-bkhccarolekinmay13,0,6102210.story?coll=3Dsfla-fe atures-headlines

The mystery
Novelist Lisa Alther explores her shadowy Southern roots with humor and
plenty of cultural musings.
By Carole Goldberg
Hartford Courant

May 13, 2007

Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree, My Search for My Melungeon
Ancestors. Lisa Alther. Arcade. $25. 236 pp.

When Lisa (and that’s pronounced "Liza") Alther was a teenager in
Tennessee, she was relegated to 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 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, Scots-Irish, Cherokee, Melungeon.

Melungeon?

Most of those groups are familiar, but Melungeons — dark-haired, t
awny-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 may or may 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 most certainly — and strangely — 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
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 –with some enriching detours to Manhattan and
Paris.

As a kid, she heard scary stories about Melungeons as bogeymen,
complete with the Evil Eye. As an adult, she meets a cousin (and she
has many) 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 Indianin a society where blacks were
denigrated.

Odd traits persisted among Melungeons — six digits per hand, East
Asian eyefolds, Native American "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 a-bob in a sea of theories about the background of the
Melungeons — possibly the heirs of Portuguese sailors, or the famous
LostColony on Roanoke Island, or Turkish and Armenian captives of
Spanish explorers, or Native American tribes (themselves said to have
ancient links to the Turksof the Altai Mountains of Central Asia) or
Croatians or Roma or Jews or Moors. Or some combination thereof.

Even the name has many explanations: perhaps from the French mélange,
meaning mixture, or from the Turkish melun can or Arabic melun jinn,
both meaning, Alther writes, "something like cursed soul." There’s a
lot to absorb about history, linguistics, racial makeup and scientific
research, but Alther injects enough personal liveliness to keep it
from going dry.

Today’s descendants of Melungeons feel less of the old shame about
their heritage and are actively seeking information through
genealogical research and DNA testing. Alther does this too, and while
the results are not entirely clear, she learns enough to feel grounded
and to recast the idea of the American melting pot thusly:

"It’s actually a stir-fry," she writes. "Like picky children, each
generation selects only the vegetables it deems palatable. … But the
other heritages were still there, however repressed or mangled,
lending their scents and flavors to the entire skillet."

Too bad that’s too long a sentiment to fit on a church signboard or
SUV bumper.

The Hartford Courant is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

Copyright © 2007, _South Florida Sun-Sentinel_
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