Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page B

THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED THE PRESENT .
    The Glenview Baptists across the street warn
    THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH. REPENT BEFORE PAYDAY .
    I like that one, but I decide that today’s winner is the New Covenant Free Pentecostals down the block with their
    IF YOU GIVE SATAN AN INCH, HE’LL BECOME YOUR RULER .
    I’m sitting in the backyard of some of my parents’ friends whom I particularly like. Throughout my childhood they always bought whatever junk I was selling for school fund-raisers — magazine subscriptions, Girl Scout cookies, chocolate bars, greeting cards. I tell them about my doomed Melungeon article and my failures in the field as a journalist.
    Mrs. Shobe stands up and disappears. She returns with her elderly yardman in tow, announcing that he was born in Hancock County to a mother whose maiden name was Collins.
    I stand up from my lounger to shake his hand. A tall, lanky man in bib overalls, he has straight white hair and high cheekbones. The whites of his eyes are bright around navy blue irises, and his face looks as though he’s been sweeping chimneys.
    We sit down and chat interminably about the habits of rhododendrons.
    Finally Mrs. Shobe asks, “Buddy, are you a Melungeon?”
    I blush furiously. She’s from Louisiana. She must not realize that this is a question one doesn’t pose.
    â€œHalf Melungeon,” he replies pleasantly.
    â€œWhere did your people come from?” she asks.
    â€œI don’t know nothing about it.” He describes moving as a child from Kentucky to Virginia, where his parents sold him to a farmer for twenty-five cents a day.
    â€œSold you?” I echo faintly.
    â€œI worked for him from sunup to sundown ever’ day of the year but Christmas.”
    â€œWhen did you go to school?”
    â€œDidn’t never go to no school. Wouldn’t nobody take me, not the whites nor the coloreds, neither one. I was too dark for the whites and too pale for the coloreds.”
    He describes his children — one in Indiana, a second in Maryland, and a third an airplane mechanic in Louisiana. “Seem like that they don’t much care to come home no more,” he says sadly.
    Back in Vermont I write my article about going in search of the Melungeons and finding that the only ones still on Newman’s Ridge are lying in their graves. The younger generations have fled the stigma, blending imperceptibly into the American mainstream. Once Buddy’s generation is gone, there will be no more Melungeons. I mock my quest for these legendary mixed-race people when I myself am of Dutch, French, German, Scottish, Irish, English, and perhaps Native American heritage.
    I close with a quote taken from a newspaper interview with a Melungeon bank president in Sneedville: “Any mystery our people ever had is gone — or at least any way of solving it. We are all immigrants in this country.”
    May the Melungeons rest in peace, I think as I push the envelope containing the article through the mail slot at the post office.
    As I write about the snake handlers for the
New York Times
, I realize that although I don’t miss church, I do miss God. Eating, breeding, and interior design are terrific, but if this is all there is, why bother?
    This thought plunges me into the melancholy familiar from my college years. To combat it I check out an armload of books from the University of Vermont library on the various world religions.
    As I read about the Puritans and their almost pornographic fixation on original sin, I begin to suspect that I’ve inherited my melancholy from my mother’s Puritan forebears. The Puritans seem as relentless as Southern Baptists in their preoccupation with the fires of hell and as obsessed as the snake handlers with evil. Virginians slaughtered Indians because they wanted their land, but Puritans slaughtered them because they saw them as Satan.
    I find Hinduism with its cast of plotting gods and