no racial, religious, or language characteristics [except
southern accents] to set them apart as an ethnic group.
Yet as a group [steadily increasing] with specific,
recognizable culture patterns that are completely alien
to urban life, they pose one of the most serious problems
in Chicago’s projected plans for industrial expansion.
—Norma Lee Browning, “New ‘Breed’ of Migrants
City Problem,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 4, 1957
It would have been an easy task for Brother LeRoi to burn his mother’s letter. He could have thrown it out on trash-collection day and most assuredly never have come in contact with it again. He could have used it as kindling and set it ablaze during one of the community cookouts or shredded it and flushed the fragments down someone else’s commode—heaven forbid a paper floater claim determined resilience in his own toilet. But people have a habit of hiding things that they wish never existed. When faced with possessing what could arguably be the very key to their physical, emotional, and mental undoing, something prevents them from destroying it.
So LeRoi didn’t discard it, nor did he open it. Not that either mattered when the information contained in its pages—the family narrative of which he’d decided to remain in blissful ignorance—sauntered into his classroom, pressured him to meet, and presently sat across from him in a small South Side coffeehouse.
Amy generously poured cream into her tea until it mirrored the milky dusk complexion of LeRoi. She rambled on about school and witnessing North Side racism as if her first-meeting jitters had compelled her into a false sense of familiarity. LeRoi waved away the proffered cream and silently sipped his coffee. His thoughts drifted to the price of coffee, which had steadily increased over the past decade. His attention pushed away toward the South American farmers who produced the beans and snapped back as Amy continued.
“And Mama’s been a little under the weather . . .”
LeRoi frowned but said nothing.
Amy’s brow creased. “Don’t you even care to hear about your mother?”
LeRoi slowly set his mug on the table. “The woman who mothered me died several years ago.”
“Your grandmother, but—”
LeRoi interrupted, “There is no but.”
Amy sighed. “I’m sorry. I—”
LeRoi held up his hand. “What is it exactly that you think I can do for you, Amy?”
She smiled widely. “Actually, it’s what I can do for you.”
“What does that mean?” LeRoi sneered. His thoughts were on unwanted trust funds and family relics. Perhaps his mother was dying and needed an organ donation. He did not want to give to them or receive from them. Not that he had a choice in the matter.
“Have you ever heard of the Melungeons?” Amy asked, and then it did not matter at all how long their mother’s letter had been wedged into the recesses of LeRoi’s closet. The letter was an errant thread that threatened to unravel the entirety of a garment. In a most callous well-intentioned act, Amy had opened her mouth and freed its contents. She had released his parents, LeAnna and Roy.
Theirs was no love story. It was not the strangulation of young love by feuding families. Nor was it the controversial tale of taboo miscegenation between a president and his enslaved mistress. They were not even an Othello and Desdemona. LeAnna and Roy hadn’t had much of a chance to be anything more than two equally poor teenagers working the same land neither of their families owned. Whites had simply been too poor to segregate themselves from their Black counterparts. Poverty may have made better neighbors than good fences. Between white and Black lived the Melungeons, isolated on a ridge just beyond the small town of Sneedville, Tennessee. Their features varied, as did the curl patterns of their hair. They were any combination of pale, olive, bronze, or brown complexion and kinky, curly, wavy, or straight hair.
Nowhere were these variations more present than in Roy’s own family. His widowed mother, Clara, was buttermilk in tone with a broad nose and full lips. Both brothers possessed the olive skin associated with those from the Mediterranean and straight hair. Roy was as brown as the Tennessee soil on which they lived with hair that curled against his scalp when short and became fuzzy if left untended. His father had been a dark man. So dark that he had been thought to be Black. Unable to prove his Melungeon heritage, the family had been excommunicated and forced to relocate to the bottom of the ridge. Clara had violated a fundamental rule of Melungeon freedom: the distinction between them and Negroes. Melungeons best resembled those with whom they were in close proximity. It was no wonder that they tended to marry their white neighbors and lighter variations of their own ethnicity.
LeAnna and Roy did not fall in love, nor did they fall in lust. Their fall was in fear. They were not colorblind, for such a thing does not exist. LeAnna did not just notice the expanse of Roy’s muscles, she reveled in the contrast—the coloring within his body lines, Roy as her polar opposite: male and dark—while Roy could not see her absent her paleness. Color had been such a part of their lives that it certainly must have infiltrated their attraction. Yet they shared the same heritage. Their most recent ancestors had successfully argued in early court cases that they were not of the Negro race. It allowed them to remain free as many of the same complexion were enslaved and subsequently legally discriminated against during LeAnna and Roy’s time. Their freedom came with a shadow that Roy knew all too well—a constant threat of it being upended should there be one dark smudge on their Melungeon lineage. They were Melungeon, but Roy, with his dark skin and coiled hair, was a dead branch on the tree.
LeAnna and Roy didn’t make eyes at each other as they passed in town. They didn’t carve hearts with their initials in trees. They ended up at the same place in a sense broader than merely arriving at Mullens Field at a specific time one evening. Namely, both were running from their lives on the ridge—the inescapable expectations that came with being Melungeon and the realities of propagating an ethnicity that seemed to exist only in Appalachia. They were trapped.
LeAnna often snuck out of the house to sleep under the stars. It wasn’t a romantic engagement with nature; she fled because she had exhausted her ability to keep her drunken uncle from entering her room in the night. She found a haven in the field they sharecropped. Shrouding her thoughts of leaving the ridge in the darkness of night, LeAnna wondered if her history could exist outside of the ridge. What would she be? She wasn’t white or Black. Would she only be as she appeared to be to those who looked upon her? Would they take in the straightness of her hair and grayness of her eyes and peg her as white?
Mullens Field similarly harbored Roy and his feelings of stagnation. The ridge simultaneously labeled his dark skin problematic and protected him from the harsh realities of American Blackness circa 1940. He could be relatively safe if he remained in the bowels of the ridge. Yet the knowledge that his station there would be tied to the complexion of his mate and their children, since his own already counted against him, kept him up nights, visiting the field. Since work at the mines had been greatly reduced, many were packing up and leaving the ridge. He worried about what could happen if he left. On the ridge, he might be Black. Away from it, he’d be nothing other than it. He’d be nothing other. He’d be nothing. Some nights as Roy sat silently gazing at the stars, LeAnna slept soundlessly across the field—each unaware of the other’s presence. Until that night when the sky opened.
Lightning, accompanied by a deluge of rain, illuminated the field in bursts of near daytime intensity. LeAnna’s fear of lightning harbored memories of her uncle creeping into her room and blinding her with a flashlight beam, a smile hidden behind the darkness. Just a joke, baby girl. His eyes lingered on her. But you ain’t a baby no more, is you?
Roy’s fear was of shotgun blasts of thunder that cracked the sky’s flesh open like a whip. He shuddered and thought of the loud noise
s in the night that often accompany the deaths of colored men in the South, even within the purview of the ridge. Although they were escorted by flashes of light, Roy remained unconvinced that the sounds were those of some dark body being brutalized. He stood, eyes scanning the horizon for lynch mob shadows. They landed on LeAnna standing paralyzed by fear, and his first thought was that his imagined vigilante posse served as a premonition since it didn’t get much more dire than being a dark man in a field with a soaking-wet white-enough woman. He resigned himself to the fate of a dead man already tried and punished for whatever did, could, or was about to happen.
Hail fell or hell fell—it was all the same to LeAnna and Roy as they moved toward each other, hurried along by a fear of everything outside of themselves. Their progress was revealed in flashes of lightning, their mud-caked footfalls silenced by thunder. They clung to each other until all that remained was night and a steady rain.
She kissed him. She didn’t know why, but she did. He responded. They, who moments earlier lamented the constraints of their lives, cast them off in the first way that presented itself.
Without speaking, they disrobed slowly. They reached for each other because there was no one else there to reach for—and no one else to see them reach. They were young birds exercising their wings before attempting flight. Their same time and place was one night’s moment of freedom. When light returned, so did they—to what they were.
LeAnna’s family did not care about the origins of her stomach bump. Some figured the uncle had finally won. Others chalked it up to the inevitable result and purpose of menstruation. What mattered most to them was where this latest addition would sleep in the already overcrowded three-room shack. Marriage suggestions brought inquiries about the father, and her silence, first regarded as the shame of a spurned lover, soon began to cause greater concern among her relatives. The question became not whose baby was in her stomach but what kind of baby.
She was eight months swollen and constricted by her nightgown the next time her uncle visited her bedroom. On her right side facing away from the door, LeAnna didn’t see him enter. The flashlight flickered three times before it released a consistent beam. She turned into the depression of the bed with his weight and eyed her uncle wearily as he placed a hand on her stomach.
“What’s in here?” he hissed in her ear.
“My baby,” LeAnna whispered.
“What’s it gon’ look like? Ain’t gon’ look like me, is it?”
Moisture spread from her. Her uncle dabbed it with his fingers. He knew before she did. Her water had broken. He ran a hand through his sweaty black hair. “Imma go wake your momma.”
LeAnna faced the door and wiped away tears. Pulling herself up, she slid her bare feet into work boots and shuffled out of the house as quickly as her contractions would allow.
When she knocked on the door, she was in full labor and could only manage to gasp in front of the older Black woman who opened it. Brown faces peered at her—the youngest with curiosity, and the oldest with fear. LeAnna’s eyes found Roy’s, and he reached for her and guided her into the room he shared with his two brothers. His mother Clara followed, soon ushering him and everyone else from the small bedroom, barking orders for towels and hot water, then staring at her eldest son with despair before closing the door in his face, isolating her and LeAnna from the rest of the house.
It was five hours before the door opened again, bringing the shrill sound of a crying newborn. The baby entered the world swathed in fresh sheets laundered for middle-class white women by his paternal grandmother, the woman who would raise him. He lay nestled against LeAnna, while Roy sat beside them. The fear in the house was palpable. They noted his pale hue, aware that an infant’s color darkens with age, before counting his tiny fingers and toes.
Baby Lee Roy, later known as Brother LeRoi, darkened, binding their fate to his complexion. When he reached the color of cinnamon, they knew that they would not ascend the ridge. Roy and his family wouldn’t return to the Melungeon community, and LeAnna would be similarly expelled from it. They would leave, as so many others had, on the Hillbilly Highway.
With great flourish, Amy sat across from her half-brother, LeRoi, and announced, “You’re not Black. You’re Melungeon. We both are. We’re the same, LeRoi. The exact same.”
Brother LeRoi belted out a deep guttural chortle that shook the table and caused a questioning glare from Amy. LeRoi didn’t need to hear the details of his mother and father’s migration from Appalachia. He had no knowledge of their multiple stops along the way or how many places refused them service and entry. LeRoi didn’t need to know about the final time his father, Roy, claimed not to be Negro—to two white men at a filling station not far outside their Tennessee home.
“Nigger says he ain’t a nigger.”
“What kind of nigger is he?”
“Whatever kind of nigger he is, it comes with a nigger-lover,” one said, nodding his head toward LeAnna seated in the pickup truck.
“That right?” the other answered.
They beat the Melungeon out of him. When Roy arrived with his family in Chicago, he was Negro and LeAnna was white. The only way for them to live was apart, as pegs pressed into the holes they closest fit.
Amy began to repeat, “You’re not Black. You’re descendant of—”
LeRoi grabbed her hand inciting an audible gasp from several of the mostly white patrons around them in the coffee shop. A white man seated across from them half-rose until LeRoi removed his hand and stood.
“Right.” LeRoi winked at her. He tossed enough money to cover his coffee and her tea on the table and left Amy to fantasies of racial loopholes and sibling harmony. All that Amy’s instigation had accomplished was to stir up the sediment of his repressed feelings about his matriculation at Tuskegee.
Five
beneath the veil
He lifted the veil of ignorance
from his people and pointed the way to progress
through education and industry.
—Inscription, Booker T. Washington statue,
Tuskegee Institute
I am standing puzzled, unable to decide
whether the veil is really being lifted,
or lowered more firmly in place;
whether I am witnessing revelation or
a more efficient blinding.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
The second rising of the South did not occur in the way expected by the old Confederacy. It arrived with the South’s racial underclass clawing their way out of oppression. Booker T. Washington’s aptly titled autobiography Up from Slavery recounts the process for Tuskegee Institute’s first president in 1881. It was a slow and arduous climb.
When Washington arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama, to serve as the first president and sole instructor at its new school for colored folk, there were no buildings in which to teach, no materials, no staff, and no land. It isn’t technically correct to state that he founded the Tuskegee Normal School, as he was brought into service by George C. Campbell and Lewis Adams, an ex-slaveholder and ex-slave, respectively. Yet it would be an extreme disservice to history not to claim Washington as the founding father of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (the school’s fourth name), the man who first learned and then instructed its growing faculty and student body in agriculture (the primary economy of the South) as well as brickmaking and masonry, much in the way he had taught himself to read and later became the head of an educational institution.
Two decades after its founding, the school would boast a total of forty buildings—all constructed by the students. The turn of the century’s contagion of progress was evident all over the country. Yet parts of the old Confederacy rallied against this particular aspect of southern uprising by memorializing the lost war in monuments like the Daughters of the Confederacy’s stone statue in Tuskegee’s town square.
The lone
stone soldier of the Confederacy stands with an unwavering gaze directed beyond the desolate square. His concrete eyes pierce space and time as the town center crumbles around him and the institute rises seemingly from the alabaster rubble. This statue glares from the growing shadows toward another—that of Booker T. Washington, immortalized in metal as in deed.
The bronze sculpture depicts Washington lifting the veil of ignorance from a kneeling slave at his side. Washington did not live to see the statue erected in his honor or the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era, which sparked millions of Blacks to flee the South beginning the year of his death. Like an omen, perhaps Washington could see the futility of his life’s work, encouraging southern Blacks to “cast down their buckets” where they were. Exhausted by violence, lynchings, and stolen legacies, southern Blacks packed their buckets with their meager belongings and migrated north while the Confederate soldier stared on.
Yet Lee Roy Duncan had found answers in Washington’s autobiography as he grappled with the changing landscape of Chicago gang life. Lee Roy saw himself surrounded by people surviving poorly, and Washington’s words spoke directly to him. At first, he just wanted to see the campus that had been built by the hands of students and teachers and Washington. He tried to relay the stories of Washington’s triumphs to his fellow Blackstone Rangers, yet his awe failed to inspire.
“We got plenty dead niggas for you to dig on right here, right now,” they chided him. It was true. His friends were pouring liquor onto cement steps in Malcolm X’s honor—three weeks dead after delivering a fiery speech on “The Spectrum of Political Ideologies” at Tuskegee Institute. They would continue the practice for each murdered activist, and it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see how, later, King’s assassination would serve as the final nail in the political coffin of the Blackstone Rangers. There seemed little profit, social or otherwise, in peaceful protests. They could not protect their king, so they acquiesced to building empires constructed of powder—heroin for broken heroes.
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