Myrtle Beach Sun News, SC
May 6 2007
Family search appealing memoir
By Carole Goldberg – The Hartford (Conn.) Courant
When Lisa (pronounced "Liza") Alther was a teenager in Tennessee, she
was in her high school’s marching band, tootling a hand-me-down
clarinet. But she longed to be a "flag swinger," stomping across the
football field in short shorts and white boots, proudly waving a
tablecloth-size banner.
Turns out that if she had to swing a flag today and wanted one
representing her background, she’d be hard-pressed to choose:
Manhattanite, Tennessean, Virginian, Vermonter, Scotch-Irish,
Cherokee, Melungeon. Melungeon?
Most of those groups are familiar, but Melungeons – dark-haired,
tawny-skinned, blue-eyed residents of Appalachia – remain a
tantalizing mystery to genealogists, their neighbors and their once
tight-lipped but now increasingly vocal descendants.
Of which Alther might or might not be a member.
Her search for an answer is what drives the narrative of "Kinfolks,"
an appealing memoir that shows off Alther’s deadpan, self-deprecating
humor and incisive musings on race, heredity, Southern charm,
Northern drollery and the ways church marquees and bumper stickers
serve as competing cultural signposts:
"If you give Satan an inch, he’ll become your ruler."
"I support the right to arm bears."
The book’s title plays off Alther’s best-selling debut novel,
"Kinflicks" (1976), a coming-of-age, coming-out saga praised for
nailing the social upheaval of the ’60s. Alther wrote four more
novels about women finding their true identities, but "Kinfolks" is
her first nonfiction book. In it she explores not sexual orientation
but family background, a subject inextricably linked to class,
culture and prejudice.
Alther was born in New York City, to a doctor father with Virginia
roots and a mother who hailed from upstate New York. She was raised
in eastern Tennessee, with plenty of influence from her
Cadillac-driving, strongly opinionated paternal grandma, who claimed
Pocahontas as an ancestor and revered her Virginia background but,
oddly enough, rarely traveled there. And did not want her
granddaughter to get to know the Virginia clan she had left behind.
Alther went North to college (Wellesley), married, had a daughter,
settled in Vermont, divorced and became a successful novelist. But as
lovely as she found the Green Mountains, they had to compete with the
Cumberland and Blue Ridge mountains of home, and she regularly
crossed the Mason- Dixon line.
As a kid, she heard scary stories about Melungeons as bogeymen,
complete with the Evil Eye. As an adult, she met a cousin who proudly
claims Melungeon ancestry. Soon Alther was deep into parsing the
history of these reticent people, commonly defined as a "tri-racial
isolate" of white, black and Indian derivation, most of whom tried to
pass as white or Indian in a society where blacks were denigrated.
Odd traits persisted among Melungeons – six digits per hand, East
Asian eye folds, American Indian "shovel teeth," "Anatolian" skull
bumps, susceptibility to uncommon diseases such as sarcoidosis, and a
commonality of last names, such as Mullins, Collins, Bolling, Gibson
and Goins.
Alther soon was abob in a sea of theories about the background of the
Melungeons – possibly the heirs of Portuguese sailors, or the famous
Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or Turkish and Armenian captives of
Spanish explorers, or American Indian tribes (themselves said to have
ancient links to the Turks of the Altai Mountains of Central Asia) or
Croatians or Roma or Jews or Moors.
Book review
"Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree – The Search for My Melungeon
Ancestors" by Lisa Alther