Kinfolks by Lisa Alther

excursions. When we’d get lost, he’d say, “Don’t worry: I’m just taking you back to the Indians.” I used to fret about whether he was kidding — until I realized that the Indians were no longer there to go back to.
    I drive toward Sneedville, said to be the epicenter of Melungeon settlement. Compared to the Rockies or the Alps, the southern Appalachians are foothills. But compared to the Green Mountains of Vermont, they seem wild and rugged. Southward-creeping glaciers ground nearly half a mile off the Green Mountains, rounded their summits, and broadened their valleys. But some eighty-two peaks in the glacier-free southern Appalachians rise higher than five thousand feet, and the valleys here are deep and narrow. Twilight comes early to these hollows as the sun plunges behind the parapets of rock.
    Once you’ve wound up and down these claustrophobic mountains on hairpin switchbacks for several hours, your heart leaps into your throat when you drive out into a broad valley, and you can very well imagine what settlers must have felt after spending weeks trudging through these punishing mountains. Valley land here has always been highly valued because it’s level and easily plowed. Prior to the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, the creeks and rivers flooded most springs, leaving deposits of rich topsoil. Indians built their villages above these waterways because crops grew well in the floodplain and because the rivers provided water, transportation, and fish.
    When European settlers arrived, they, too, coveted this rich bottomland. So, in the largest land grab since the Norman Conquest, they simply took it. Or not so simply, because it required many decades of bogus treaties and bloody warfare, culminating in the Trail of Tears. Although American schoolchildren learn that our continent was a vast uninhabited wilderness when Europeans “discovered” it, current estimates place the native population of North America at somewhere between five and twenty million. These people spoke over five hundred languages. The Ohio River Valley alone contained five thousand villages.
    â€œFree person of color” (FPC) was a category applied in the nineteenth century to anyone whose skin wasn’t pale enough to allow him or her to pass for a northern European. This included Middle Easterners, Native Americans, Africans, East Asians, East Indians, Mediterraneans, or any mixture of these.
    Of course, many settlers were illiterate and had no record of who their ancestors were. Many hid exotic origins, changing or anglicizing their names, moving to new places, fabricating new ancestors. So in practice, it was darker skin that made you vulnerable to being labeled FPC. Since FPCs weren’t allowed to testify against white people in court, those who were edged off their land had no recourse (short of murder or suicide) but to move to a place no one else wanted, like a swamp or a mountaintop.
    One such spot is Newman’s Ridge. It looms over Sneed-ville, the county seat for Hancock County, the poorest county in Tennessee, with 29.4 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line.
    I drive my parents’ Buick up and down the rutted dirt roads across the face of Newman’s Ridge, searching for Melungeons. Fifty years earlier, several hundred people lived here. Now all I find on the densely wooded cliffs are a few vacation cabins, a deserted church, and the ruins of some farmhouses and outbuildings in fields overrun with briars and saplings.
    The only signs of life I discover are a couple of new ranch houses on the main road and a well-tended cemetery on a slope overlooking the Cumberland Mountains, which stretch ridge upon ridge toward Virginia. Wandering among the headstones, some merely flat rocks with names and dates scratched onto their faces, I find several of the traditional Melungeon surnames — Mullins, Collins, Goins, Gibson. Whatever their hardships while alive, these