The Meanings and Mystery of "Melungeon"

In episode 50, we will talk about the word "Melungeon," its multiple meanings, and the history of a mysterious Appalachian people known as the "lost tribe" (who claim Elvis and Abraham Lincoln among their members.) Appalachian historian Dr. Brian McKnight joins me as we dive into a dark part of Virginia's history, the 1924 Racial Integrity Act and Walter Plecker's policies, and what that meant for Melungeon people. We'll also explore what the latest DNA studies say about their ancestral background, and learn about one of the most storied Melungeons, moonshiner Mahalia "Big Haley" Mullins.

Research for this episode comes from:

New DNA study on Melungeons attempts to separate truth from fiction

Melungeon Heritage Association | Document. Preserve. Sustain

Transcript

 This is Amy, and you're listening to the Talkin Appalachian Podcast.

Today, we're diving into a truly intriguing topic, the Melungeons. In recent years, Melungeons have increasingly stepped out of history and into Appalachia's cultural landscape. So authors like Adriana Trigiani and Barbara Kingsolver, both of whom have been interviewed on this podcast, included Melungeons in their novels.

That's just an example, Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead includes a reference to malinges. So if you read that and you had never heard of them and you saw that in print, you might wonder, who were they? Where did they come from? And why does their story continue to inspire people to research and to write and sing and gather?

If we go back in time, you quickly realize that people were not so eager to embrace Melungeon ancestry as they are now. They were called Melange is a mysterious group of people living in the Appalachian regions of the United States, particularly in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. The word Melange comes from the French mélange, meaning mixed.

As early as the 1800s, it was used as a racial slur for about 40 families living in central Appalachia. There are other origins of the word according to the Melange Heritage Association. And I'm probably going to miss pronounce these, so just bear with me. One origin is the Afro Portuguese term milango, supposedly meaning shipmate.

Yet another is the Greek Term Melon, meaning black, and other researchers have speculated that Melingen derives from the Turkish Melon can, meaning cursed soul. The Italian Melangina, eggplant, referring to one with dark skin, or the Old English term Melingen, Which means guile or deceit. So Melungeons were often described as having darker skin tones than their European descended neighbors.

Many had curly hair, dark eyes, and facial features that seemed to blend European, African, and Native American traits. And that led to a lot of speculation about their ancestry with some people believing they were the descendants of escaped slaves or that they were mixed with indigenous groups. But, as we'll see, their genetic makeup was far more complicated than anybody initially realized.

When I first began teaching at UVA's College at Wise, the late Dr. Brent Kennedy was researching and writing about his own Melungeon ancestry. He wrote the book, The Melungeons, A Resurrection of a Proud People. And we worked there together, so I sought him out one day and sat down with him in his office to talk about his research.

He said like so many of us, he'd been told he was Scotch Irish, but that didn't seem to align with what he was seeing in family photos. And for a while, it didn't really matter, but then he started to get sick. He suffered from aching joints, swollen legs, and he had trouble breathing. He was diagnosed with sarcoidosis and familial Mediterranean fever, which are more common in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

And the National Institute of Health confirmed that diagnosis later. At that time, Kennedy had found 13 other people in the area with that diagnosis. And there were physical characteristics that also seemed to form a pattern, such as reddish or olive skin tone. That set him on a path to find out more about his family.

And he did what so many of us do. He questioned family members. He got into genealogical research. He sifted through old photos. He read about abandoned Spanish and Portuguese soldiers in southern Appalachia. He read about Sir Francis Drake, who left 1, 500 Turkish captives on Roanoke Island in the late 16th century.

He questioned whether it was possible that their descendants could have interbred with whites, blacks, and Native Americans, but the research didn't sit well with some academics. Kennedy told the Associated Press that it was as if they considered Appalachian history a done deal with no need for revision.

But then DNA evidence came along. Dr. Kevin Jones, another colleague of mine at UVA Wise at the time, began analyzing DNA from hair and cheek cells of 120 Melungeon men and women. And at that time, his findings suggested that they were genealogically distinct with Northern Indian or Middle Eastern DNA and genetically similar.

And these findings seem to support Kennedy's theory. Keep in mind, however, this is 20 years ago and there's been so much advancement in DNA analysis since then. In 2021, a study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy reported that genetic evidence in DNA now shows that The families historically called Melungeons may be the offspring of Sub Saharan African men and white women of Northern or Central European origin.

According to Travis Lawler of the Associated Press, Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung up from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid 1600s before slavery. They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other.

So if you claimed to be Spanish or Cuban or Italian, for example, you wouldn't face the same discrimination, even the possibility of death, that you would if you were accused of being black. There were records of people going to court over their inheritances for this reason. To be black was to lose your inheritance.

But that didn't apply if darker skin could be explained with another ethnicity. And here are two examples from historical documents. One. This one is from author Ann Toplovich, who wrote that the earliest historical record of the term Melungeon dates to 1813. In the minutes of the Stony Creek Baptist Church in nearby, Scott County, Virginia, which is near me, a woman stated that another

In December 1943, Walter Plecker of Virginia issued a letter to local authorities alerting them to, quote, colored families attempting to present themselves as white or Indian. In defiance of the 1924, Dr. Brian McKnight is my colleague at UVA's College at Wise. He's in the Department of History and Philosophy, and he's founding director of the Center for Appalachian Studies.

He's also an author of several books. He's currently researching Walter Plecker, and I asked him to tell me more about Plecker's role in all of this. Walter Ashby Plecker was the Virginia Director of the State Bureau of Vital Statistics. We know that that's the office in Virginia where you write if you lose your birth certificate and they'll send you a new copy.

Historically, that job has been to record birth certificates and make sure those birth certificates go on record as being valid. accurate, etc. Plecker took it a step further. Plecker was a physician. He was from Augusta County. Apparently a pretty good doctor in his day. But, Plecker was a racist. And he was a scientific racist.

He was into phrenology and the measuring of skulls to make sure people were accurate. Uh, properly intelligent and, and, and to show these racial, to give some, I suppose, uh, evidence to, uh, suspicions of racial inferiority. In 1924, Virginia passed what becomes known as the Racial Integrity Law. Now this updates a 1910 law that had been passed in Virginia.

The 1910 law says that you are classified as black if you are 1 16th black. The 1924 law is a one drop law. If there is one drop of black blood in your past, you are black, which is kind of interesting to a historian because we look at the 19th century, particularly the era of slavery as being the great age of full throated racism.

But in 1924, Virginia and a lot of southern states were passing these one drop laws, which really superseded anything that had preceded them officially. Now, one of the byproducts of this is that anyone who has any non white ancestry is now classified as non white. One of the more entertaining aspects of this is Pocahontas, who married John Rolfe.

Uh, way back in, in the 16 teens, her descendants grew into these very influential figures in Virginia history and very politically and economically powerful figures in Virginia history. As of 1924, they were black and they were not afforded any of the benefits of citizenship, etc. in Virginia. So, this becomes a real lightning rod, particularly for those descendants of, of Pocahontas.

And, and within a year or two, the state legislature is going to write in the Pocahontas exception, which basically means anybody with a drop of, of non white blood is non white. Unless you descended from Pocahontas, then you're purely white. Which is pretty laughable from my perspective, but, you know, we all have to do what we have to do to justify what we do.

One of the more interesting things about this is Plecker, he sticks around in this job for a very long time, and in 1943, he is hearing rumors that, uh, black people are Moving out of their home counties, moving to new counties, getting married to white people, and having children who will then pass as white for the rest of their lives.

Well, of course. Somebody like Plecker, they're going to be opposed to this. So what Plecker does is he writes a letter to all the registrars across the state of Virginia. And he explains his rationale. And he goes as far as including a list. of counties and surnames from those counties that should be at this point forward classified as black.

Interestingly enough, throughout Virginia, you have these very common names that would automatically become black as a result of this, this letter. In southwest Virginia, it's among the most popular. in the region, but ultimately this letter doesn't actually go that far. I'm not sure that any of the registrars actually changed any of the classifications and uh, and ultimately the racial integrity acts going to go, uh, by the wayside.

This is incredible to look back in history and see that this man. As late as 1943 was able to do this as an official of Virginia. So for some families, this resulted in the loss of official documentation that had affirmed their ongoing self identification as Native American on government forums.

Have you subscribed to our Patreon page yet? In my latest post for my subscribers, I wrote about my interview with the late Yvette Perdue, a hero of the French Resistance. Captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in Dachau, she escaped to Austria and later found safety in Appalachia. Go subscribe and read about her incredible story of courage and survival, preserved before her passing in 2021.

I visited Dachau about 20 years ago, and I describe what it was like to walk through that camp and then talk to Yvette about being there a few months later. I was always interested in helping others, she says, and when you do that, it makes you strong. Read my exclusive photo essay and interview with her now on Patreon.

That post is also available for a one time donation on Patreon. which will be given to Yvette's charity of choice, the Holly Helps Bay and Nooter in Bristol. One of the most famous Mullensians, whose name has passed into legend, is Mahalia Mullins, also known as Big Haley. She was born in 1824 and she lived on Newman's Ridge in Sneedville, Tennessee.

She was known to make the best moonshine you could find. She was also known for her large size. So in one widely circulated story, a lawman was dispatched to arrest her for bootlegging, but he found that he could not get her through the cabin door. He went back to tell the judge that she was, quote, catchable, but not fetchable.

The story goes when she died, a coffin was built around her and part of the cabin was removed so she could be buried. But that phrase, catchable, but not fetchable, was forever attached to Big Hailey Mullins.

So what all this tells us is that the Melungeon story is complex, but it's also a story about their resilience and their survival. They didn't just survive, they thrived, despite facing racial prejudice and exclusion, which they did. They managed to preserve community and piece together a more complete understanding of their ancestry.

So if this topic There's so many more layers to it. There's so much research out there. I encourage you to read Dr. Kennedy's book. Visit the Mlungin Heritage Association website. They also have a 7 episode podcast called Mlungin Voices. And since he first began researching his own family, Dr. Kennedy sparked a wave of interest in research.

So, In recent years, the Melungeons have started to reclaim their history, and many people of Melungeon descent are now proud to acknowledge the mix of cultures and heritages that make them who they are. You can see that in the Melungeon Heritage Association and the gatherings, and while some aspects of their health and physical traits may have been mysterious or misunderstood in the past, we can now see how much their diverse ancestry shaped not just who they were, But who they are today.

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