Melungeons: Mysterious Origins of an Appalachian Subculture?

Or maybe “subculture” isn’t the right word, nor “race” nor “ethnicity.”  Whether born of the invisible incursions of Portuguese, the wayward Welsh led by Madoc, the intermarriage of whites (Lost Colony survivors among them) and Indians, the weddings and progeny among Sub-saharan Africans and Europeans or other nearly-untraceable groups of triracial isolates, the Melungeon people of the Appalachians have long provided an enigma for ethnologists and sociologists, as well as readers, as the mysteries associated with Melungeons have led many writers to treat them as exotic and “Other.”

And it’s easy enough to see how “Melungeon” quickly became a defamatory epithet.  I remember being told as a boy that Melungeons (as well as a woodswitch named Sally Soapsuds, ghosts and fugitives from the chain gang) would snatch me up if I didn’t behave.  We didn’t live in the Appalachians but in its played-out foothills, and all I was told about them was: they’re savage, maybe cannibals; they’re dark but often have blue eyes and gums and “English” features; they lurk (importantly loaded word for a boy) in the wilder spaces and don’t fit in with “white culture,” though they’re neither Indians nor African-Americans (not the term of preference back then).  With the danger ascribed to them, they also had a kind of outlaw glamor, and I preferred inventing their stories whole cloth to responsible investigating.

A few years ago I did do a little inquiring and read Lisa Alther’s Kinfolks, which chronicles her quest to see if she was part Melungeon.  The vague identity of the group was beginning to be adopted by people who yearned to be associated with the exotic; few people until the late twentieth century had ever referred to themselves as Melungeons, but the stigma was transforming to a badge of courage.  And now Alther, a card-carrying Appalachian and a novelist, was determined to get to the bottom of the question.  She didn’t, but from her book I gleaned what I wanted to know for my own fictive purposes– that the group [s] tended to keep to themselves and to suffer both legal and extemporaneous persecution, that they were convenient scapegoats.

Preparing to teach a course on Appalachian Literature and Identity, I decided to pursue information on this group, to see if the whirlwind of questions about their source and nature could shed some light on the larger quest of Appalachians to shed stereotypes and reveal their actual selves, individually and collectively, to shed the trappings of Snuffy Smith, Jed Clampett and the cartoon moonshining hillbillies so many associate with American highlanders.

The two most extreme theories strike me as too simple and untrustworthy: 1) the whole notion of Melungeons is fabricated by offspring of white persons and persons of color to dodge the long-standing prejudices against the latter; 2) some exotic group —  formed long ago from intermarriage of rogue (or lost) explorers, Native Americans and strays– has a cultural identity called “Melungeon,” which would clearly delineate them from mainstream Appalachians.

Although phrases like “Melungeon culture” are scattered through the texts from the many theorists, I’ve yet to read anything about Melungeon music or handcrafts, religious practices, dialect, poetry or cuisine separate from Appalachian culture, so I’m very curious to hear about their distinct crafts and ways.  The good news in this may be that the people once called Melungeons from afar and who now identify as such were just about as homogenous (or diverse) as other Appalachians.  It’s true that both Alther and her scholarly cohort Wayne Winkler conclude that the demographic is growing more and more rare, due to the ease of Melungeons in assimilating, shadowing into our now-diverse culture.  However, none of this diminishes the angst that arises when someone looks in the mirror to ask the question that sets the stage for Hamlet: Who’s there?”  In Chris Offutt’s story “Melungeons,” one of the principals the title refers to recounts being threatened  as a schoolboy that “the Melungeons will get you.”  Imagine what a scourge to one’s sense of self that must have been.

One of the difficulties in tracing the history of Melungeons (the word may come from the French melange, though there are other theories, Turkish words, Saxon, Portugese) is that migration theories abound, and all can be argued for without resorting to high myth or low reasoning.  However, I have not found that the Melungeons are known for distinctive religious practices, particular music, a recognizable dialect or body of folk lore or craft.  They seem to be amorphous, a melange indeed of many people whose appearance set them up for exclusion and who sometimes found themselves, as the shunned or hounded often will, banding together for defense.

Recent DNA studies tell us more about the formation of the Melungeon identity that we ever knew before, and I’m still sorting out what I think of them, but I can’t recommend a better place to begin an inquiry than with Offutt’s story (from Out of the Woods.  The Melungeons in the story act out of a stern and painful code, but they do it in the midst of beauty and for reasons anything but chaotic.  It’s a story about feeling who you are, constructing who you are, embracing who you are, regardless of the consequences, and it suggests, especially by the story’s ending, that dignity is achievable among even the least conventional subcultures.

I’d love to receive some comments on what I’ve put forth her or omitted to say.  The comment field appears below.

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.