1920s: “All you can do is the best you can do. You can’t do no more than that.”

  One last circuit around the Kaaba on my Melungeon hajj, and I vow to call it quits. I drive up the Shenandoah Valley to Lynchburg, Virginia, the hometown of Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, who blamed 9/11 on homosexuals, abortionists, feminists, pagans, and the ACLU because they offended God, who therefore allowed America’s enemies “to give us probably what we deserve.” Lynchburg is also the former home for the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. A coincidence, or another of God’s little jokes?

  During the Civil War Lynchburg’s huge tobacco warehouses served as hospitals for the mutilated troops from both sides, who were transported from the Virginia battlefields in crammed boxcars. Those who arrived already dead were packed in charcoal and shipped home to their parents. If their identities or their parents couldn’t be located, they were buried in Lynchburg.

  I visit this sad cemetery in the heart of town, which features row after row of identical stone tablets, arranged by state, sometimes carved with only regiment numbers. All my life I’ve been fighting the Civil War inside my own brain. Yet this is how the Civil War — or any war — ends: barren fields of blank headstones. Will my Melungeon struggle end similarly with my anonymous ancestors still lying unclaimed in unmarked graves, despite all my efforts to find and acknowledge them?

  I drive across the James River and wind up a road to the bluff on which the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded sits. Now named the Central Virginia Training Center, it houses five hundred mentally handicapped patients in several handsome redbrick Colonial Revival buildings. These occupy 350 well-groomed acres that used to be a working farm run by the inmates.

  I arrive at a building that was constructed in 1910 to house the first one hundred epileptics, assembled here from Virginia’s mental hospitals. As I park alongside the nearby infirmary, I remember a Helen Keller quote featured on the Training Center Web site: “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.” Although the sun is beating through my windshield, I can’t help but see the shadow that drapes over this infirmary like a shroud.

  In 1913, the Virginia Colony for Epileptics became the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. By 1926, there were 511 epileptics of both sexes and 334 “feebleminded,” all women. Two were a mother and daughter, Emma and Carrie Buck.

  Carrie, being illegitimate, had been taken from Emma and placed in foster care in Charlottesville. When a nephew of her foster parents raped her at age seventeen, she became pregnant. Her foster parents committed her to the Virginia Colony, where she was at last reunited with her mother. Carrie’s resulting daughter, Valerie, was judged “feebleminded” at seven months and was placed with another foster family.

  I try to imagine how I’d have felt if some official had taken Sara away from me and entrusted her to strangers — especially if I myself had been denied my own mother and then raped while in the care of her replacement. Or how I’d feel to have someone declare Zachary “feebleminded” and confiscate him. I might very well strangle such a person with my bare hands.

  Next, the state of Virginia passed a law mandating sterilization of the “feebleminded.” Carrie Buck became the test case. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in support of Virginia’s law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in the majority opinion in 1927, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

  Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will, and without the consent of her mother, inside the building I’m looking at, a redbrick structure with white wooden two-story porches out front. Carrie’s sterilization opened the floodgates. Four thousand more were performed in this building on people the superintendent of the Virginia Colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, called the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Many were told they were receiving appendectomies. Some did
n’t learn the truth until many years later, after repeated failures to conceive. The last mandatory sterilizations in Virginia were performed in 1972.

  During this period, an additional 4,300 were sterilized elsewhere in Virginia. Fifty-two thousand more were sterilized in twenty-seven other states — 20,000 in California alone. At the Nuremberg trials, the chief Nazi eugenicists, who engineered the sterilization of somewhere between 360,000 and 3.5 million people, defended themselves by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Supreme Court decision in the Carrie Buck case.

  In 1985, Stephen Jay Gould investigated the third generation of Buck “imbeciles”— Carrie’s daughter, Valerie. He found that, before dying at age eight of a childhood disease, she attended a public school, where she received superior marks for deportment and average ones for class work. Carrie herself had once made the honor roll at school.

  The “feeblemindedness” of Carrie and her mother evidently consisted of their being impoverished unwed mothers, however unwillingly so on Carrie’s part. But after seeing photos of the two, I’ve realized that there may have been an additional motive behind their incarcerations and Carrie’s sterilization. Both appear partly Native American. The present-day Saponi Nation, whose original territory included what is now Lynchburg, maintains that they were descendants of a chief named John Buck.

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, several pseudo-anthropological studies of rural mixed-race communities set out to prove that the genes for degenerate and criminal behavior descend from generation to generation. The Virginia Colony in Lynchburg appears to have expanded its patient base from epileptics to the “feebleminded” so that the children of such communities could be separated from what was seen as the bad influence of their families. They were fed, clothed, educated, taught a trade — and sterilized so that in time these mixed people would die out.