Lisa Alther's Hilarious Genealogical Romp

By Amy Lilly

When Lisa Alther's paternal cousin suggested that they might be related to the Melungeons, a little-understood ethnic minority located in the Appalachians, Alther had her DNA tested. The test, while not capable of pinpointing Melungeon heritage, revealed that her chromosomes had originated in "Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa." Her DNA, she states in her introduction to Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors, made her a "citizen of the world." It also brought a sense of belonging to a writer with, in her words, "a chronic identity crisis."

That Alther, born in Tennessee, has determined her genealogical origins is good; we are happy for her. Why one would want to read another 230 pages about this fact--unless we are related to Lisa Alther--is at first a mystery. As it turns out, though, Kinfolks, despite a confusing double subtitle, is really both a memoir and a wide-ranging American history lesson, each receiving roughly equal space. Not to mention a wealth of information on the Melungeons, a (perhaps) tri-racial group of (perhaps) fewer than 100,000 people whose identity can be pinned down with about the same precision as that of local lake monster, Champ. (Champ is, in fact, sighted by Alther's family at a lakeside reunion and duly reported to a weeping man on the other end of the Champ hotline.)

Alther's memories of childhood and early adulthood, the first part of the book, are related with a storyteller's sensibility and a wonderfully deadpan humor. Alther has fictionalized parts of her life in five previous books, all novels; the title of the first, Kinflicks, is clearly echoed here. (If you haven't read her novels, this book might be a good introduction to them: each one gets a recap, a context, and the occasional retaliatory stab at mean reviewers.) Like most eastern Tennesseans of her era, she first learned of the "evil" Melungeons as a child, when a babysitter informed her of their six-fingered hands and cave dwellings just outside her town, Kingsport.

For at least this stretch of her life, Alther's struggle to establish her identity had less to do with racial genealogy than with cultural difference. Her father, a doctor, was a Southerner whose parents were from Virginia; his mother in particular claimed lineage blue-blooded enough to please the Daughters of the American Revolution. But Alther's mother came from upstate New York, and by making sure Lisa and her three brothers were able to pronounce "cow" as a single-syllable word, she also ensured that they would never be perceived as true Southerners.

A privileged childhood was tempered by her parents' horror of spending money. One memory runs: "My mother is clipping the boxwoods [...] with scissors. There are one hundred sixteen bushes, and she trims four a day all year round. That way we never need to pay a yardman's exorbitant rates." Another quips: "It's summer, and we don't have any fans. We don't buy things that aren't on sale, and who ever heard of a fan sale in the South?" Instead, the family buys a 300-acre tobacco farm with a cabin to escape their Georgian house in the summertime. (This is in fact one of the few ironies on which Alther's dryly humorous, pared-down voice remains silent-perhaps the only one.)

Growing up with three brothers meant playing Trail of Tears (complete with Indian ceremonial dance reenactments), World War II (a medical triage game involving homemade mud pills), and fierce football skirmishes. Lisa and her friend Ellen are the only girls on the Longview Losers--until they're pressured to leave the team. Another avenue of belonging has been shut off, not to mention the camaraderie: "Being pounded into the mud by hoods from across town on a weekly basis is a bonding experience like no other."

Some scraps in this episodic memoir section are like jewels from a forgotten American past: riding the town's first escalator; seeing a Lone Ranger movie--which launches Lisa and her young friends into a discussion of why he is "Lone" when Tonto, "loyal as a teacher's pet," is always at his side. One memory involves the lynching of an elephant that crushed a child underfoot, after the boy "gouged her with his goad" for trying to pick up a watermelon tossed to her. The book's selection of black and white photos includes a grotesque, grainy photograph of "Murderous Mary" hanging from a crane.

Oddly, the presence of African Americans is nearly erased in this part of the book, supplanted by Native Americans-the other Other-and by lynched elephants. Only later in the book do such apparently suppressed memories come to the fore, as in Alther's strange meeting as an adult with the African American nanny who took care of her and her brothers until Lisa was approximately five. Alther embraces the woman before knowing why, acting merely on emotional memory; the ex-nanny stands with arms rigidly at her side. Indeed, the fear of Melungeon ancestry itself, a taboo topic for all white families in Alther's account of growing up, looks like a screen for the real fear of black-white miscegenation. Melungeon ancestry, by the way, is still only a vague hint during the memoir section. Alther's baby sister, born as Lisa is heading into college, turns out to be curiously dark-skinned-but Lisa's attempts to learn of a possible Cherokee ancestor from tight-lipped Grandma go nowhere.

College at Wellesley means a reverse experience of discrimination: suddenly she is nothing but a Southerner, directly responsible for the killing of three civil rights activists in her classmates' eyes. Wellesley begins its work on this country bumpkin with a semester-long class in posture, a speech test (which she passes due to her mother's coaching) and the news that the Civil War was fought to end slavery. She had learned in high school that it was fought "to protect our homeland from invasion by immigrant Yankee riffraff."

Alther does her first research on Melungeons at the University of Vermont library, while living in rural Vermont and raising a daughter with "the Cornell man" she married after graduation from Wellesley. This launches her into a researching frenzy, pursuing her own family tree and the Melungeons' simultaneously. Even their name is a mystery: could it come from the French mélange, for mix? Is it of Turkish origin, since Melungeons refer to a clock by its Turkish word, satz? She decides to pursue the three main theories about Melungeon origins-Spanish explorers fathering children on Indians, shipwrecked Portuguese, and Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony on Roanoke Island.

From this point, Alther's narrative becomes a discussion of history shaped by her travels to the places she is researching. Since her travels-criss-crossing the Southeastern US in a car, with repeated trips back to her parents' Georgian house and country cabin; sailing to Portugal; driving around Turkey; and two extended side trips to London and Paris to write books-take a roundabout route, so does her history.

In certain books, the search for knowledge is as interesting as the knowledge itself-but it is made so by retelling the history as experienced by historical individuals, who become, necessarily, semi-fictionalized characters. In the history half of this book, Alther uses a device that might be summarized as the Civil War Tour, or, Stop and Summarize. Paragraphs of history beginning with "I pull over at a sign announcing" or "Driving around the Northern Neck of Virginia" lead to a weariness that even Alther acknowledges in a late chapter title, "Forbear Fatigue." Fortunately, we are saved by her regular reports on the latest church signboards, a feature of the Southern landscape for which she has a particularly sharp eye. "NOTHING TO BE THANKFUL FOR? TAKE YOUR OWN PULSE," wins the prize one day; another, it's: "NEVER GIVE UP, EVEN MOSES WAS ONCE A BASKET CASE."

If Civil War tours don't phase you, though, Alther's research findings will genuinely astonish in their scope and dismissal of easy answers. (A small sample of her research is included in a bibliography at the back, divided into "On the Melungeons" and "On DNA.") She paints a history of a deeply intermingled America-racially, ethnically, culturally-from its very start, not a pure colony subsequently evolving into a huge melting pot. In other words, her grandmother's claims to pure blue-bloodedness are an impossibility. Some evidence Alther draws on is DNA-based, like the news that Jefferson not only had sexual relations with African Americans but had black heritage himself.

Alther has tracked her verifiable genealogic identity to the--or at least some--ends of the earth in this book. But one has the sneaking suspicion that, could all of us afford to be DNA-tested (a $900 proposition, according to some Internet sites), we would all discover traces of the world's populations in ourselves. That we are all potential "citizens of the world," or in Alther's final, bland conclusion, Americans, strikes me as far less important than the stories we tell about ourselves. Fortunately, Alther has collected in Kinfolks all the material she needs to write a romping, hilarious sixth novel.

Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington, and has written on American short story writers Elizabeth Cullinan and Edward Newhouse for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.