Kinfolks: Falling off the family tree: the search for my Melungeon ancestors

Another book I read recently that I really enjoyed was by Lisa Alther

Alther hails from Kingsport, Tennessee - a town I once spent an hour in waiting for a north-bound Greyhound bus after my martyred 1988 Chevrolet Caprice Estate Wagon slid off an ice-and-snow-covered logging road and caught fire in a ditch on top of High Knob in Jefferson National Forest, near Norton Virginia. The old man running the station picked out tunes on a mandolin while we waited for the bus. I'd have been transfixed, but I was really pissed off about my lost car.

Alther narrates a free-wheeling tour of her attempt to trace her family's history. Suspecting her grandmother concealed a past she was ashamed of - for reasons involving the stigma of miscegenation, Alther sets off to uncover the truth. Her stories about life in 1950's East Tennessee were at least as compelling to read about as the mythic and mysterious origins of the Melungeons.

Alther moved North for college decades ago, settling in Vermont. She too was a part of the Appalachian brain drain. She married a Yankee and surrounded herself with poets, feminists, and other intellectual types who she both craved as a child, and often felt misunderstood by. As Joe Bageant noted in his Australian TV interview, "Southerners are famous...for having a love-hate relationship with their hometowns." I think some small-town Yankees might sympathise with that too.

Alther compares the spectacle of drunk Tennesseans being carried downriver on a pontoon boat accompanied by the portable-stereo blasted audio backdrop of Southern rock alongside the image of fitness-minded Yankees windsurfing, sailing, and swimming. She concludes that the two regional cultures have vastly different ways of experiencing both watersports and the outdoors, and that Yankees work really hard at leisure activities.

She also argues - and I believe effectively - that the greatest difference between Southerners and Yankees is that Southerners can enjoy making a fool out of themselves and looking ridiculous. Yankees, on the other hand, cannot bear the embarrassment and have to work really hard to feign dignity all the time.

I think this is a marvelous observation and a dichotomy I often noticed firsthand, being a product of families from both Kentucky and Ohio and having spent my entire life on the border between the two.

Trying to look dignified is usually a lot more work than it is worth. And then you miss a out on a lot of fun activites - take pie-eating contests for instance. There's also no way to wrestle a greased pig or drive in a demolition derby without being able to laugh at yourself.

Vive la Spectacle de White Trash!