A Possible End to the Mystery of Melungeons

By Henry Robert Burke

     I am rather proud of the fact that after all the different ideas that have been expressed about Melungeons in recent years, there has been surprisingly little hostility shown between researchers. I think this is a very encouraging sign and I hope the good will continues, because I can see the possibility of some answers. It is my feeling that the Riddle of the Melungeons will finally be understood. In the end, I believe that all of us researchers will have been a little bit right and all of us researchers will have been a little bit wrong, but that all of will have enjoyed and profited from each others research.

     To me Melungeons are a tremendously interesting subject. No matter what the final conclusion turns out to be, Melungeons are exclusively American. The term Melungeon would hardly fit in any language except (American) English. Melungeon Culture would hardly be appropriate anyplace except Appalachia. Melungeons hardly matter to anyone except Melungeons and perhaps a few sociologists. Could it be possible that Melungeon and American mean the same thing?

     What does the word Melungeon mean? The dictionary or encyclopedia does not even carry a definition for the word. The word Melungeon means different things to different people. To some it may mean a culture or sub-culture, to some it may mean an ethnic group and to some it may mean a lifestyle. There are names like Black Dutch, Black Irish and dozens of other terms which may connected the word Melungeon. The word has connotations with Native American, African American and with people from the Middle East. Perhaps when incorporated, all of the above apply to Melungeons.

     We have all researched, we have all postulated, we have all developed theories, but to date, no one seems to have been able to prove anything conclusive, except that Melungeons appear to have originated in Appalachia and we all knew that when we started.

     The good news is, that we now have DNA analysis to sort out the genealogy of any given human being or group of human beings. DNA is the abbreviation for deoxyribonucleic acid organic chemical a complex molecular structure that is found in all prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and in many viruses. DNA codes genetic information for the transmission of inherited traits.

     Genetic studies have been used to help decipher the origins of human populations and the history of their movements across the world. In the 1960's, genetic studies focused on differences in proteins and blood groups to reconstruct relationships among human populations.

     With the advent of the new genetic technology based on the study of recombinant DNA the focus has shifted to the abundant variation found in the hereditary material of DNA. The small, circular DNA found in the mitochondria (mtDNA) of the cytoplasm of our cells has been particularly useful for tracing maternal lineages of contemporary populations to their ancestral roots. These kinds of studies have begun to produce a preliminary picture of how contemporary populations are related to each other.

     (For example), a pattern has emerged indicating a considerable degree of genetic differentiation among Siberian populations, especially among those populations living in the extreme North. These differences may be due in part to random fluctuations (genetic drift) caused by low population densities and small tribal numbers in this region. On the other hand, genetic data have demonstrated a close resemblance between the aboriginal Siberian tribes living east of the Yenisey River and northern Mongoloid populations, and similarities among populations dwelling to the west of the Yenisey River and to some European populations. This same technology can be used to solve the riddle of the origins of Melungeons!

     But do we really want to solve the mystery of the origins of Melungeons? I even wonder about my own motives. I know I will miss researching about the mysterious Melungeons. This has been a great adventure for me. I have met some wonderful people and enjoyed some lively discussions concerning the subject. When there is no longer any mystery, I wonder what I will have to concentrate on. This situation reminds me of a line from a movie named KING KONG. Kong was a fictional giant Ape who had for many years, terrorized an isolated primitive population of humans on a small remote island. Kong was both feared and revered by the island's natives, yet ironically he also gave the incentive. Then the island was discovered by modern men. They captured and removed King King to America. Someone commented that the natives were lucky to be rid of that monster. A wiser voice spoke up and stated very eloquently, that the natives had lost their god, i.e., their best friend. After Kong was gone, they had anything to motivate them. Without Kong, life on the island was so easy that social decay ensued and most of the natives became drunks.

     Well, I am so confident that DNA will at least give us some very good answers, that I am already looking for some interesting new project of research. I have enjoyed researching the Melungeons. It has occupied a fair amount of my time and has in fact taken a fair amount of my energy. I am seriously going to miss the hours of pondering over possible explanations. My only consolation is that be I will not be alone in misery!

     My Case for Gypsy or Roma Origins of the Melungeon Appalachian Sub-Culture - is based in part on the history of how Gypsies were treated in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and later in the Americas.

     The Roma, or "Gypsies," entered south-eastern Europe in the last quarter of the 13th Century, caught up in the Ottoman expansion westwards. Originating in India as a composite, non-Aryan military population assembled to resist the Muslim incursions led by the Ghaznavids, they left through the Hindu Kush during the first quarter of the 11th Century, moving through Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine Empire towards the West. (Hancock, 1995:17-28).

     The condition of slavery in Eastern Europe emerged later, out of the increasingly stringent measures taken by the landowners, the court and the monasteries to prevent their Romani labor force from leaving the principalities, as they were beginning to do in response to the ever more burdensome demands upon their skills, and from the shift of their "limited fiscal dependency upon the Romanian princes" to an "unlimited personal dependency on the big landlords of the country, the monasteries and the boyars" (Gheorghe, 1983:23).

     The Code of Basil the Wolf of Moldavia, dated 1654, contained references to the treatment of slaves, including the death penalty in the case of the rape of a white woman by a Rom. (The same offense committed by a non-Rom warranted no punishment, according to the same Code). Gheorghe (loc. cit.) saw the process of the enslavement of Roma as an abuse committed by the feudal landlords, without any legal base or legitimation; certainly their outsider status denied Roma any power to resist, and qualified them for this status according to the Islamic world-view of the occupying Ottomans, for whom dominated non-Muslim populations were "fit only for enslavement" (Sugar, 1964:103). By the 1500s, the terms rob and tsigan had become synonymous with "slave," although the latter was originally a neutral ethnonym applied by the Europeans to the first Roma. The fact that in 1995 tsigan was adopted by the Romanian government as the official designation for Roma in that country has generated much pain and anger, and is indicative of the ongoing racism against the Romani minority in contemporary Romania. (See Szente, 1996, and Zenk, 1991).

Slave Sale Advertisement

"For sale, a prime lot of Gypsy slaves, to be sold by auction at the Monastery of St.Elias, 8 May 1852, consisting of 18 men, 10 boys, 7 women and 3 girls: in fine condition." Wallachia. (From Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome, 1987.)

     House slaves were forbidden to speak Romani, and their descendants, the Beyash (also Boyash or Bayash), today have a variety of Romanian, a Latin-based language, rather than Romani, as their mother tongue. Female house slaves were also provided to visitors for sexual entertainment (Colson, 1839); the half-white children of such unions automatically became slaves. In the 16th Century, a Romani child sold for the equivalent of 48¢. By the 19th Century, slaves were sold by weight, at the rate of one gold piece per pound. Treatment of the slaves included flogging, the falague or shredding the soles of the feet with a whip, cutting off of the lips, burning with lye, and wearing a three-cornered spiked iron collar called a cangue. Slaves were able to escape periodically and take refuge in maroon communities in the Carpathian mountains; these are called netoti in the literature.

     By 1800 the laws codified by Basil the Wolf in 1654 had been forgotten, and the treatment of the slaves had become a matter of the whim of those in charge of the estates or the monasteries. The Ottoman court attempted to make the laws more stringent, and in 1818 incorporated into the Wallachian Penal code the following laws: §2 "Gypsies are born slaves," §3 "Anyone born of a mother who is a slave, is also a slave," §5 "Any owner has the right to sell or give away his slaves," and §6 "Any Gypsy without an owner is the property of the Prince." But Ottoman rule was thwarted by a takeover by the Russians in 1826, and Paul Kisseleff was appointed governor in 1829. He was firmly opposed to slavery, but because of pressure from the boyars, among other things, he did not abolish it. Instead in 1833 he incorporated stringent, conservative revisions in the Moldavian civil code, including the following: §II(154) "Legal unions cannot take place between free persons and slaves," §II(162) "Marriage between slaves cannot take place without their owner's consent," §II(174) "The price of a slave must be fixed by the Tribunal, according to his age, condition and profession," and §II(176) "If anyone has taken a female slave as a concubine, she will become free after his death. If he has had any children by her, they will also become free."

     While the enslavement of Roma in the Balkans is the most extensively documented, Gypsies have also been enslaved at different times in other parts of the world. In Renaissance England King Edward VI passed a law stating that Gypsies be "branded with a V on their breast, and then enslaved for two years," and if they escaped and were recaptured, they were then branded with an S and made slaves for life. During the same period in Spain, according to a decree issued in 1538, Gypsies were enslaved for perpetuity to individuals as a punishment for escaping. Spain had already begun shipping Gypsies to the Americas in the 15th century; three were transported by Columbus to the Caribbean on his third voyage in 1498.

     Spain's later Solucion Americans involved the shipping of Gypsy slaves to its colony in 18th century Louisiana. An Afro-Gypsy community today lives in St. Martin's Parish, and reportedly there is another one in central Cuba, both descended from intermarriage between the two enslaved peoples. In the 16th century, Portugal shipped Gypsies as an unwilling labor force to its colonies in Maranhão (now Brazil), Angola and even India, the Romas' country of origin which they had left five centuries earlier. They were made Slaves of the Crown in 18th century Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, while in Scotland during the same period they were employed "in a state of slavery" in the coal mines.

     England and Scotland shipped Roma to Virginia and the Caribbean as slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries; John Morton, in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), describes seeing "many Gypsies (in Jamaica) subject from the age of eleven to thirty to the prostitution and lust of overseers, book-keepers, Negroes, &c. (and) taken into keeping by gentlemen who paid exorbitant hire for their use."

     A large measure of my thesis rests with the fact that a substantial number of Gypsies were brought to North America. In general, the Gypsies became dispersed through out the American population as Black Dutch, Black Irish, Melungeons and various other descriptive names. Some mixed with Native Americans, some mixed with African Americans and many mixes with European Americans. Some of the Gypsies who migrated to Appalachia as groups, formed the basis for the Melungeon Culture. With this I rest my case, for now I am confident that there is sufficient incentive to warrant the DNA Study that I have been suggesting for a few years.