Read Online Kinfolks by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online

which looks increasingly unlikely.
    This prognosis is confirmed when I hear a soft murmuring above me that includes the name of Jesus. A nun is standing over me telling her rosary beads.
    Don’t talk to me about Christ’s suffering on the cross, I silently rage. Did Jesus push a bowling ball through the nozzle of a pastry bag with his stomach muscles? As I scowl at this presumed virgin in black, the next contraction hits me.
    When it’s over, I’m enchanted with the results — a tiny baby girl as exhausted as I am. Richard assures me she has no extra digits.
    To occupy myself while my daughter Sara naps, I decide that either I can watch
As the World Turns
or I can write my own soap opera. I start my first novel. When Sara is awake, I put her in a backpack and we hike through the woods and pastures. Or she toddles around the yard tormenting the dog as I garden. Or she plays with pot lids on the kitchen floor as I can tomatoes or make raspberry jam.
    While she sleeps, I write about a character who doesn’t know who she is. She tries on roles as though they’re Halloween costumes, but none fits — including Earth Motherhood.
    My current problem is that I don’t do drugs. When people pass joints at parties, I diligently inhale. But instead of collapsing into hysterical laughter over bad jokes, I fall asleep, confirming my lifelong reputation as a drag.
    In addition, because of my occasional bouts of melancholy I’m leery of introducing outside chemicals into the already noxious soup my body can brew for itself. And I’ve read that magic mushrooms are sometimes dried apples injected with hog tranquilizer.
    One of my father’s favorite stories concerns his treating a dozen people for lockjaw one night at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York. They all attended a party at which they shot up heroin cut on a dusty mantel. The dust gave all these hip fun-seekers tetanus.
    One afternoon I find myself leaving Sara with Richard and driving to the University of Vermont library to look up those six-fingered bogeymen of my youth — the Melungeons.
    I learn that they were a group of olive-skinned people found living in what is now northeastern Tennessee by the early European settlers. In 1782, John Sevier reputedly found “white Indians” in that area. They themselves said they were “Portyghee.” But certain seemingly non-Portuguese surnames are associated with them — Collins, Mullins, Goins, Boiling, and Gibson being the most common. Most researchers source the name Melungeon to the French word
melange
, meaning “mixed.”
    I picture my high school classmates who bore those surnames, but I can’t recall any distinguishing characteristics. They had many different shades of eye, hair, and skin, and none had six fingers.
    My sources divide into two hostile camps. The Romantics ascribe Melungeon origins to Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, to survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, to deserters from sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions, or to other exotic sources too far-fetched even for someone as gullible as myself. Normally I’ll believe anything for a while, but wayward Phoenicians in Appalachia nudge me over the edge.
    The Academics, however, insist that the Melungeons are merely one of some two hundred groups of “tri-racial isolates” numbering around 100,000 people, found throughout the southeastern United States as far west as Louisiana and as far north as New Jersey. These communities — with names like the Red-bones and the Brass Ankles, the Moors and the Turks — are said to be the product of early mixing on the frontier among natives, free blacks, escaped slaves, European fur traders, et al. Some were labeled “free persons of color” in census records.
    In 1891, Nashville journalist Will Allen Dromgoole visited some Melungeons and described them as “natural born