Mulllins Family and Overton County Tn and Melungeon

By Kimber Ray

Attempting to trace the origin of the Melungeon people is akin to pursuing the source of the Cumberland River coursing through their historical territory. Like the waters of the Cumberland Gap, where neighboring streams weave through Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia to meet among the rolling crests of the Appalachian Mountains, the Melungeons — a mixed-race population of Appalachia — are the production of a great fusion. Yet where had these waters passed before they arrived in Appalachia?

With a map of the Cumberland Gap spread on the table, Sylvia Ray, mother of Tammy Stachowicz, researches the residences of her Melungeon ancestors.

If the water had traveled along the same path as the Melungeons, some might speculate that it had pooled into swimming holes for the lost colonists of Roanoke Isle, off the declension of Due north Carolina. Others may suggest these were the same waters that had carried the notorious ships of 17th century Portuguese slave traders beyond the Atlantic Ocean. While any of these stories may exist truthful, each 1 blunders over an essential truth: the Melungeons— like the river — are an indisputable presence that is greater than whatever far-flung origin.

"You tin can't pin downward a definite definition for Melungeons," says Tucker Davis, a freelance announcer and self-identified Melungeon from Buchanan Canton, Va. He recalls a youth spent exploring his rural mountain community of Grundy, where everyone had a different story about what it was to be Melungeon. From neighbors recounting tales of African or Native American lineage, to a Dominicus school teacher who said they could be identified by a pocket-sized knot of bone on the back of their heads, no i could say who the Melungeons were with certainty.

A popular misconception is that Melungeons can be identified by their dark skin and piercing blueish or greenish eyes. This may have been true historically but, by its very nature, a racially mixed group will manifest in endless expressions over fourth dimension.

The quest to conclusively narrate Melungeons may be spurred by the constant mystery of whether they were in Appalachia fifty-fifty earlier the English. William Isom, a coordinator for the grassroots Community Media Organizing Project, explains that his family had long passed down an oral history of their Melungeon heritage; yet he was the first to conduct more all-encompassing academic and genealogical research on his family'south deep-rooted history in the Cumberland Gap region of Tennessee.

"I've always been actually intrigued with genealogy and keeping records even equally a kid," Isom states. "Then I've always been interested in copies of the family unit tree and family photos. It'southward a personality thing; I'thou that guy who likes to annal things and keep these scraps together."

From sifting through these pieces of the past, Isom says he's settled on the idea that Melungeons are ambiguous because the population is historically mixed. In vivid item, he speaks of how the English first scaled the Appalachian mountains in the 17th century and encountered people of colour — neither Native American nor black — who dressed like Europeans, lived in houses, and spoke some kind of English, which they used to announce that they were Portuguese.

But this history withal would not provide a decisive answer of origin: the Portuguese were the get-go slave traders, and their population included Jews, Muslims and North Africans. What is known with more certainty is that the term Melungeon did not announced in print until 1813, where it was used to ascribe mixed-race identity to others.

Tucker Davis has documents from this early fourth dimension period of his ain ancestors actualization in court, fighting the theft of their land after having been labeled Melungeon. According to Isom, discrimination and the resentful sentiment of being labeled a Melungeon can even so exist very tangible in northeast Tennessee.

Recalling sociology that would brand Melungeons every bit bogeymen, Isom says that children would exist warned, "Don't go out in the wood at night, the Melungeons will get you." In his community, it was not uncommon for fights to ensue if the discussion was thrown around.

"If y'all called someone Melungeon, it meant you hated that person to the core of their beingness," Isom says. "But now information technology's fine," he adds, because "well-nigh of the Melungeon population has assimilated into broader society, then the threat — the dread — of getting your property taken, or existence murdered is no longer a reality."

Growing acceptance of Melungeon identity is the most recent emergence in this circuitous narrative. "I knew no one that referred to themselves every bit Melungeon prior to 1990 considering until recently in some areas it's still a term you don't say out loud — it's a racial epithet," states Isom, who himself became engaged with the grassroots Melungeon movement in the mid-'90s.

Ray is preparing a repast in this 1968 photograph. Many recipes were passed downward by her Cherokee grandmother in southeastern Kentucky. Photos courtesy of Tammy Stachowicz

Isom asserts that there are actually ii kinds of Melungeons: racial Melungeons and cultural Melungeons. While a racial Melungeon is someone from a historically mixed community, Isom explains, a cultural Melungeon is "poor folks — who make upward the majority of people in Appalachia — who might not have racial disparities to bargain with, but share a cultural and economic identity. They understand that even though they might be white and from the mountains, they're notwithstanding not quite white enough, they're not quite alloyed into the mainstream, they're not marketable."

The idea of racial condition forming the basis of identity is a persistent — and harmful — belief. "Race itself is so socially constructed," remarks Tammy Stachowicz, a diversity instructor at Davenport University in Michigan. For Stachowicz, her experience as a Melungeon had nothing to do with her skin tone.

Stachowicz discovered her Melungeon origins while searching for the source of her family's puzzling heritage. She grew upwards on a farm in Michigan, where her family unit advisedly tended their garden and orchard and raised animals including horses, goats, pigs and chickens. Although she recalls these memories fondly, Stachowicz felt throughout her babyhood that there was something about her family that was unlike.

"Nobody else was then cocky-reliant — canning, freezing and growing their ain nutrient," she says. Other children in the neighborhood made sure that she knew just how unusual this seemed. "Nosotros got teased mercilessly. Kids behind us on the school bus would throw spit wads and make animal noises," Stachowicz adds. In her journeying to understand her identity, she conducted her thesis work on Melungeons and came to a versatile conclusion: "Nature doesn't brand you Melungeon. Nurture does."

All the same despite this conviction — ane which she constitute validated by various Melungeons she spoke with — many people take never stopped trying to pinpoint a firmer genetic source of Melungeons. With the advances of modern technology, this fascination has taken on a new class.

Most recently, researchers published a Melungeon Deoxyribonucleic acid written report in the Periodical of Genetic Genealogy. The final results examined just a "core group" of Melungeons — i that excluded many self-identified families — and concluded that Melungeons are primarily sub-Saharan African and European. Tucker Davis is unconvinced. "Even if a group of researchers vote on some technical definition of Melungeons, it won't matter," he says. "It won't alter what information technology means to be Melungeon."

William Isom establish this undated photograph of his bully-smashing-aunt and uncle, Lillian Isom and Henry Cloud, while searching for information about his family unit's heritage in northeastern Tennessee. Photo courtesy of William Isom

In a nod to the dissentious furnishings of assigning an identity to others based on race, the American Anthropological Association wrote in 1999 that "humans are non unambiguous or conspicuously demarcated … race is an arbitrary and subjective means of classifying groups of people, used to justify inequalities … and the myths impede understanding of cultural behavior."

This plight is poignantly revealed in Appalachia, which has long struggled to shed stereotypes imposed by others. For Melungeons, this struggle is magnified. Despite sharing the Appalachian cultural heritage — a story of independence and a fighting spirit shadowed by mistrust from generations of exploitation — Melungeons take suffered harsh bigotry from their "whiter" neighbors.

Prejudice against Melungeons has waxed and waned over time, in footstep with shifting racial perceptions in the U.s.a.. Through the emergence of racial slavery in the late 17th century, wealthy landowners sought to keep the poor nether control by pitting racial groups confronting one some other. Despite the shared heritage of many Appalachians, the stigma that came to exist associated with race led much of the public to speak of "purity." Those who could non conceal a multi-racial background encountered endless civil, educational and economic limitations.

Nevertheless prior to — and fifty-fifty following — the rise of racial slavery and legal segregation, people of all different backgrounds were sharing cultures and marriages, calculation to the identity of Melungeons today. Equally Davis explains, the story of Melungeons is not just one of discrimination, just also of diverseness and community. "When I think of Melungeons, I call back of unity," he states.

In revealing the legacy of Melungeons, Isom says that he wants to "dispel the myth of Appalachian whiteness and dispel the cutting-and-dry story of American settlement in Appalachia: that there was Cherokee, and so the Scotch-Irish gaelic came, then the TVA, and mountaintop removal — that's Appalachia." He adds, "I want to mess that upwards every bit much as I can."

Exactly where Melungeon identity ends and Appalachian identity begins is uncertain. Davis suggests that maybe being Melungeon is just a state of heed. Stachowicz likens it to a venn diagram, pointing out that with generations of Appalachians and Melungeons all living together, "you tin can't know one without the other." Then again, perchance information technology's not and so surprising that there is no unmarried chemical element that can define the shared experience of identity.

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Source: http://appvoices.org/2014/02/07/handing-off-and-holding-on-melungeon-identity-and-appalachia/

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