A Lost Tribe's Origin

Wired News: Legends of a Lost Tribe's Origin

02:00 AM Jun. 19, 2002 PT

Ask 10 Melungeons about their ethnic identity and you'll likely get 10 different answers.

Even though historians have concluded that Melungeons, a sub-population of southern Appalachia, are a "tri-racial isolate" made up of whites, local tribes like the Cherokee, and escaped slaves, nobody knows for sure.

"Anybody who tries to claim there's one ethnic background for the Melungeons is like the story of the blind men and the elephant," said Libby Killebrew, a Melungeon historian and genealogist with a background in sociology. "It's not that everyone's wrong, it's that everyone's right and they need to get together."

Over the centuries, so much ethnic mixing has occurred that all of the theories are at least somewhat true.

A researcher at the University of Virginia's College at Wise could offer tantalizing evidence at a gathering of the Melungeon Heritage Association on Thursday.

Kevin Jones, a molecular biologist, has analyzed the DNA of about 120 Melungeon women and 30 men, and has hinted that his results will reveal a very mixed background.

One thing that's certain is Melungeons were a disenfranchised group in southern Appalachia, most of whom had darker skin and were marginalized by the wealthier whites around them. They settled in isolated communities such as Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee, or Stone Mountain in Wise County, Virginia.
They hid their backgrounds by saying they were Indian, orphans, or adopted. They changed either the spelling of their surnames or took on new ones. They called themselves black Dutch or black Irish -- anything but Melungeon.

In fact, Melungeon was considered a derogatory label until just a few decades ago.

In the mid-1960s, Hancock County was one of the poorest counties in the country, and its leaders were looking for a way to attract people and money.

"The only thing that Hancock County had going for it was this story of the Melungeons," said Wayne Winkler, president of the Melungeon Heritage Association.

Kermit Hunter had seen success with a previous outdoor production in Cherokee, North Carolina, called Unto these Hills, so officials formed the Hancock County Drama Association and commissioned Hunter to write a play about Melungeons.

The show, called Walk Towards the Sunset, was staged in Sneedville, Tennessee, in 1969. Even though the town had no hotels, few restaurants and was well off the beaten path, the drama ran for six years (they had to skip 1973 because of the gas crisis).
Winkler believes it was only after Walk Towards the Sunset that families begin to take pride in calling themselves Melungeon.
"It would be like saying: 'Our family is a low-class and trashy, disreputable people,'" Winkler said. "It's not the kind of thing you passed onto your children."

Even today, there are Melungeons who don't want to admit or discuss their heritage. But those who do talk do so openly and often loudly.
In 1943, Walter Plecker, the director of Virginia's Department of Vital Statistics, declared Melungeons "free persons of color," causing people to deny they were Melungeon altogether.

But stories that deflected the possibility of African ancestry temporarily helped them preserve their right to vote, send their children to school, or marry whom they wanted. Later, it helped some Melungeons escape discrimination.

One such yarn is that Portuguese sailors brought Turkish slaves to America who joined with local American Indians. Some believe they are Portuguese who fled Spain to escape the Spanish Inquisition.
Some scholars say that while these stories serve a convenient purpose, history bears no proof for them.

"They're saying our ancestors were lying and that is what drove me on to say, 'Look, maybe they weren't lying, maybe it's who they thought they were,'" said Brent Kennedy, author of The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America.

Even now, some Melungeons feel an aversion to the possibility of having African heritage.

"The controversy (when the DNA results are announced) will be that not everyone, even today in our more enlightened times, is willing to accept the possibility of African ancestry," Winkler said.

One is the Angolan theory, which suggests that all Melungeons are descendants of the original Angolan servants, who were brought to Virginia in 1619 and are widely regarded as the first African slaves.
They were not technically slaves. Early Africans in America were actually indentured servants and were able to buy their own freedom, become landowners, and sometimes married white women, Killebrew said.

"I like that theory because it gets rid of a lot of myths, and the idea that 'I'm more American that you, or more white than you,'" she said.
The list of hypotheses goes on and on, and it's unlikely one will come out the winner, at least not as a result of the DNA study.

Perhaps it doesn't matter which is the true tale, because the basis of racism against Melungeons was not necessarily the color of their skin, but their socio-economic position, Killebrew said.

"In my experience you got called Melungeon only if you were poor enough and low-class enough that people didn't respect you," she said. "There are plenty of people who haven't been discriminated against who have the same ethnic background as me. Race is a matter of perception -- there's no genetic basis to race."