Melungeon Portraits by Tamara L. Stachowicz

Author:Tamara L. Stachowicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2018-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Angela (Johnson) Blankenship in 2015.

We discuss the $99 offer at Ancestry.com and how that could help connect to others on the site to possibly better define what lines are related to her family. She ponders this for a while as she considers what kind of evidence she would need to feel she was or was not Melungeon. “I would need DNA or documentation possibly—and that would depend on what kind of documentation it was. Because if it came from the mountains–I don’t know—because those things were all altered.” She continues by adding a story about a friend who found out later in life that her grandmother was black. Her parents had left the area and didn’t maintain any connection with that part of the family. When she found out, she thought, “Oh, that explains it.” The family loyalty comes up again though as she worries about the future implications of genetic testing.

“If I was to get genetic testing right now, I would be fine, okay—but you don’t know what the climate is going to be in fifty years. If it is documented would I be able to hide if things changed? Especially if we have proof—you don’t know what is ever to say we won’t ever face that again. I think that is why our grandparents think the way they do—my ninety-three-year-old grandma is still preparing for the next depression. When you are really down there and people have worked so hard to out run that stigma, you don’t want to go back. What if they find out I’m black, or Portuguese, or Middle Eastern—what will happen? I can see where people would worry about that and not want to know—I can see how my grandma wouldn’t want to know. She found out that there were slaveholders in her family and she is very disturbed by that—she had prided herself in her family never being like that. She would never tell me that—she told my aunt who told my dad who told me. She is afraid of the backlash—like—what if the black neighbors found out that her family owned slaves? Is it realistic today? Who knows? Maybe in some areas it is!”

It is at this juncture that she turns to her own physical characteristics. She didn’t realize how much different she looked until her oldest son, Christopher, was asked by a classmate if his mom was part black. Angela came from the era of sun-tanning and sporting a deep bronze glow during the summer, so at first she didn’t think much about it. However, she recalls considering the comment while standing in line at a department store and noticing that her skin was darker than the African-American woman in front of her. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I guess I can see how kids would ask that.’” Still, even with the explanations of a Cherokee grandma, that reasoning never came to mind when examining her looks.

“Now my Grandma Smith, Mom’s mom, said she was ‘Black Dutch,’ whatever that is,” she laughs. “She also said they were from the Netherlands.

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