The Mystery of the Melungeons.
Nashville Tennessean Sunday
Magazine
September 22, 1963
By Louise Davis
Who are the Melungeons—the
“mystery race” tucked away between giant ridges of East Tennessee
mountains long before the first white explorer arrived? What exotic
tale of shipwreck or mutiny lies in the dark eyes of the red-brown
people already in Hancock County before Daniel Boone cut a trail? What
story of explorers’ strayed from DeSoto’s party 400 years ago or of
Portuguese sailors stranded on the North Carolina coast stares out in
their steady gaze?
A photographer and I set out
to talk to these shy people and, if possible, to break down their
long-standing refusal to have their picture made. In part, we
succeeded. We found that the dark people are indeed there, pocketed
mysteriously in the mountains where tow-headed Anglo-Saxon children
fill most of the schools. But the sullen eyes of Anglo-Saxon citizens
(who make up 99 percent of the population of Hancock County) followed
every move we made, and even the sheriff challenged the photographer’s
right to make a picture of the court house.
The tragedy of the “lost
race” was thick around us. “Every eye in the valley is watching you,”
one of our kind guides (who asked not to be identified) said after we
had left Sneedville, the county seat, and risen over Newman’s Ridge to
dip down the back side where the few identifiable members of the race
live.
So deep is the resentment in
Hancock County against inquiring outsiders, particularly against
certain Knoxville newspapers and “The Saturday Evening Post” for
stories they published, that all writers and photographers are under
suspicion. The truth is that Melungeons are a vanishing race, a race so
rare that Hancock County citizens can point out only two or three
families with certainty. And they prefer not to do that.
For the word Melungeon
(pronounced Me-lun-jun) itself is so clouded in tragedy that people
there will not say it. A much maligned people—not white nor black nor
yellow nor red—the Melungeons had to take their case to the Tennessee
Supreme Court before the Civil War to win the decision that they were
not Negroid and were therefore entitled to send their children to
school with white children.
Before that, in the state
constitution of 1834, they were disfranchised as “free men of color”
and were denied the right to sue or testify in court. White men who
coveted the rich lowlands the Melungeons had cultivated pushed them off
their acres and on to the rocky ridges. The Melungeons had no recourse.
Trapped in poverty, snubbed
by their fair-skinned neighbors, some of them withdrew to the poor land
along Snake Hollow, deep in the rattlesnake-infested gorge in the
shadow of towering Newman’s Ridge. Some of them settled along the
northern end of the valley, at the Virginia line, where Blackwater
Creek flows, and some settled on the Ridge.
“I have never heard one refer
to himself as a Melungeon.” Mildred Haun, gifted Tennessee writer who
grew up in a neighboring county and wrote many stories about them,
said. “Most of the mountain people refer to them as Blackwaters and
Ridgemanites.” But even in that long gorge, winding some 20 miles in a
half-mile-wide band between Newman’s Ridge and Powell Mountain there
are few “pure Melungeons” left today.
The Melungeons still there
deeply resent outsiders who pry into their ancestry and pontificate on
their intelligence and industry. They themselves refuse to discuss the
matter, and few will talk to reporters on any subject. They and fellow
citizens of Hancock County are incensed at bus-loads of brash teachers
and students from university sociology classes who descend on the court
house from time to time to announce they are “looking for Melungeons.”
Miss Martha Collins,
vice-president of the Citizens Bank of Sneedville, sat at her
trim-lined desk in the air-conditioned, modernistic bank and pondered
questions we asked her. Obviously it was not a subject to dismiss
lightly, nor to discuss with strangers who might write misleading
stories. A fair-skinned, blue-eyed woman whose calm efficiency at
running the bank was sharpened in 25 years of training under her
distinguished father’s presidency, Miss Collins weighed her words,
spaced her sentences precisely ------- figuring interest.
“I used to regard the stories
about Melungeons as a part of mythology,” Miss Collins, a college
graduate who is descended from one of the oldest families in the
region, said. “But my sister said, “No, there is some truth in it.”
Miss Collins rose from her desk and walked thoughtfully to the vault to
withdraw a letter postmarked 1907. It had been written to her by one of
her uncles. Elegant in vocabulary and charming in sentiment, the letter
related some of the family stories about their origin. Written by J. G.
Rhea, the letter told of one of the legends that persists to explain
the presence of the dark-skinned people in the area: they are
descendants of the Spaniards and perhaps Portuguese men in DeSoto’s
party who ventured from Florida into parts of North Carolina and
Tennessee in search of gold in 1540.
According to this story, some
of the men became lost from DeSoto’s party, were either captured or
befriended by Cherokee Indians, intermarried with them, and left their
descendants in Rhea, Hawkins, and Hancock counties in Tennessee and
neighboring counties in Virginia. “Navarrh Collins….a fine old
patriarch….said to be of Portuguese descent, was one of the early
settlers.” Rhea wrote. “He settled on Blackwater Creek and owned Vardy
Mineral Springs.” Vardy, a community centered around a neat cluster of
white frame church, school and missionary teacher’s residence, got its
name from Spanish settlers, tradition says.
Navarrh, Rhea said, was a
variation of Navarre, a region in Spain. When Navarrh Collins opened
Navarrh Mineral Springs, a long-ago health resort in the valley, the
name was soon contracted to Varr and they Vardy.There is nothing of the
backwardness of the traditional mountaineer in the letter, and it is
obvious that Hancock County has—and for generations has had—its
artistocracy, some of whom took pride in their Spanish and Portuguese
ancestry as well as in their Scotch-Irish blood. But there are no
Spanish or Portuguese names in the community now. There is no
peculiarity of vocabulary to set the Melungeon apart from other
citizens of comparable education and background.
The late Mrs. John Trotwood
Moore, historian and former head of the Tennessee State Library, said
original family names of the Melungeons disappeared as they took the
names of English-Irish settlers who came into the mountains after the
Revolutionary War. The Melungeons became Collins, Mullins, Gibson,
Freeman, Goins, et cetera. Others may have anglicized their Spanish or
Portuguese names.
The Melungeons themselves, a
clannish lot who are said to talk freely among themselves of their
mysterious beginnings, are silent when outsiders broach the subject.
Miss Collins, at the Sneedville bank, had told us we might find one of
the dark-skinned people some 14 miles away, where Snake Hollow road
crooks through the shadowy gorge between Sneedville and Tazewell. Mrs.
Bertha Bell, Miss Collins said, might talk to us and pose for our
photographer.
Mrs. Bell did both, chatting
happily on every subject from gardening to taxes until the origin of
the settlers was mentioned. A slight, engaging woman, hospitable and
kind, she became inscrutable as Buddha when we asked her about
Portuguese or Spanish settlers in the area, and, finally about
Melungeons. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said, suddenly
wide-eyed and innocent. “I don’t know about such as that.”
Her skin had the red-brown
color of an Asiatic. Her bare feet, after 58 years of walking the rocky
roads unshod, were dainty and shapely. Her hands and feet had none of
the light coloring of Negro palms and soles. It was reminder of telling
evidence used by one of Tennessee’s early lawyers of distinction, John
Netherland, to win the lawsuit hinging on the fact that Melungeons are
not Negroid.
Some observers say the
distinct coloring of a Melungeon does not blend with that of a white.
Some of the children of mixed marriages are white, while others have
the red brown coloring of the Melungeons. White mothers, for instance,
may have dark sons and white daughters. The setting for tragedy is
complete.
The dark forebodings and
heartbreak that come of the mixed marriages is theme of many of the
short stories in the remarkable volume, “The Hawk’s Done Gone,” that
Mildred Haun published in 1940. In one story, she told of a white girl
who did not know that her father was Melungeon. When she married and
her child was dark-skinned, the girl’s husband killed both mother and
child. “From my observations and from all I have heard, I don’t believe
they blend in color.” Miss Haun, now a writer for the Department of
Agriculture in Washington, D.C., said recently. But some lifelong
residents of Hancock County say Melungeons do indeed blend with other
races. For centuries they kept their distinctive look because they were
so isolated that they seldom married outside their clan.
The word Melungeon is said to
come from the French word mélange, meaning mixture. But that too
is conjecture. Another explanation is that the word comes from melas, a
Greek word meaning dark, and that fits the theories of the ancient
Greek beginnings of the race. Still another explanation is that the
word comes from an Afro-Portuguese word, melungo, meaning sailor. It is
the Portuguese sailor tradition that persists among the Melungeons.
Those who discus the matter simply say they are “Porter-ghee.”
According to them, Portuguese sailors sometime before the American
Revolution mutinied, and their ship was beached off the coast of North
Carolina. The sailors came ashore only to encounter hostile Indians,
and when they had killed the Indian men, the claimed the Indian women
as their own. One version of this story is that some of these
Portuguese sailors were descended from ancient Phoenicians who had
moved from Carthage to Morocco, whence they crossed the Strait of
Gibraltar to settle in North Portugal. “A colony of these Moors is said
to have crossed the Atlantic and settled in North Carolina,” the
Encyclopedia Americana states. Chinese sailors were known to have made
their way to Portugal and intermarried with the Portuguese, and that
slightly Oriental strain is one of the clues to the occasional slant
eyes and silky skin of some of the Melungeons.
One thing is sure: the
mystery is alive and walking in Hancock County. As Mrs. Bell stood on
the front porch of her home—the only two-story house on narrow Snake
Hollow road—her nine-year-old grandson, Terry, appeared around the
corner of the house. His dreamy Oriental eyes and elfin face held all
the mystery of his race. Like one of the genil from the Arabian Nights,
the long-legged boy scampered over rocks and around tree roots,
bouncing the “wheelbarrow” he had created by nailing the lid of a tin
bucket to a long stick. “All it takes to make a boy happy in this part
of the country is a hammer and some nails,” his grandmother commented
happily. The boy grew quiet at the sound of a jet plane zooming far
above the mountain that walls in his world, and he and his grandmother
squirted tobacco juice thoughtfully. “Not anything goes too fast for
me,” the boy of mysterious past said. “And no water’s to deep for a
boy,” his grandmother added, nodding her head till her string of pearls
twinkled, with an animation no stoic mountaineer knows.