the chance of a lifetime here.
But he would not be moved. 'I don't want to hear any more about it. Now let's all get in the car and drive I-75 miles to the Molasses Point Historical Battlefield. You'll learn lots of worth while things about the little-known American war with Ecuador of 1802 and it won't cost me a penny.'
So I went through the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and I savored every artifact and tasteless oddity. It was outstanding. I mean honestly, where else are you going to see a replica of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, made entirely of chicken bones? And how can you possibly put a price on seeing an eightfoot-long model of the Circus Maximus constructed of sugar cubes, or the death mask of John Dillinger, or a room made entirely of matchsticks by one Reg Polland of Manchester, England (well done, Reg; Britain is proud of you)? We are talking lasting memories here. I was pleased to note that England was further represented by, of all things, a chimney pot, circa 1940.
Believe it or not. It was all wonderful-clean, nicely presented, sometimes even believable-and I spent a happy hour there.
Afterwards, feeling highly content, I purchased an ice cream cone the size of a baby's head and wandered with it through the crowds of people in the afternoon sunshine. I went into a series of gift shops and tried on baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim, but the cheapest one I saw was $7.99
and I decided, out of deference to my father, that that would be just too much extravagance for one afternoon. If it came to it, I could always make my own, I thought as I returned to the car and headed for the dangerous hills of Appalachia.
CHAPTER 10
IN 1587, a group of 115 English settlers-men, women and children-sailed from Plymouth to set up the first colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Shortly after they arrived, a child named Virginia Dare was born and thus became the first white person to arrive in America headfirst. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to see how the settlers were getting on and to bring them their mail and tell them that the repairman from British Telecom had finally shown up and that sort of thing. But when the relief party arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There was no message of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a wall: 'Croatoan.' This was the name of a nearby island where the Indians were known to be friendly, but a trip to the island showed that the settlers had never arrived there. So where did they go? Did they leave voluntarily or were they spirited off by Indians? This has long been one of the great mysteries of the Colonial period.
I bring this up here because one theory is that the settlers pushed inland, up into the hills of Appalachia, and settled there. No one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, 'had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate.'
No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans-blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build-but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names-- Bro-gan, Collins, Mullins-but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may be the lost settlers of Roanoke.
Peter Dunn, a colleague at the Independent in London, put me onto the Melungeon story when he heard that I was going to that part of the world, and kindly dug out an article he had done for the Sunday Times Magazine some years before. This was illustrated with remarkable photographs of Melungeons. It is impossible to describe them except to say that they looked like white Negroes.
They were simply white people with very dark skins. Their appearance was, to say the least, striking. For this reason they have long been outcasts in their own county, consigned to shacks in the hills in an area called Snake Hollow. In Hancock County, 'Melungeon' is equivalent to
'Nigger.' The valley people-who are themselves generally poor and backward-regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely scattered intervals to buy provisions.
They don't like outsiders. Neither do the valley people. Peter Dunn told me that he and the photographer who accompanied him were given a reception that ranged from mild hostility to outright intimidation. It was an uncomfortable assignment. A few months later a reporter from Time magazine was actually shot near Sneedville for asking too many questions.
So you can perhaps imagine the sense of foreboding that seeped over me as I drove up Tennessee Highway 31 through a forgotten landscape of poor and scattered tobacco farms, through the valley of the twisting Clinch River, en route to Sneedville. This was the seventh poorest county in the nation and it looked it. Litter was adrift in the ditches and most of the farmhouses were small and unadorned. In every driveway there stood a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back window, and where there were people in the yards they stopped what they were doing to watch me as I passed. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, when I reached Sneedville. Outside the Hancock County Courthouse a group of teenagers were perched on the fronts of pickup trucks, talking to each other, and they too stared at me as I passed. Sneedville is so far from anywhere, such an improbable destination, that a strangers car attracts notice. There wasn't much to the town: the courthouse, a Baptist church, some box houses, a gas station. The gas station was still open, so I pulled in. I didn't particularly need gas, but I wasn't sure when I would find another station. The guy who came out to pump the gas had an abundance of fleshy warts-a veritable crop- scattered across his face like button mushrooms. He looked like a genetic experiment that had gone horribly wrong. He didn't speak except to establish what kind of gas I wanted and he didn't remark on the fact that I was from out of state. This was the first time on the trip that a gas station attendant hadn't said in an engaging manner, 'You're a long way from home, aren'tcha?' or 'What brings you all the way here from I-o-way?' or something like that. (I always told them that I was on my way east to have vital heart surgery in the hope that they would give me extra Green Stamps.) I was very probably the first person from out of state this man had seen all year, yet he appeared resolutely uninterested in what I was doing there. It was odd. I said to him-blurted really-'Excuse me, but didn't I read somewhere that some people called Melungeons live around here somewhere?'
He didn't answer. He just watched the pump counter spin. I thought he hadn't heard me, so I said, 'I say, excuse me, but didn't I hear that some people-'
'Don't know,' he said abruptly without looking at me. Then he looked at me. 'Don't know nothin'
about that. You want your oil checked?'
