by Richard Seifried
Signal Hill Musings
February, 2006
“Has anyone ever heard of the Melungeons?”
Krissy Willis, official of the Ozark Writers Conference I was attending, responded, “Sure. They live where I do, in Eastern Tennessee.”
She then proceeded to tell our little group about the mysterious people of that mountainous region.
And, what Krissy told us was different from what I had read. Way back in the 1940s or 1950s, Colliers or The Saturday Evening Post or National Geographic (Shafer’s note: The article, “Sons of the Legend” by William Worden, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on October 18, 1947) published an article about the Melungeons.
What I recall from the article is that they were living high up on the mountain slopes of the southern Appalachians of Tennessee. According to my memory, they were very shy, slim, pallid, the latter characteristic due to decades of inbreeding among a small population. They spoke a sort of archaic English and had been living in the area for perhaps hundreds of years.
The Melungeons were able to avoid “modern” man until WWII. Incursions into their territory by white development, plus the military draft, caused them to gradually come down from their mountaintop meadows and obtain employment in war industries.
Chrissy told a rather different story. My memory must be faulty. She told us that the Melungeons that she knew of were not pale but were dark skinned, of Mediterranean descent. More specifically, the ancient ones are now reputed to have come from Portugal. They may even have been persecuted Gypsies.
How and why they spoke old English is open for conjecture.
The Melungeons seem to be tri-racial (Caucasian, Black, and Native American) but claim that they are “Portygee.”
Dr. Brent Kennedy, a leading researcher on the people, thinks that they are a mixture of remaining eastern native tribes who were devastated by European diseases, remnants of a pre-Jamestown Spanish colony that had settled in South Carolina, and Portuguese/Turkish peoples that Sir Francis Drake rescued from South American slavery and put ashore on Roanoke Island way back in the late 1500s.
What does all of this have to do with Signal Hill? Well, I sit here today, on this wintry, broken-clouded day, and romanticize/contemplate about those who once passed through our hills.
Down below the point of our ridgetop, a mere football field east of our home, there is a very small rock cliff. At the base of it, there is an indentation large enough to provide shelter to a small group of people.
Oh, not in the summer. Mosquitoes and ticks and possibly copperheads reside there. But in winter, it is different. The overhang, the tiny niche in the chert cliff, is relatively dry, sheltered from cold winds and high above the even colder valley floor. Woodland springs still trickle nearby. Since the shelter is very small, it would be unlikely to have attracted human enemies.
There, snug beneath thick, soft blankets of animal fur, mother and child could sleep relatively free from fear. Fathers’ and older sons’ spears would provide protection against mountain lion and wolf. Perhaps the people could have felt the added comfort of a small, smokeless fire.
As father crouched there, dozing off and on, he might have seen the bright star, my star, sailing just above a great pine, ancestor of our nowadays great pine.
Well, they are gone now. We, our society, our culture, dwell on Signal Hill. Sometimes I wonder who will live here after we are gone. Our civilization will be gone someday, you know.
Few Melungeons exist today, and those who do have assimilated into our contemporary society, the result of discrimination and intolerance. It saddens me think that one day, they will likely disappear
Who, or what, will replace us here on Signal Hill? I hope they will be gentler than we.
