Mixed Race Studies

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Duke University Press
2004
360 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3402-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3399-9

Megan Vaughan, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History
Cambridge University

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• One – In the Beginning
• Two – Engineering a Colony, 1735-1767
• Three – Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767-1789
• Four – Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins
• Five – A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery
• Six – Love in the Torrid Zone
• Seven – Reputation, Recognition, and Race
• Eight – Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss
• Nine – Metissage and Revolution
• Ten – Sugar and Abolition
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

The Love Story That Made Marriage a Fundamental Right

Color Lines
2011-04-27

Asraa Mustufa

The Tribeca Film Festival is under way in New York, and one featured documentary delves into the story behind the landmark civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down Jim Crow laws meant to prevent people from openly building families across racial lines. 

Mildred and Richard Loving were an interracial couple that married in Washington, D.C., in 1958. Shortly after re-entering their hometown in Virginia, the pair was arrested in their bedroom and banished from the state for 25 years. The Lovings would spend the next nine years in exile, surreptitiously visiting family and friends back home in Virginia—and fighting for the right to return legally. Their case wound its way to the Supreme Court and, in 1967, the Court condemned Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act as a measure “designed to maintain white supremacy” that violated due process and equal protection. The ruling deemed the anti-miscegenation laws in effect in 16 states at the time unconstitutional. However, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until the year 2000 to officially remove language prohibiting interracial marriage from their state constitutions.

The landmark case has returned to popular consciousness in recent years as states have debated same-sex marriage rights. Marriage equality advocates have pointed to the Lovings’ fight as a foundational part of American history, establishing marriage as a basic civil right. But for decades it was left to the footnotes of civil rights history, overshadowed by blockbuster cases like Brown vs. Board of Education.

Director Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story” aims to deepen public understanding of not just the case but the Loving family itself. The filmmakers recreate their story through interviews with their friends, community members and the attorneys fighting their case. Buirski and her team revived unused footage of the Lovings from 45 years ago, including home movies, and dug up old photographs to bring the couple to life. As a result, the film is as much an engaging love story as it is a history of racist lawmaking. 

“The Loving Story” is making the film festival rounds this year and will air on HBO in February 2012. I spoke with Buirski after the film’s Tribeca screening this week…

Read the entire article here.

John Powell: His Racial and Cultural Ideologies

Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online
Volume 5, Issue 1 (2006)
14 pages

David Z. Kushner, Professor Emeritus of Musicology/Music History
University of Florida

The opening of the first movement of the Symphony in A Major “Virginia Symphony” (Allegro non troppo ma con brio). QuickTime-format, WindowsMedia-format

Following John Powell’s death on August 15, 1963, Virginius Dabney closed his editorial comments in the Richmond Times-Dispatch with the following encomium: “Mr. Powell’s passing at 80 removes one of the genuinely great Virginians of modern times. In personality and character he was truly exceptional, and as a pianist and composer he was unique in the annals of the Old Dominion.” Only a dozen years earlier, on November 5, 1951, the then Governor of Virginia, John S. Battle, proclaimed a “John Powell Day,” on which the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Howard Mitchell performed the composer’s Symphony in A major. The Governor went on to state that the state-wide tribute to Powell was only fitting owing to “his many contributions to the cultural life of America….” The irregularity of such an extravagant gesture toward a musician in this country had the effect of rejuvenating interest in the artist both within the borders of Virginia and beyond. The world of academia, for example, contributed three master’s theses and a doctoral dissertation between 1968 and 1973, and Radford College, now Radford University, named its new music building Powell Hall at dedication ceremonies held on May 13, 1968.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Powell’s earlier involvement in contentious issues such as race relations in general, and the incorporation of racial and ethnic elements in the formation of an identifiably American music was conveniently forgotten or, at the least, placed on a back burner…

…Fame and, to some extent, fortune permitted Powell to devote more of his energy toward what became the leit motifs of his life—a preoccupation with racial purity and a conviction that Anglo-Saxon folksong serve as the primary basis for an identifiably American music. During the 1920s, Powell developed a friendship with Daniel Gregory Mason, a relationship that is treated in the latter’s book, Music in My Time.  Both composers held an aversion to the avant-garde music of their day and both supported the idea that an Anglo-Saxon-based musical aesthetic was the best way to establish an identifiably American music. But Powell’s persona is well-illustrated by the following remarks by Mason:

Considering how insatiably social John is, it is strange how hard it is to extract a letter from him. In all our long friendship I have accumulated only about half a dozen. He will gladly sit up all night with you, if you will let him, discussing music, or just gossiping—for he has an unappeasable appetite for personalia, especially when spiced with a little friendly malice—or declaiming on some of his pet fanaticisms such as the horrible dangers of intermarriage between Negroes and whites, or the supreme virtues of Anglo-Saxon folk-songs…

…Where Mason’s biases were slanted toward Jews, Powell’s were directed primarily, but not exclusively, to blacks. And these prejudices were, like Mason’s, intertwined with his views on the state of American music. In September 1922, Powell and several prominent Virginians of like thinking, was a founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, the purpose of which was to foster “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization in America. This purpose is to be accomplished in three ways: first, by the strengthening of Anglo-Saxon instincts, traditions, and principles among representatives of our original American stock; second, by intelligent selection and exclusion of immigrants; and third, by fundamental and final solutions of our racial problems in general, most especially of the negro (sic) problem.” The pamphlet further enact legislation that will ensure the preservation of the white race:

1. There shall be instituted immediately a system of registration and birth certificates showing the racial composition (white, black, brown, yellow, red) of every resident of this State.
2. No marriage license shall be granted save upon presentation and attestation under oath by both parties of said registration or birth certificates.
3. White persons may marry only whites.
4. For the purposes of this legislation, the term “white persons” shall apply only to individuals who have no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.

Aligning himself with leaders of the burgeoning eugenics movement, Powell was instrumental in gaining political support for passage of the Racial Integrity Act, which was signed into law on March 20, 1924 by the Governor of Virginia, Elbert Lee Trinkle. This bill also forbade the marriage of Orientals and other non-whites to whites, although the compulsory registration provision was defeated…

…Powell makes clear the direction in which he is heading, by decrying the likelihood of miscegenation and by citing specifically “the negro (sic) problem”:

If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro (sic) blood makes the negro (sic). We also know that no higher race has ever been able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro (sic) blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo…

Read the entire article here.

Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

University of Notre Dame, Australia
March 2008
328 pages

Derrick Tomlinson

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

Read the entire thesis here.

Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

Union Institute and University
June 2005
277 pages
AAT 3196614
Publication Number: AAT 3196614
ISBN: 9780542425899

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and Sciences a Concentration in African American – Native American Relations at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio

W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement, ‘The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,’ invokes images of the century’s racial antagonisms between Blacks and whites. However, racial antagonism in Virginia also occurred between African Americans and Amerindians, as the question regarding who was an Indian and who was a Negro became paramount to Amerindian survival. Central to this problem was the enforcement of a law the Virginia General Assembly passed on March 20, 1924, entitled ‘An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.’ This legislation, the first such law to be passed in the United States, was the culmination of Virginia’s three hundred year campaign to insure the ‘purity’ of the white race. Racial purity, in early twentieth-century Virginia, was defined by the absence of African ancestry. Therefore, one could be of Indian-white admixture and remain racially pure. But an Indian-Black admixture, even one drop of black ‘blood,’ and one was transformed from pure to impure, and in jeopardy of being ethnically reclassified. By denying the historical relationship between African and Indian peoples in the Commonwealth, this paradox informed the state recognition process and helped many to successfully maintain their aboriginal status. However, the problem of the color line continues in the twenty-first century because racial integrity remains the dividing factor in African-Indian relations. The following discourse examines the changing state of African-Indian relations in Virginia from the Colonial period to the present. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the United States racial formation project in relation to Africans and Indians; chapter 2 examines Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories concerning African-Indian admixture, racial identity, and their influence on Virginia’s twentieth-century racial purity campaign; chapter 3 examines the historical relationship between African and Indians by tracing the Indian presence in the slave and free ‘colored’ populations of colonial and antebellum Virginia; chapter 4 examines the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, its impact on African-Indian relations, and the debate it provoked among such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; chapter 5 provides a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropological advocates Frank Speck and Helen Rountree, their activism on behalf of the Virginia Tribes, and the ways their advocacy contributed to the racial integrity cause; chapter 6 is a case study which examines Central Point, Virginia, the home of Richard and Mildred Loving (Loving v Virginia), to interrogate race and self identity, namely the self identity of Mildred Loving as an Indian woman; the Epilogue examines the contemporary activism of Virginia residents of mixed African-Indian heritage whose alternative historical consciousness defies racial politics and promotes decolonization, reclamation and empowerment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapters
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia Revisited
  • 3. The Changing State of African and Indian Relations in Virginia
  • 4. Towards State [Un] Recognition: Native Identity and the One Drop
  • 5. The Present State of Virginia Indians: The Predicament of Of Race and Culture
  • 6. “Tell The Court I Love My [Indian] Wife:” Interrogating Race and Self Identity in Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue – Coming Together: Decolonization and Empowerment, Reclaiming Ourselves
• Appendices
  • A. An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
  • B. Loving Marriage license
  • C. Weyanoke Holiday Card
  • Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

George Washington University
2009-01-31
392 pages

Laura Janet Feller

A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people.

In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan-Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract of Dissertation
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s
• Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State
• Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies
• Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples
• Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Introduction

The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.

Matthew Frye Jacobson

One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, recreated, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.”

Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.”

The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance oftheir Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations?

For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that they have dealt with whites in whose eyes Indians were often both racialized and ethnicized. For tidewater organized Native groups in the period of this study, it seems that their foes wanted them categorized primarily as “racial” groups, and that Virginia Indians fought back on grounds and with weapons that to a large extent reflected the racialized, segregated world in which they lived.

The 1924 law on “racial integrity” was part of a long history of racial legislation in Virginia and throughout the United States designed to create racialized lines in a world where such lines had been blurred since the age of European colonization began. “Miscegenation” law, for example, was solidly entrenched in the English colonies then in the United States, until the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The first ban on “interracial” marriage in the English North American colonies was Maryland’s in 1664. Virginia’s first “miscegenation” law dated from 1691, and it explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals. Before 1924, Virginia laws specified what made someone black rather than defining whiteness. To define “blackness” as a legal matter, Virginia law before 1924 typically expressed and codified racialized identities in terms of numbers of ancestors, or fractions of ancestry. Virginia’s 1924 “racial integrity” law, though, defined legal “whiteness” rather than “blackness.” In doing so, this statute in effect made a matter of explicit law, for the first time in Virginia, the concept of a “one drop rule” for what makes someone legally African American. The sole exception to the whiteness definition in the 1924 law was that a Virginian could be legally white if he or she had no more than “one-sixteenth” Indian “blood” and his or her ancestors were otherwise “white.”

This 1924 statute stands at several intersections in the history of racialist thinking and racism in America. In it, Jim Crow meets “scientific racism” and eugenic thought. As a “miscegenation” law, the statute also illustrates some of the ways in which racialized identities are entwined with conflicts about sexuality. It evidences how constructions of social and cultural identities could connect with, or be contested by, state powers and legal discourses, within the context of the modernizing tendencies of post-World War I governmental policies and programs…

…Starting with 1924 as a focal point, this project looks at Native and “mixed” Native identities as claimed and recorded before and after passage of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity” law. Moving backward into the post-Civil War era and then forward from 1924 into the 1950s, this study explores the impact of Virginia’s 1924 “miscegenation” law on individuals and communities who claimed Native American identities. The 1924 law was a climax of sorts in decades of official and social efforts by whites to classify Virginia Indians variously as “persons of color,” “mulattoes,” or African Americans. Native peoples’ reservation lands in Virginia disappeared, except for two that survive to this day. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey people of those two reservations had some advantages in that they had and have a land base, and along with that land they also have community structures recognized by whites. Even the reservation peoples, though, faced white reluctance to concede the continuing existence of red, rather than black or white, identities in Virginia. Non-reservation tidewater Native people had even trickier choices to make about when and how they would identify themselves publicly, in official situations and documents, as Indians…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Fifteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering

Melungeon Heritage Association
Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry Communities
Warren Wilson College
Swannanoa, North Carolina
2011-07-14 through 2011-07-16

MHA is delighted to announce that this year our annual Union will be celebrated at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, July 14-16, 2011. This will be our first Union in the Carolinas, states of primary significance to the history of mixed ancestry communities across America. Melungeon roots in the Carolinas have been prominent topics of discussion in past Unions, and MHA welcomes the opportunity to celebrate and study our heritage on this historic and beautiful campus. Warren Wilson College is located a few miles from Asheville in a scenic area near the highest mountains in the East. It has historic connections to the Melungeon community of Vardy, which the Union will celebrate.

We will have speakers on a wide variety of genealogical and historical topics. The program is still being developed, but two distinguished authors have agreed to discuss their new books at the Union. Each book breaks new ground in the literature of mixed ancestry in the United States.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011) tells three stories that will be especially meaningful to MHA readers. Author Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Within a month of publication, his new book was acclaimed in the New York Times as “astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights.” This study of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families has the potential to change the national conversation about race, and MHA is honored by Mr. Sharfstein’s participation in 15th Union.

Lisa Alther is an acclaimed author of bestselling fiction whose most recent book was a nonfiction investigation of Melungeon ancestry entitled Kinfolks: Falling off the Family Tree. She returns to fiction with Washed in the Blood, forthcoming this fall from Mercer University Press. Alther’s new novel portrays the early history of the southern Appalachians. It tells the story of several generations of the Martin family, from the arrival of Diego Martin as a hog drover with a Spanish exploring party in the 16th century, describing his descendants’ struggles to survive and gain acceptance down through the early 20th century.  In this new novel, Alther connects Melungeon history to early settlement of the Southeastern US, and thus to the theme of 15th Union…

For more information, click here.

Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

Arcade Publishing
April 2007
264 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 1559708328; ISBN-13: 9781559708326
Paperback ISBN-10: 1-55970-876-X; ISBN-13: 978-1-55970-876-0

Lisa Alther

Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir.

Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther’s mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia, and every day they reenacted the Civil War at home. Then a babysitter with bad teeth told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people—often with extra thumbs—living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, or of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or the children of frontiersman, African slaves, and Native Americans? Lisa set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.

Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Kinfolks shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.

INTRODUCTION

Many People are born believing they know who they are. They’re Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don’t share that enviable luxury.

My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.

In my life since, I’ve often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I’m one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.

But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I’ve ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.

I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I’d inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.

Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.

Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.

Growing up, I’d heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent’s showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father’s family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.

For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I’d learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others—all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.

In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.

I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers—and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I’d been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.

For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I’d finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere—and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world…

Daniel Sharfstein awarded Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by Fletcher Foundation

Vanderbilt University Law School
2011-07-06

Daniel J. Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has been awarded an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by the Fletcher Foundation.
 
Professor Sharfstein’s new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, examines the history of race in the United States through three families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities. He will use the Fletcher Fellowship, which provides awards of $50,000 to fund research and support literary and artistic works that contribute to improving race relations and further the broad social goals of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to chronicle a group of Southern lawyers who argued against integration in courts during the decade following Brown…

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D’Eichthal and Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 240-258
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Naomi J. Andrews, Assistant Professor of History
Santa Clara University

This article is a close reading of Gustave d’Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the “second” French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.

Read or purchase the article here.