VISITS TO THE MELUNGEONS AND TIDEWATER VIRGINIA GROUPS 

By W. GROSVENOR POLLARD 

     During a visit to my parents in Oak Ridge, Tennessee the summer of 1962, I was introduced to a juvenile probation officer who had been assigned Hancock and Hawkins counties in northern Tennessee as part of his jurisdiction. His supervisor had informed him that there were several communities of a "mixed-blood" people known as Melungeons and claiming an American Indian identity in those counties, with the major concentration being on Newman's Ridge, northeast of Sneedville, in Hancock County. He was to visit this community to determine how to proceed with rehabilitating potential Melungeon juvenile offenders. 

     Learning from my parents that I was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, he asked if I would accompany him on the trip and conduct interviews with any Melungeons we met. I welcomed the opportunity. My companion first had to introduce himself to the sheriff in Sneedville, who informed us that, until about 1950, the Melungeons were rarely seen in any towns in the county except for quick trips for groceries or gasoline. Many Melungeon families were leaving Hancock and Hawkins counties for construction jobs in New Tazewell in neighboring Claiborne County. There were also several communities of Melungeons in Lee County, Virginia who were supposedly engaged in coal mining or logging. 

     Newman's Ridge is the second ridge northeast of Sneedville to the right of State Highway 33. We followed a dirt road along the foot of the ridge through a narrow valley, known locally as Skunk Hollow, and passed many young people with black hair and varying shades of bronze skin color before seeing the first house. This was the only house we saw on the right side of the road, opposite the foot of Newman's Ridge. 

     A woman came out and, after we introduced ourselves and told her why we had come, she informed us that she had been permanently banished from the Melungeon community on the ridge. She had been left with five young children to care for on a meager salary as a checker at a grocery in nearby Rock Hill when her first husband, a Melungeon, died. An African-American co-worker befriended her and helped care for her children. Other Melungeons had threatened her with banishment if she did not end the relationship, and made good on the threat when she and her friend married. The only way they would accept her back into the community was for her to divorce the man and never befriend another African-American. 

     Her banishment became irrevocable when she gave birth to a sixth child fathered by her second husband. The reason is clearly that her marriage to an African-American and having a child with him could be seen as validating the claim of many local whites that the Melungeons were actually mulattos attempting to deny their Negroid ancestry by claiming to be American Indians. The entire community risked being branded with this stereotype if she was not expelled. 

     The poor woman recommended that we talk to her neighbor, a Mr. Bell, on the other side of the road. He and his father were said to be the most knowledgeable about the history of the community on the ridge. Mr. Bell identified himself and his family as American Indians, although no one had any idea what tribe, or tribes, they were descended from. He recognized that the Melungeons are not culturally distinct from their rural Appalachian white neighbors and was aware of the theory that the Melungeons are descended from shipwrecked Portuguese sailors who made their way inland. He said that this is an invention, borrowed from the so-called "Guineas" of West Virginia, and used by those with light complexions in the hope of marrying whites and producing children with even lighter complexions. The only hope for darker Melungeons, like Mr. Bell, was that the Tennessee State legislature would acknowledge their American Indian identity. But he recognized that there was little chance of this unless the group can prove descent from some tribe known to have inhabited Hancock County. 

     Mr. Bell's father, who was away on business, and one or two elderly women in Rhea County were the only Melungeons he knew of who spoke an American Indian language. The senior Mr. Bell and a visiting Cherokee from the Qualla Reservation in western North Carolina had found that language and Cherokee to be mutually unintelligible. 

     Asked if there were any customs he thought were possibly Indian, Mr. Bell said at least the Melungeons on Newman's Ridge built A-frame "chicken coops" about two feet high over the graves of family members. Every Memorial Day, gifts of food and water are left in these for the souls of the departed who might not have gone on "to their reward." My later investigation proved that this custom is a possible clue to the ancestry of the Melungeons. I knew that Cherokee territory in East Tennessee did not extend north of the French Broad River and was curious to know what Indians may have occupied land north of it before white settlement. I found the answer in John Reed Swanton's *Indians of the Southeastern United States*. Bulletin 137 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1946. 

     Swanton reported that there were three bands of the Yuchi (Uchee or Euchee) a southern one centered near the present Macon, Georgia; a middle one near the present Talladega, Alabama; and a northern one centered on Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. The northern band were not among the Yuchi forced to relocate in Indian Territory in the 1830s. They were settled on the Qualla Reservation with the Eastern Cherokee band and allowed one representative on the tribal council. All deliberations were in Cherokee, which none of the Yuchi understood (understandable, since Cherokee belongs to the Iroquoian language stock and Yuchi to the Siouan one). After two years of feeling like strangers among the Cherokees, the Yuchi left and returned to Newman's Ridge. 

     Frank G. Speck, in his *Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians* (Anthropological Publications of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, no. 1, 1909), both describes and includes a photograph of the spirit houses the Yuchi in north-eastern Oklahoma erect over the graves of deceased family members. They appear to be the same structures Mr. Bell called "chicken coops." This strongly suggests that, whatever other ethnic and genetic elements make up the Melungeons, the core group may well have been the northern band of the Yuchi. 

     A visit to the Chickahominy and Rappahannock in Tidewater Virginia in 1973 gave me several good reasons to think that the claim of a Negroid genotype in such racial isolates in the Eastern United States should be seriously downplayed. The Rappahannock in Caroline and Essex Counties were not as sensitive to this claim for reasons stated below. The slowness of rural school boards to desegregate the public schools and their attempts to place Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Upper Mattaponi (or Adamstown Indians), and Nansemond children in schools reserved for blacks threatened to invalidate any claims of these groups to an American Indian identity. 

     The Chickahominy are divided into two bands southeast of Richmond, a larger one in a rural area between Charles City and Providence Forge, and a smaller one centered in Providence Forge itself. They recognize that many African-Americans in the area have the same physical features they do and admit that this is perhaps the result of band members who fraternized with blacks being forced out of the group through ostracism. Chief Oliver O. Atkins of the larger band assured me that this had been a routine practice since the eighteenth century. He pointed out that many Mattaponi, descendants of Powhatan's tribe, are particularly sensitive to the claim that their dark brown complexions are proof of Negroid ancestry despite their obvious Caucasian or American Indian facial features and straight or curly (not kinky) hair. I told him I had read that the Mattaponi insist on marriage within the tribe, which he confirmed, and said that inbreeding among American Indians was known to cause darker complexions. Mattaponi women and a very dark Haliwa-Saponi from North Carolina my wife and I met when we attended the Chickahominy Fall Festival and Powwow in 1993 were aware of this and had used it as a defense against claims that they had Negroid ancestry. 

     Both Chickahominy bands, the Rappahannock, and the larger of two factions of the Nansemond had incorporated with the Commonwealth of Virginia as The Reorganized Powhatan Confederacy. Chief Atkins was well aware that the Chickahominy were never part of the original Powhatan Confederacy and that the Rappahannock were only allied with it on occasion. What these groups needed was a name both the state government and whites in the general population would associate with Indians who had lived in the Tidewater area in colonial times. 

     To further their claims to be American Indians, Chief Atkins, who was president of the Jamestown Association, involved members of all four groups in a powwow held annually Memorial Day weekend at the site of the Jamestown colony as a major tourist attraction. This had presented a problem all remnants of the original Algonquin tribes in the Tidewater area lost their traditional culture and indigenous languages in colonial times. To demonstrate an American Indian identity, they had to borrow from other tribes, which whites would recognize as "Indian." Thus, the regalia worn by the dancers is a mix of Eastern Woodland and Plains motifs. Canvas teepees are set up behind the stand where the master of ceremonies sat, despite the fact that the ancestors of the participants had lived in bark-covered longhouses. 

     This process of attempting to establish a separate ethnic identity by a group that has lost its distinctiveness from its neighbors is what anthropologists call "retribalization." It requires the revival of some symbol of the group's original identity, which will be recognizable to the general population. The Chickahominy who organized dancers for powwows in the 1970s, Clifford Holmes, stated that the tribe's songs had been taught to one man in each generation, who was responsible for teaching them to a successor, since colonial times. They were all that had been preserved from the original culture. 

     When my wife and I attended the Chickahominy Fall Festival and Powwow in1993, there were three wooden posts with carved faces in their tops at the center of the dance arena. Anyone familiar with drawings of Delaware or Secotan dances in colonial times will recognize such carved posts as a common trait of coastal Algonquins. Whether they were used by the aboriginal Chickahominy is immaterial. They are symbols that identify them with Indians who occupied the Tidewater area in colonial times, and this is their primary function. The two Chickahominy bands are among seven groups now recognized by the State of Virginia as American Indian tribes. They, the Nansemond, and the Monacans of Amherst hold annual powwows which draw a fair number of white spectators, and all seven groups hold an intertribal powwow in Richmond in November. 

     Captain Nelson, chief of the Rappahannocks in 1973, and his wife had some real surprises to tell. The group has a tradition of descent from the chief's namesake, a British officer who married the daughter of the Rappahannock chief sometime in the late 1600s. Although all legal documents relating to the group were lost when the Essex County Courthouse was destroyed in a fire in the early 1870s, there is no case in memory of a child born to a Rappahannock and an African-American. It is difficult to imagine there was much chance of an exception. Captain Nelson shared the surprising information that there had been a small Rappahannock community of two birch-bark-covered longhouses, each over 120 feet long, in thick woods only miles from his back door until after the Civil War. Mrs. Nelson had inherited a diary kept by a great aunt who had been a resident. Each longhouse was inhabited by a matrilineal clan (descent from a common ancestress through mothers only); whose members were obliged to marry members of the other clan. That is, the two clans were also moieties. Succession to leadership was from mother's brother to sister's son. The diary even included a vocabulary of some 300 words in the Rappahannock language or dialect. 

     How was it possible for an Indian tribe to preserve their traditional settlement pattern and aboriginal culture for so long and near the Rappahannock River, which was the scene of major battles between the Union and Confederate armies? One explanation is that the longhouse community was so isolated that outsiders may have been unaware of its existence. The impressive height of many Rappahannock men may have made any whites who saw them for the first time believe others who think they were deranged if they reported it. Captain Nelson remarked that the group had a basketball team made up of teenage boys all over seven feet tall! Captain Nelson's uncle had been the Indian giant (7'9") employed by the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1940s and '50s. Mrs. Nelson placed a whole loaf of bread in a size 22 shoe the man had worn! 

     The longhouse community was abandoned after the Civil War, and the isolation of its residents ended as they experienced varying degrees of contact with whites and acculturation. The traditional culture described in the diary was gradually lost. There was one living medicine man who conducted traditional curing ceremonies and an annual rite surely associated with the aboriginal religion. The entire group gathered at a spring in rural Essex County, where the medicine man invoked a female spirit supposed to live at the bottom and everyone tossed in small bundles of tobacco, red maize, and meat. The medicine man, who was said to be the only person able to speak Rappahannock, then prayed for bountiful crops and the health and prosperity of group members in the indigenous language. He was in his eighties and attempting to teach the language and traditional ceremonies to a grandson, who seemed more interested in basketball and girls. It seemed inevitable to the Nelsons that the elder's linguistic and ceremonial knowledge would die with him. 

     There were elders who had preserved traditional crafts, such as weaving oak-splint baskets, making bags consisting of chain-linked bracts from pine cones, and hand-made bows and arrows. They were using the group's American Baptist church to conduct classes for the young people. But the Nelsons feared this was not enough to give the Rappahannock's a sense of group solidarity. I suggested that it seemed the ceremony at the spring had been a focal point of this in the past. If some group members saw this ceremony. 

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