APPALACHIA'S MELUNGEONS

By Katherine Vande Brake

The Melungeons, a minority recognized in Southern Appalachia where they settled in the early 1800s, have mixed heritage that is Native American, Sub-Saharan African, European, and Mediterranean. Their dark skin and distinctive features-long thin noses, remarkable blue eyes, black hair, volatile dispositions, and reckless manners-have marked them and been the cause of racial, social, and cultural persecution both by custom and by law in Appalachia for two centuries. An outsider might think that they, having suffered at the hands of those more privileged, might be understanding of others in a one-down position, but their marginalization has led to an insider mentality. Tolerance is not their mode. They are fiercely protective of the position that recent genealogical and biological studies have afforded them and police the borders of the Melungeon community with determination and energy.

The consummate mystery of the Melungeons is the question of origin. The native American strain is not disputed by anyone. The African connection is resented and denied by some, acknowledged by others. The real conundrum is nature of the European/Mediterranean element. Are the Melungeons Spanish, descendants of explorers, soldiers, and clerics who came to North America in the century between Columbus and Jamestown? Are the Melungeons the lost tribe of Israel or crypto-Jews who left the Iberian peninsula to escape the violence of the Inquisition? Are they descendants of Turks captured by Sir Francis Drake and dropped off at the site of the Roanoke colony right before the upheaval caused by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588? Are they descended from Moors or Berbers? Are they Arabic? Are they Portuguese? They have said for more than a century that they are "Porty-ghee." Because there are no written records to prove any of these claims and the DNA tesing undertaken in the last five years confirms none of the theories incontrovertibly, the discussion about origins rages on.

While the origins question may pique your interest, the people themselves will keep it. It's hard for many Americans used to freedom and plenty to fathom what it's like to be denied access to anything. Yet the Melungeons, while they paid property taxes and rendered military service in every American war, could not vote, attend public school, or testify in court against a white person. Tagged "free persons of color" in the early 1800s, they were just one step above slaves. Victimized in the first half of the 1900s by the eugenics movement in the United States that was only slightly less horrible than Hitler's Aryan supremacy efforts in Germany, they gradually have gained legal rights, but the stigmas remain. Only in the last quarter of the 20th century did they begin to realize the human rights that most people in 21st century America take for granted.

Just a century ago, while specialized practices such as farming, preserving food, hunting, gathering, and distilling insured survival in the unforgiving mountain environment, few Melungeons could read or write. In the late 1890s a visionary Melungeon leader named Batey Collins invited Presbyterian home missionaries to settle in one Tennessee Melungeon community where they established a church and built a school of unparalleled excellence. Educator-ministers Mary Rankin and Chester Leonard creatively reified the theories of educators John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and those of theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, but, despite their efforts, school literacy did not neutralize difference.

In the last five years I have done research among the Melungeons. Their stories rend my heart. Let me share two of them. The first was told to me at the home of one of the people I interviewed. We were sitting at her kitchen table poring over Vardy Presbyterian Church records, letters, her scrapbook, and family photographs. Pointing to old pictures of both her mother and grandmother when they were at boarding schools in North Carolina, she was telling me that both women left their home in Vardy, the valley community between Newman's Ridge and Powell Mountain along Blackwater Creek near Sneedville, Tennessee, to get high school and college education. Suddenly she paused: "You know they never could have gone to school in Sneedville; they wouldn't have been allowed."

They were excluded, not wanted, not welcomed-two generations of women from a landowning Tennessee family. The grandmother would have gone away to school around the turn of the twentieth century; the mother in the 1920s. Both of them attended one-room schools in Vardy: the grandmother at the log cabin subscription school built just after the Civil War and her daughter at the one-room primary school built by the Presbyterian missionaries in 1902.

The second story surfaced when a Melungeon descendant was taking me on a drive up the Vardy Valley and over Newman's Ridge to the main road that runs from Sneedville to Kyle's Ford. This man attended the Vardy Community School in the 1960s; by then it was still staffed by Presbyterian missionaries but was administered and funded by Hancock County. As we drove up the switchbacks of the gravel road, he pointed out sites of homes of Melungeon people whose names I recognized. One new house belongs to Seven Gibson, a Melungeon descendant who pastors a thriving Baptist Church. For the most part, the old houses and log cabins are long gone; trees and underbrush have invaded the clearings. There is little evidence that people ever lived on that mountain. As we crested the ridge top and started down the other side, he gestured to a thriving farm definitely still inhabited. "We never came over this far," he said, "and I bet you can guess why since you've done so much research." He glanced over at me, waiting for my response. When I gave none, he said, "They didn't want us here." The silence that fell between us did not mitigate the force of that prohibition. This man has white hair and a pink and white Irish-looking complexion, but his name, his heritage, and where he lived made him an outcast just a couple of miles south of the valley where he grew up. The old ways die hard.

These two exchanges stood became defining moments for me. In each case, an almost offhand reference to exclusion of Melungeons from Hancock County society brought the conversation, flowing easily just moments before, to a standstill. I realized I was glimpsing the center of the Melungeon experience through a lens I had not had before-the experience was not about how a person was designated on census records or whether he or she paid taxes. Instead these remarks told how people had to live their lives informed by a hidden literacy-what people know about each other and how that knowledge shapes the way they interact.

Brent Kennedy grew up in Wise County, Virginia, another area where there are Melungeon people. He believed he was Scots-Irish until he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a Mediterranean disease that nearly killed him. When his malady went into remission, he began to question family members, many of whom looked more Arabic or Jewish, than they looked Scots-Irish, about who they were. He learned that many of them did not want the story told. They were more interested in putting "Melungeon" behind them than in understanding their heritage. Kennedy's book Melungeons, the Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America, narrates the odyssey of his quest for the truth about himself and his ancestors, and was a turning point that brought Melungeons into the mainstream of Appalachian life and discourse.

Now Melungeons are exploring their identity at a series of biennial conferences called Unions, by creating websites, and by participating in listserv discussions. The Unions provide a forum for scholars and laymen to talk about many issues. The online expressions provide the diaspora (many people Melungeons included have left Appalachia to make their livings in other American communities over the years) with asynchronous discussion opportunities and illustrate surprisingly not solidarity but fragmentation on issues of origins and legitimacy. Two questions are at the center of the debates. Who can be included in the group labeled "Melungeon"? And, what counts as evidence? Do you have to have proof of an FPC designation in the 1830 or 1840 census to belong? Is it important to trace your lineage back to one of the original families named Collins, Gibson, Goins, Mullins or Nash? Does oral history legitimize a claim? Or, is it enough to have endured persecution for difference from the mainstream of southern highland culture? Armed with notions of difference stemming from both nature and nurture, Melungeons are using writing and rhetoric to embrace the difference they cannot seem to escape. In the final analysis, however, being Melungeon is the trump card, more important than education, financial success, or social position.

"Melungeon" bespeaks Appalachia. When a person owns Melungeon heritage, she is making a statement about her history and her prospects. When an author creates a Melungeon character in a novel or short story, he is drawing on this regional understanding of difference and persecution; it's a way to say a great deal using only one word. Recently when my friend and I followed the hostess through the dining room of the Cracker Barrel in Morristown, Tennessee, and passed a handsome dark-skinned, fine-featured young man at one of the tables, I leaned close to her and said, "Did you see that Melungeon?" She nodded and raised an eyebrow. "You bet," she said. And we both know our exchange said volumes.

For further reading:

The Melungeon Heritage Association Website http://www.melungeon.org/

Winkler, Wayne. Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia. Macon, GA: Mercer Univesity Press, 2004.

Kennedy, N. Brent with Robyn Vaughn Kennedy, The Melungeons, The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994.

Vande Brake is Dean of the School of Arts & Science and teaches technical communication at King College in Bristol, TN. She published How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in the Fiction of Appalachia in 2001. Her study of how Melungeon descendants are using literacy practices on the Internet to understand and negotiate their cultural identity is forthcoming.