"Kinfolks" | Of six fingers and the evil eye

"Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree — The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors"
by Lisa Alther
Arcade, 241 pp., $25

Lisa Alther, author of five novels including her best-selling 1976 debut, "Kinflicks," rides that book's reputation in her aptly titled, first nonfiction work, "Kinfolks." Ten years of research and writing have produced a happy hodgepodge: part memoir, part travelogue, part genealogy, part history — all triggered by her tangled roots.

Raised in Tennessee, where her Virginia-born father and New York-born mother seemed to re-enact the Civil War on a daily basis, Alther was uncertain where her mutt bloodlines landed her. Her childhood playmates insisted "Yankees were rude," while her New York cousins claimed "Southerners were stupid."

One day, things became yet more confusing. A "gray-haired baby-sitter with crooked brown teeth" informed her three rowdy charges that the Melungeons would get them for misbehaving.

"What's the Melungeons?" Alther asks. She's been asking that question ever since, as have scholars and historians, who have studied this mysterious population for the past 300 years.

Alther's baby-sitter claimed that Melungeons have six fingers on each hand and drag bad children to cliff caves outside town. Others believe them to be a multiracial Appalachian group — Melungeon may derive from the French word, mélange, or "mixed" — whose origins could include Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, 16th century deserters from Spanish expeditions, or even wayward Phoenicians. Some academics favor Moors and/or Turks, others Native Americans and/or Africans. Melungeons supposedly have the evil eye, a myth probably due to their strikingly blue eyes. Other recurring features among these people in certain rural mountain settings of the Southeast include dark hair and olive skin.

Alther's fascination waxes and wanes as years pass. Her account, in memoir mode for about the first half, becomes a more concentrated investigation of her family tree after a friend gives her a book by "self-acknowledged Melungeon" Brent Kennedy, who turns out to be a cousin. She meets him, finding a tanned, blue-eyed man with wavy dark hair and scars where his extra thumbs had been removed.

Now the plot thickens. For some reason, her Cadillac-driving grandmother has distanced herself from family ties in Virginia. Why? Could her father have Melungeon ancestors? Friends, Alther admits, can't fathom this growing fixation. But Southerners, she explains, "feel we scarcely exist except as an extension of our ancestors."

Setting off on travels and research, Alther provides a fascinating look into early American history, when Old World explorers and settlers turned up in the New World bringing disease, demanding help, intermarrying and profoundly changing indigenous populations. Less interesting are lengthy details about DNA and her extended family. In fact, sometimes the joking wears thin, the line between funny and unkind blurs.

At any rate, as with most big questions, results are mixed. The journey proves more rewarding than conclusive, as Alther turns her lively curiosity loose on issues of race, privilege, identity and what it means to be a part of the "all-American stir-fry."