Independent Perspective News - Where do we really come from?

Growing up in Wise, Virginia, Brent Kennedy had no clue that he was related to those shy-looking people who kept to themselves up in the Appalachian hills. He didn't look particularly Gaelic, with his cornflower blue eyes and bronze skin, but Melungeon roots were something polite people didn't talk about. After he began his genealogical research in the late 1980s, one great-aunt torched a collection of family photos and letters, and other relatives stopped speaking to him.

When Kennedy approached scholars with his questions, they couldn't be bothered. Anthropologists and historians like Virginia DeMarce of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., had already settled the Melungeon question, they said. Kennedy's people were an insular group like the Louisiana Red Bones and the South Carolina Brass Ankles. They were a "triracial isolate" with white, American Indian, and African-American blood—a footnote in history.

So Kennedy did his own research instead. His book, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, is part memoir, part manifesto. It draws on his family story and genealogy to show how the Melungeons, like African-Americans and American Indians, have been victims of vicious racism—and how they have struggled to protect themselves through assimilation. Kennedy's thesis became a rallying cry for many Melungeons, but historians scoffed at his less-than-rigorous approach. Kennedy "essentially invented a 'new race,'" DeMarce wrote in the National Genealogical Quarterly in 1996, a "historically nonexistent oppressed minority that belies his own ancestry."

In 1998 Kennedy's research took a more urgent tone. After struggling for most of his life with inexplicable fevers, he was finally diagnosed with a hereditary disease. Familial Mediterranean fever, as it's known, causes intermittent high temperatures and crippling stomach pains. It's common among Syrians and Turks—and the Melungeons of Tennessee and Virginia. Thanks to the drug colchicine, Kennedy was eventually able to keep the disease at bay. But the experience left him convinced that he must have Mediterranean roots. Why else would a white boy of Scotch-Irish ancestry have this genetic disorder?

A DNA study offered the best hope of an answer, but it was controversial from the start. Some Melungeons opposed it. Others hoped it would finally bury age-old theories about African ancestry. Still others were less interested in escaping their racial impurity than in celebrating it. At the reunion, several white-looking men proudly proclaimed their African-American roots; others bragged about Saponi Indian or Sephardic Jewish ancestors.

Onstage Kennedy made an emotional case for the DNA project. Handsome and articulate, with a Ph.D. in communications research and a gentle Southern accent, he has become a celebrity among Melungeons—both admired and shunned. "We've been marginalized and shoved out, and I point the finger at academia," he told the crowd. Many nodded in assent. Melungeon history is too broad, too messy for historians, Kennedy said. "That's the reason for the DNA study. It was forced upon us."

Unfortunately, biologists have little power to right history's wrongs or comfort its victims. They say the very concept of race, on which some Melungeons have hung their hopes, is biologically meaningless. Compared with other mammals, all humans are practically cousins. One troop of chimpanzees has more genetic diversity than all 6 billion humans. Moreover, any large human population has about 85 percent as much genetic variation as the species as a whole. An average Greek probably has as many genes in common with a Mongolian as he or she does with another Greek. In fact, recent genetic evidence suggests that all of humanity descends from a few thousand hunters who wandered out of sub-Saharan Africa less than 150,000 years ago.

What little light DNA can shed on race is often unwelcome. Three years ago, for instance, at the University of Arizona, geneticist Michael Hammer studied the Y chromosomes of Jewish men from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Their genes had more in common with one another than with most of their non-Jewish neighbors, he found. But they were indistinguishable from those of Palestinians and Syrians. In a similar study, geneticist Michael Bamshad of the University of Utah examined DNA from Asian Indians of various castes. He found that the higher the caste, the greater the proportion of typically European genetic patterns—especially among men. His team's data support the anthropological and linguistic theory that the Indian caste system was established thousands of years ago by Western invaders, perhaps from Anatolia and Caucasia.

Molecular anthropologists like Underhill and Hammer are used to the controversy such research causes. But it came as a nasty surprise to Kevin Jones. "I went into human genetics being horribly naive as to what that meant," he says. "Nothing prepared me for the hype side of it." After the study began, some Melungeons called to see when they would see his results; others called to say that he had sampled the wrong people. Jones even received a death threat from a Melungeon repelled by the possibility of having African-American blood. "I don't think many of us have a sense of how dangerous this is," he says. "It stirs the hornet's nest. We are driven, through the purity of science, to support or reject hypotheses, but it's a terribly naive, pure, God-like approach. And, my God, does it stir the mortals up."

As Jones approached the podium that afternoon in Kingsport, the Melungeons were fanning themselves. Jones had been billed as the person who would finally provide some unambiguous answers to the Melungeon question, yet he began by telling them that their DNA didn't prove much of anything at all.

After looking at 120 mtDNA samples and about 30 Y chromosomes with the help of geneticist Mark Thomas of University College London, Jones concluded that the Melungeons are mostly Eurasian, a catchall category spanning people from Scandinavia to the Middle East. They are also a little bit black and a little bit American Indian. Among the mtDNA haplotypes Jones examined, four were unusual. They matched only one of the 20,000 sequences in the global database, from an Indian group called the Siddhi that may have originated in North Africa and given rise to Europe's Roma, or Gypsies. A few other Melungeons had a haplotype common to Syrians and Turks but not unknown in northern Europe.

Among the Y chromosomes, a few were completely inexplicable. When Jones searched a database of European populations at University College London, the samples matched none of the 4,500 entries. As for Kennedy's familial Mediterranean fever, it remained a mystery. Although some patterns definitely were similar to ones found in Turkey, there was no proof of either Portuguese or Turkish ancestry in the Melungeon DNA.

The study as a whole offered proof that multiracial ancestry is commonplace, even in a part of the country where racial divisions have historically been deep. "If anyone ever called you inbred," Jones quipped, "they're lying."

Still, that wasn't much to go on. The DNA data told people who felt a deep connection to American Indians that their ancestors were mostly white. It informed a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed people that at least some of their forebears were black. And it delivered a particularly cruel message to Kennedy: That his deeply cherished sense of himself and his community might never be proved, and the origins of the rare genetic disease that nearly killed him might never be known. What did it all mean? "Whatever you want it to," Jones told the audience. "If you were hoping for a DNA sequence that says you're Melungeon, forget it."

The crowd asked a few questions and then drifted off for lunch. Many didn't come back, although the reunion still had two days to go. "They're trying to say that there's not a whole lot of Native American, and that's a pure joke," one reunion attendee said at the Shoney's restaurant down the street. Some shrugged their shoulders, but others seemed truly disappointed. "An awful lot of people were hoping something exotic would be presented, and it was not," Darlene Wilson later said. "There were also those who wanted the African aspect thrown out, and it was not."

The reaction would have come as no surprise to other molecular anthropologists. Y chromosomes and mtDNA leave a deep but very narrow record of ancestry, says Douglas Wallace, a geneticist at the University of California at Irvine and a pioneer of molecular anthropology. Imagine that your great-great-great-great-grandmother was North African, and just by chance, her daughters and their female descendants all married Frenchmen. Five generations down the line, you'd still have purely African mtDNA, but most of the rest of your genome would come from the French side of the family. "So are you African or are you French?" Wallace asks. "People imagine one portion of the genome is representative of all of them, but it's clearly not the case. You are more what you think you are than what your genes tell you."

When people assume that genetic information supersedes culture, language, and upbringing, they are bound to be disappointed. "I don't subscribe to people baring their arms [for a blood sample] to find out whether they are Phoenician," Wallace said, when asked about the Melungeon project. "It can only end up with people getting hurt." Jones wasn't so sure. "Should I have done this?" he wondered, after his presentation. As a scientist, he had to say yes—if only for the potential medical benefits of the information. But beyond that he couldn't say. "It's a strange business. Slime molds are so much safer."

Early the next Sunday morning, seven Melungeons piled into a minivan and trundled up Newman's Ridge into the heart of Tennessee's Melungeon country. The sycamores were draped with mistletoe, and many of the houses along the way had small plots of tobacco growing. Sitting at the wheel, Jack Goins joked that the switchbacks were so sharp that "you meet yourself coming back," while others made wisecracks about whose outlaw ancestors killed whose.

This was why they had come to the reunion—to see the valleys and hilltops their forebears had farmed, to share lore and take pictures of each other in front of gravestones and crumbling cabins. Others may have looked to DNA for identity, but to this group of Melungeons, a summer morning in the sweet air of Hancock County was more meaningful than any pattern of genetic blips.

In the valley below Newman's Ridge, the Melungeons clambered out and headed for the little whitewashed Primitive Baptist Church. Seven Gibson, who can trace his roots through several major Melungeon families, was preaching. In front of the church, a fountain collected the springwater that ran off the razorback hills above. It was little more than a low stone trough with a roof and a spigot, but the sign above it read: "This water will satisfy the thirst of your body. Only Jesus can satisfy the thirst of your soul."

Goins passed out some Styrofoam cups, and each of the Melungeons drank in turn.

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