The Invisible History of the Human Race (35 page)

Winkler published a powerful history of Melungeons,
Walking Toward the Sunset
. His Aunt Hazel and his father had been the most willing to share their pasts, and although his father was dead by the time he wrote his book, his aunt was proud of him. “They were the youngest children in their family,” said Winkler. “I think they suffered less discrimination than the older kids.” Still, during the writing of the book he had to deal with people who thought that Melungeons were a fairy tale. But after the book appeared, Winkler said, “There were quite a lot of people that were unhappy about my talking about the family like that, even though I barely mentioned my own personal connection.”

It wasn’t just the two contradictory beliefs—that Melungeons don’t exist
and
that they do exist but no one should admit it—that made research so difficult for Winkler. Melungeon history is enormously complicated, mostly unwritten, and in many respects remains hidden. Exactly who was a Melungeon was never fully recorded or formalized; everyone simply knew who others in the group were. Now, because the people who lived through those times are dead, all of that social complexity is lost. “Anybody who is involved in any sort of family research, they all find out that nearly everyone who could give them good information has passed away by the time they thought to ask the questions,” Winkler explained. “You’re always a little bit too late to get the good answers, to feel the thoughts of the people who might really have been able to tell you something.”

Of his reluctant relatives Winkler observed, “I think they had a sense of shame that they weren’t considered good enough, but the way the discrimination happened was really strange. It wasn’t formal.” When his relatives were young, said Winkler, authorities “just said, ‘This is the school you go to’ and ‘Here’s the school these people go to,’ and everybody just kind of knew why.”

Even when social attitudes became more liberal, there was little clear acknowledgment about what life had been like and why it was changing. “That all just sort of disappeared in a way that I haven’t really been able to put my finger on,” Winkler said. “I’ve talked to people who were around then, and nobody seems to know what exactly happened. But right around the time of World War II, the separation between Melungeons and non-Melungeons just kind of stopped. They started identifying Melungeon men going into the army as white. I think it had something to do with the idea that if we’re sending people from our home county off to the army, we’re going to send them in as white men so they’ll be treated better, and we’ll back that up at home. We’re not going to have their kids go through a different school.”

One might hope that the surge of Melungeon pride and the reclamation of a complicated, nonwhite identity would constitute a satisfying turnabout. But the situation is more complicated than that. Some Melungeons have themselves come to restrict the term so narrowly that it excludes most potential members. As one man said to Wayne Winkler, “If you can’t trace your family back to Hancock County, you ain’t a Melungeon. Period.”

There is suspicion too about why people might wish to reclaim Melungeon heritage. Local people who have always identified as Melungeon are skeptical about “wannabes” who only now want to acknowledge a Melungeon heritage because it has become exotic or popular. While it’s admittedly easier now for someone to call himself a Melungeon without having to suffer any of the explicit discrimination and shame that have historically burdened the group, the “wannabe” accusation is an easy but potentially crude label for people with unique motivations.

Winkler explained his own motivation for his interest in his ancestry:

I want to document as best I can, the lives of those who struggled against racism and a rigidly enforced class system to survive. Those of us who descend from Melungeons owe much to our ancestors who worked hard to provide their children with a quality of life that they themselves would never enjoy.

For his part, Kennedy wrote about the effect of shame on many generations of his family. He had long wondered why so many of his people looked Mediterranean, why they often lived in inhospitable places, and why their surrounding communities treated them so badly. His own great-grandfather had not been allowed to vote, even in the twentieth century. No one in his family would explain any of this when Kennedy asked about it, or, if they did, their explanations struck him as unconvincing. When the topic came up, they often didn’t look him in the eye. Only after tracking down piece after piece of evidence, many of which had been purposely hidden by his family, did he discover that he was Melungeon. The missing piece of his identity explained a lot of confusing incidents in his life, like the fact that as a girl his mother was always dressed in long sleeves, long skirts, and a hat, even in the summer—all to make certain she didn’t turn “black.”

The centuries of silence damaged his family, wrote Kennedy: “
I saw the still-living tentacles spawned by this morass in much of my own behavior. This silent monster still lived and breathed and it had to be confronted if we were truly to move beyond it.” He believed that reclaiming his heritage, coming out of the “Melungeon closet,” would be a critical act of healing. His mother, who was uncomfortable with his choice, eventually grew to accept it. “I suppose it’s like hearing a cry from the grave,” she said, “and then having to decide whether or not to answer it.”

 • • • 

Most investigations into Melungeon history are carried out by amateurs. Many are thorough, responsible, and compelling, but like much of the research that takes place in the sphere of genealogy and personal history, the lack of a university or corporate imprimatur leaves the area vulnerable to being dismissed as niche and unreliable. When Kennedy published his first newspaper article on the topic, long before the Internet and the lightning-speed responsiveness of services like Twitter, he received hundreds of calls and letters from people who felt they recognized themselves in his piece. Yet when he began his research, he wrote letters and telephoned many scholars to ask them for their thoughts, tried to fax his research to history and anthropology departments, and got no response.

Can genetics help lend validity to the stories of groups like the Melungeons? Currently the actual genetics are as complicated as the legends. In principle, if geneticists can identify the ancestry of large populations, they should be able to find ways to focus in on the more recent history of smaller populations. Indeed, the scientists who were able to detect differences in the small populations of Britain opened the door to this kind of fine-grained history. But as of now there have been only a few DNA analyses of Melungeon groups.

The largest study to date found evidence of male African American ancestry and female European ancestry, which is consistent with some of the legends. The subject group in this case was limited to descendants of those who had been described as Melungeon in historical records from the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet records of the word “Melungeon” as a descriptive category for members of a particular population are rare and incomplete, although for a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century a number of individuals were noted as Melungeon in censuses. The subjects in the study represented just a small sample of families from Tennessee and other states. Moreover, within those families the researchers looked only at Y DNA and mtDNA, which in a set of possible great-great-grandparents represents just a small fraction of the DNA of two of the thirty-two people at this level.

What about the clustering of physical traits in Melungeon groups, the shovel-shaped incisors, the Anatolian bump, the palatal torus? Anthropology has long recognized that different physical features—such as the shape of one’s head or teeth or the distance between one’s eyes—occur at different frequencies in different populations. Richard Scott, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada at Reno, says that looking at teeth alone, he couldn’t tell a German from an Italian, but he could always pick a German person from a Japanese or a Bantu person. Much like paper records and DNA, the evidence of the body can be definitive, but it can also be incomplete: The trick is knowing how to determine which it is.

The first step to determining if Melungeons developed a characteristic dentition would be to carry out studies to see if shovel-shaped incisors or other typical traits were significantly more common in Melungeon families than in the general population. If they were, it would suggest family connections, if not population-level ones. Here too we are only on the cusp of answers.

It’s thought that one reason Melungeons might have shovel-shaped incisors is because Native Americans have shovel-shaped incisors. According to Scott, the trait occurs in 98 percent of the Native American population. If Melungeons have Native American ancestry, the trait may have been passed down from those ancestors. In fact, shovel-shaped incisors tell a story that dates back even further. More than fourteen thousand years ago, an extremely hardy group of people walked out of Siberia, across the Bering land bridge and down into North America. The first band that crossed what is now the Bering Strait originally came from Asia and brought their shovel-shaped incisors with them. The dimpled teeth are still a common trait in Asia and among Eskimo-Aleuts, and more than 90 percent of Chinese
people have shovel-shaped incisors.

Shoveling does occur in Europeans and African populations, but much less frequently. Typically, it is the extent of shoveling, not just its presence, that distinguishes different populations. “
For some reason, people always get fixated on shovel-shaped incisors,” Scott said, “but they are only one of many traits that we look at.” In fact, there are at least twenty-six different features of teeth that can help map ancestry. As far as shoveling is concerned, Europeans and Native Americans tend to be at opposite ends of the scale. With respect to other dental features, Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans are quite distinct. If Melungeons are a truly triracial population, there is a good chance it will be obvious from their dentition.

If we knew exactly how genes underlay these traits, and what particular genes they were, it would help piece together the history of the Melungeons. But the genetics of physical features is a nascent science. Simple traits that are shaped by one or a few genes are easier to identify. The moistness of one’s earwax, for example, can be linked to a
single letter within a single gene.

Many of our traits, however, are determined by several genes, with height being the classic polygenic trait. At least forty genes have been shown to contribute to it, and it’s likely that hundreds of genes affect it. If that seems like genetic overkill, consider how many different parts of the body contribute to height: Someone may have a long shinbone or a long femur, or his spine may be longer than average, or he might have all of these features—it’s likely that each of them is polygenic as well. Not even blue eyes and brown eyes are the straightforwardly Mendelian traits we used to believe they were. Despite what you probably learned in high school, it is possible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.

Long before we sequenced the human genome or identified genes that contribute to teeth, anthropologists knew from tracking traits in families that many dental traits were polygenic. In 2011 scientists identified EDAR as the first gene known to contribute to shoveling. But we are still a long
way from the full picture.

Of course, even when you are looking at genes, you are rarely looking
only
at genes. Some features are controlled by genes and
also
by whatever happens to be shaping them. We often think of genes as if they were master switches for the body—flick them one way, and you get blue eyes; flick them another, and you get brown. But genes can be influenced by a number of factors, including other genes, noncoding DNA, epigenetic markers (nongenetic attachments to cells), and chemical changes in the cell. The chemical changes are themselves often caused by larger systems in the body, which is, of course, shaped by the world in which it lives.

The palatine torus, for example, is shaped by development. “It has a pretty strong relationship to latitude,” Scott explained, and is found predominately in Eskimo, Inuit, Siberian, and Native American populations. Scott also examined ancient Norse remains and found that it occurred frequently in medieval residents of Greenland. While it’s clear that there is a genetic component to the trait, it’s thought that mechanical stress, like chewing lots of cured reindeer meat, could cause a palatine torus to form.

 • • • 

Back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Melungeons weren’t ostracized because they had shovel-shaped incisors, as no one could see the backs of their teeth. They were treated differently because they
looked
different. The face is an incredibly important part of human culture and biology, and indeed, without becoming too circular, it is the major interface between the two. What happens on our faces shapes our initial encounters with others and our most intimate relationships. It is a powerful guide to internal states, and not just psychologically: A significant number of abnormal facial traits are correlated with defects in certain organs. Human brains even have specialized face-recognition mechanisms. Still, we are only beginning to understand how the human face is put together.

It’s widely accepted that facial features are strongly determined by our lineage. Children often look like parents, siblings like each other, twins may look exactly alike, and even grandparents can look like their grandchildren. For the first two years of my eldest son’s life, people in our neighborhood whom I didn’t know would stop me on the street and exclaim, “Your baby is a clone of his father.” It’s true of our second child too. Baby photos of my son and husband, taken some thirty-five years apart, could easily be of the same child.

What makes family similarity so compelling and confusing is that it comes down to probability: Because you get 50 percent of your DNA from each of your parents, there’s a good chance you’ll resemble them both. There may be a reasonable amount of genealogical collapse in your family tree as well: If some of your great-great-great-grandparents who were married to each other were also first cousins, they brought more of the
same
DNA to the table when they had children. Their offspring are likely to have recycled more DNA from that lineage, and less variety was therefore passed down to you.