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

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KINFOLKS

Arcade Publishing

Chapter One

My younger brother bill is clutching his teddy bear, the noose still knotted around its neck. My older brother John and I sit on a carpeted step in the front hallway as the gray-haired babysitter with crooked brown teeth informs us that the Melungeons will get us for having hung the bear from the upstairs landing, just out of Bill's reach in the downstairs hall.

"What's the Melungeons?" I ask.

"The Melungeons has got six fingers on each hand," she says. "They grab mean little chilrun and carry them off to their caves in the cliffs outside of town."

John and I glance at each other uneasily.

When my parents get home from their tea dance at the country club, John and I wait for Bill to tell on us, but he doesn't. He's a good kid. The Melungeons won't be interested in him when they arrive.

In her silvery cocktail dress and the spike heels that make her look like a toe dancer, my mother is very glamorous. The top of her head comes to my father's chest. He's the tallest man we know. He claims he has race-horse ankles. He's madly in love with my mother and is always coming up with corny new ways to tell her so.

Tonight, right in front of the babysitter, he says, "Kids, isn't your mother just as pretty as a carnival queen at a county fair? If I put herin a pageant, she'd win the four-hundred-pound hog. But how would I get it home?"

Her face freezes halfway between a smile and a frown as she tries to decide if this is a compliment. She was a model at the University of Rochester. In my favorite photo, she's wearing a satin evening gown, standing inside a giant wine bottle, her black hair bobbed. But at home she resembles Harriet Nelson more than Loretta Young because she hates to buy clothes. My parents share a horror of spending money. Having grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, they say you never know when the next ax will fall.

Since my mother is from upstate New York, she doesn't gush like normal mothers. She used to teach high school English, so she's always coaching us to pronounce "cow" in one syllable. Our friends look at us as though we're lunatics whenever we say "cow" as she recommends. But our cousins in New York still mock our southern accents when we visit them in the summer. They say southerners are stupid. Our Tennessee playmates say Yankees are rude. But I've met plenty of rude southerners and stupid Yankees.

My mother's hobby is curling up in an armchair with the library books from which she's always quoting. When she makes us take naps so she can read in peace, she announces, "I'll but lie down and bleed awhile and then rise up to fight again."

Once at supper, as she was carving a chicken, she looked up and said, "Children, always remember to stab low and pull up."

"Why?" I asked.

"That way you sever the aorta." She illustrated this in the air with her knife.

In the car on the way home from dropping off the babysitter, my father, a doctor, confirms that some babies in East Tennessee are born with extra fingers, which are usually removed at birth. He indicates on my hand the joints from which they can sprout.

Before turning out my light that night, I look under the bed and in the closet for lurking Melungeons. I'm often bad, and apparently the Melungeons, like Santa, have their ways of finding out. At least I know how to stab low and pull up.

Lying in the dark, I convince myself that I'm safe as long as my body is completely covered by the top sheet. It's summer, and we don't have any fans. We don't buy things that aren't on sale, and who ever heard of a fan sale in the South? The air that drifts through my window, carrying the screeching of the night insects, is hot and humid. But the thought of being seized in my sleep by six-fingered cave dwellers is so appalling that I endure the sweaty sheet. I become alarmed as I try to figure out how to stay encased in my magic sheet if our house catches fire and I have to jump out the window.

John, Bill, and I are crammed into one seat on the Ferris wheel. Spread out below us are the throngs of milling townspeople and the lights from the carnival tents and rides. As we hurtle toward the ground, I can see my mother standing outside the ticket booth. She's frowning. I wave as we swoop past her and head skyward, but she doesn't notice.

When we stagger off the ride, my mother tells us that we have to go home because her baby will soon be born and she needs to go to the hospital. Back at the house, my grandmother arrives, and my mother departs with my agitated father.

The next morning my grandmother informs us that we have a new baby brother named Michael. Shrugging, we race outside to ride our bikes in the driveway.

Toward dusk my father drives us to the hospital. Children aren't allowed inside except as patients. So we sit cross-legged on the lawn while the frogs in the valley take turns burping. My mother comes to her third-floor window and tilts a blanketed bundle in her arms so that we can see Michael. He looks like an unpromising playmate, but we do our best to act excited.

My mother vanishes. Then she reappears without the bundle. She opens the window and tosses foil-wrapped candies down to us. They turn out to be chocolate-covered cherries - my favorite - so the evening hasn't been a total waste.

One day in Miss Goodman's second-grade classroom my nose starts bleeding. I lean my head back, but it doesn't help. Miss Goodman sends me to the nurse. She can't stop the bleeding either, so my mother comes to get me.

That night I wake up to find my pillow soaked with blood like in some horror movie. Can this be the revenge of the Melungeons that I've long been expecting?

As my mother changes the sheets, my father packs my nostrils with cotton. I smile because, while explaining what he's doing, he's finally called me Betsy. I've changed my name to Betsy because Lisa, pronounced "Liza," is too weird. My only ambition is to be exactly like every other student at Lincoln Elementary, none of whom is named Lisa, pronounced "Liza."

Tucking me in, my mother says, "There! Isn't it nice to have fresh, clean sheets?"

"Dot in the biddle of the dight," I mutter.

The next morning my mother drives me to the hospital, explaining that my father is already there, reading about my nosebleeds in the medical library. She rolls me in a wheelchair to a room and helps me undress. Black and blue bruises cover my entire body, like one of those tattooed natives in National Geographic. I put on a gown that ties in the back and climb into the high, narrow bed.

My father, wearing green scrubs, booties, and a cap, comes in. He tries to act silly, but he looks tired and worried. His doctor friends and my grandfather come and go in their scrubs, poking at my bruises and murmuring to each other. Nurses arrive to remove the bloody cotton wads from my nostrils and to pack them with fresh cotton. I can feel the blood seeping down the back of my throat. Sometimes it makes me gag.

This continues for what feels like several years. But it's probably just a few weeks. I don't really know. Day after day the light outside fades to black. Then the night gives way to dawn. I lie there, dissolving squares of strawberry Jell-O in my mouth and repeating the name of my illness in my head - idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. It has a rhythm like a poem. It's nice to have a name for what's happening to me. I never imagined my body could let me down like this. I never imagined until now that my body and I weren't one and the same.

Sometimes I raise an arm to inspect my bruises. The new ones are black or midnight blue. Then they turn to shades of purple. When they're almost healed, they fade to yellows and greens. It would be beautiful if it weren't my arm.

One morning, I realize that the nurses and orderlies have been calling me Lisa. I'm still a Betsy, trapped in the bloodless body of a Lisa, but I'm too weak to protest. With a sigh I bid Betsy farewell and let her go.

My father and his friends decide that I need a transfusion. But I have rare blood, and no donor can be found except my grandmother. As my father explains this, I feel a stab of panic. I picture myself as her blood flows into me: my hair turns silvery blue; I develop wrinkles on my face and a slight stoop. I express these concerns to my father, and he laughs for the first time since this all began.

In the end, the blood of another doctor matches mine. After the transfusions my own blood starts to clot again. No one knows why. I am pleased to be a medical mystery.

Soon I'm back in Miss Goodman's classroom, listening to our Bible teacher recite the Twenty-third Psalm. When she gets to the part about the valley of the shadow of death, I understand that's where I've been.

But the only lasting consequence is the realization that I need to choose another career. My father describes each day's operations to us at the dinner table. He also tells about a man in jail who swallowed a spoon so he could escape as they drove him to the hospital. Once he'd escaped, he realized he had a spoon in his stomach and needed to go to the emergency room, where the sheriff was waiting for him. My father has so much fun at the hospital that we all want to be doctors, too. But who ever heard of a doctor who's afraid of blood?

My parents have bought a three-hundred-acre tobacco farm eighteen miles from town. We spend our weekends peeling ancient yellowed newspaper pages off the chinked log walls of a cabin at one end of our new valley. My father has hired a man with a bulldozer to make a dam so we can have a swimming pond. The water from the spring in the hillside keeps draining into underground caves, leaving only a mudflat. My mother calls it Shelton's Folly.

John and I form the Electric Fence Club. To join, the younger kids are required to touch the electric fence, which they do, to their regret and our delight.

My grandmother has to drag my grandfather out from town to see our farm. My grandfather was orphaned in southwest Virginia when his father died of pneumonia and his mother of gallbladder disease before he was six. Like an episode from Oliver Twist, the uncle in charge of the estate sold their farm and squandered the money.

My grandfather, one of eight children, was raised by an older sister named Evalyn who was married to a farmer who put him to work in the fields. My grandfather ran away when he was a teenager, hiking a hundred miles through the mountains to join two older brothers in Kentucky. He worked as a logger to put himself through medical school. He has earned his lack of enthusiasm for rural living.

We own a brown Saddlebred named Nora, who used to be a show horse before she got too old. She plods grimly around the pastures with us kids on her back swatting her with switches. Once my grandparents arrive, my father insists that my grandfather take Nora "for a spin." When my grandfather first practiced medicine in the Virginia mountains, he kept a stable of six horses for house calls into the hills, so we figure he must know how to ride.

My grandfather finally agrees - to humor my father. He swings up onto the equally unenthusiastic mare. Next thing we know, Nora is leaping along the dam like a ballerina. Our mouths drop open.

My grandfather runs Nora through her five gaits as though shifting the gears on a race car. At his command she backs up. In response to pressure from his thighs she prances sideways and then switches her lead leg in mid-stride. Attempting to copy these moves later that week on a pony we keep in the backyard in town, I will gallop under a wire clothesline and nearly decapitate myself. Trying again a couple of years later, I will ride Nora into a barbed wire fence and require thirty-six stitches in my left leg.

Nora and my grandfather return to the cabin. He slides off her.

"Nice horse," he says, tossing the reins to my speechless father.

We continue to stare at our grandfather and Nora.

"Can we go home now?" he murmurs to my grandmother.

Pam, Martha, and I, along with half the other kids in town, are riding the new escalator in J. Fred Johnson's Department Store. No one could believe the advance reports of a self-propelled staircase, but it's all true!

As we dash through the lingerie section to the stairs that glide back down to the ground floor, we pass dozens of high school girls stalking along with textbooks balanced on their heads, weaving through armless plaster torsos clad in brassieres and girdles. The girls are students from the charm class that's held in a room off the hair salon, where they're learning the skills necessary to become the next Miss Kingsport. If your posture is perfect, the sky's the limit.

J. Fred Johnson was a revered town father. His widow lives next door to us on Watauga Street. After the War Between the States, when many in our region were starving, he teamed up with some Yankee bankers to found our town. Its nickname is the Model City. In 1918, J. Fred, as everyone calls him, invited my grandfather, William Henry Reed, from Virginia to open a hospital.

We tear ourselves away from J. Fred's new escalator because it's time for the cowboy special at the State Theater. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy - you never know which you'll get until he appears on the screen. One of my grandfather's claims to fame, in addition to being able to operate with either hand, is that he performed an appendectomy on Tom Mix once when Tom was in town for a wild west show.

We amble up Broad Street, the axis of the Model City. When my grandparents moved here, the street was packed clay. There were few stores and many vacant lots. The workmen building the town lived in a city of canvas tents near where the Piggly Wiggly now stands.

Martha is on my right. She has wavy blond hair and blue eyes. Although a year older than I, she's a lot shorter. But she's still the boss of the neighborhood, except when her brother Nic is around. Nic wraps his stack of comic books with a swing chain and locks it with a padlock so no one can read them without his permission.

To my left is Pam. She's as tall as I, with curly black hair and glasses with thick lenses. Her mother works at a grocery store, and they live with her grandmother on the street behind ours. Whenever Martha and I ask Pam where her father is, she replies, "None of your beeswax and shoe tacks."

Behind us is a traffic circle surrounded by four steepled churches of red brick - one Baptist, two Methodist, and one Presbyterian. My family's church, St. Paul's Episcopal, is a low stone manse with a door the color of dried blood. It looks as though it belongs on a windswept moor. Instead, it squats atop a hill, looking down on the other churches.

My father used to be a Baptist, but he says he doesn't want his children threatened all the time with burning in hell. His mother, my grandmother, Hattie Elizabeth Vanover Reed, assures me that he's never been happy since he turned his back on the Baptists. But he seems happy to me, except when she stops by to remind him that only Baptists will pass through the Pearly Gates.

Ahead of us is a boarded-up train station of maroon brick. Since freight trains are now the only rail traffic, there's no need for a station except as a clubhouse for our drunks. Branded liquor is illegal, and moonshine is expensive, so they're said to imbibe liquid shoe polish and after-shave lotion at their socials in the vacant building.

The plaintive howls of the locomotives whistle in my bedroom late at night as I lie there fretting about marauding Melungeons. The trains clatter past Riverview, where the Negroes live in low red-brick apartment buildings. Then the trains stop at the Tennessee Eastman plant by the river to unload mountains of shiny black coal and to collect camera film, ammunition, and bolts of rayon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from KINFOLKS by LISA ALTHER Copyright © 2007 by Lisa Alther. Excerpted by permission.
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