Melungeons explore mysterious mixed-race origins

In 1947, DruAnna Williams Overbay's schoolteacher mother sent her down to the mailbox at recess. She started flipping through that week's edition of the Saturday Evening Post and saw pictures of her neighbors she knew in Hancock County, Tennessee.

The little girl read a word describing them all that she'd never heard before: Melungeon.

She was showing the pictures to the other children until her mother snatched the magazine away.

"She didn't want me to know about Melungeons," Overbay, 73, recalled. "In my mother's family, they said we were 'Portugee,' That's what they called Portuguese."

Melungeons, the mysterious dark-skinned mountaineers of eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia and into Kentucky, have sparked myths and theories over the past century. They were whispered to be descendants of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, or gypsies now known as Roma. Some have speculated on connections with the Lumbee Indians in Robeson County or the Lost Colonists of the Outer Banks.

The name likely comes from the French "melange," a slur most often used by suspicious white neighbors in the days of the Jim Crow South, when African-Americans and anyone with dark skin faced prejudice and segregation.

What's certain is that Melungeon students like Overbay came to Asheville for boarding school and to Warren Wilson College, which welcomed poorer Appalachian students of all backgrounds.

More than 100 descendants, experts and others are expected to attend the 19th annual conference of the Melungeon Heritage Association June 26-27 at Warren Wilson.

Who are the Melungeon?

"In Tennessee, they are a people of more or less unknown origin. We assume there is some African ancestry, so the Melungeons largely kept to themselves," said Wayne Winkler, a professor at East Tennessee State University and author of the 2004 book "Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia."

At age 12, Winkler learned his father's family hailed from Hancock County and had Melungeon roots, fueling his lifelong fascination and academic career with the community.

He wanted desperately to see the outdoor drama "Walking Toward the Sunset," a story about the Melungeons, staged in remote Hancock County in the 1960s. The script was written by Kermit Hunter, best known for "Unto These Hills," which opened in 1950 in Cherokee. Hunter also wrote the Daniel Boone drama "Horn in the West," still staged each summer in Boone.

Kathy Lyday, too, was fascinated by the play and legends about Melungeons. Growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, she remembers reading newspaper accounts of a different kind of mountaineer in the east Tennessee mountains. Now a professor at Elon University, Lyday has researched Melungeons appearing in literature and periodicals over the past century. Lyday has been a regular participant at the annual conferences of the Melungeon Heritage Association.

"Melungeons are clearly not like the mountaineers I knew. They look different. They have darker skin, darker hair and blue eyes. In older photos, their physical appearance looks almost Mediterranean or Middle Eastern," Lyday said.

A Spanish influence is likely, given that the Southwest and the mountains were explored and settled. Hernando de Soto trooped through the region in 1540 in the first contact with whites for many Native American tribes.

In 1567, Captain Juan Pardo brought an army of 125 men to Joara, an Indian town in Burke County, and built a fort — the oldest European garrison in the interior of North America.

"We know there were Spanish explorers as far west as modern day Morganton," Lyday said. "They likely brought African slaves with them. They probably intermarried, and when the Spanish retreated, they left behind remnants."

"People migrated looking for better land. One of my theories is that perhaps we followed Daniel Boone's route through the Cumberland Gap. We went straight up what's now I-26 to Vardy," Overbay said.

Researchers have theorized that Melungeons may have been a mixture of European, African and Native Americans. A DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy in 2012 found that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

Overbay said DNA testing in her family shows about 98 percent European and 2 percent African genetic background while other Melungeon families show other mixtures.

In the segregated South, any trace of black blood mattered legally. Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924, the so-called "one drop" rule that would strip anyone of mixed race from white legal privileges.

Welcomed at Warren Wilson

The quest to better themselves led many Melungeon students to the Asheville area.

"My mother, Alyce Horton, her siblings and several of her cousins from Vardy, Tennessee, attended the Pease Home School in the 1910s. They were taken by wagon to Ben Hur, Virginia, where they caught the train to Asheville," Overbay said.

Pease Home School was a Presybterian educational mission, part of what was called the Asheville Normal School on McDowell Street, which later combined with the Asheville Farm School to form Warren Wilson College.

Other Vardy students attended the Dorland Institute in Hot Springs, also later to fold into Warren Wilson.

In 1959, Overbay took the bus from Knoxville to Warren Wilson, started as a high school and then a junior college. There, she had an African-American roommate, which she didn't think twice about.

Warren Wilson itself had been early to integrate before most Southern colleges. Alma Shippey, of Swannanoa, was the first black student to attend the school in 1952, two years before landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Sunderland residents voted 54-1 to welcome the young Swannanoa man into their dorm.

"Warren Wilson had a real concern to do the right thing," said Rodney Lytle, the college's alumni director. "Alma helped break down the Confederate Bars of hate when it was almost illegal for races to mix in schools and in public."

Overbay's Melungeon heritage didn't much matter in 1959 on the diverse campus, where she worked on the student newspaper. "I dreamed of becoming Brenda Starr," she laughed. Going on to earn her master's from University of Tennessee, Overbay made her career teaching English for 46 years.

But Overbay encountered discrimination for the first time in Asheville. She remembers her friend being asked to leave a lunch counter at a drug store on Pack Square.

In a more diverse United States with celebrities like Tiger Woods or movie star Dwayne Johnson, let alone a president, Barack Obama, who was born to a white mother and an African father, fewer people find stigma in having mixed-race heritage.

Whether the Melungeons will continue as an identity into the future remains to be seen, Lyday and Winkler said.

The reality is that Melungeons through history were often shunned and pushed off to the edges of the economy. "Hancock County is still the poorest county in Tennessee, and I hear there is still discrimination. People still whisper," Lyday said. "Because they have different colored skin, from the very beginning, they were ostracized. It wouldn't mattered if they were green, purple or red. They weren't white."