It is here - along the banks of Troublesome Creek - that Benjamin Fugate came in 1802, leaving Moccasin Creek in Russell County, Virginia. He brought his wife, Hannah, and their children, one of whom was named Martin. Though the genealogy of the Fugate family is sketchy and, in places, contradictory, it seems that Martin married a woman named Mary and produced a son named Zachariah.
When Zachariah fell in love with and married Mary Smith, the daughter of Elder Richard Smith, the resulting Fugate children were born ... with blue skin.
Thus began the mysterious presence of the Blue People of Troublesome Creek, and the adjective blue stuck fast as a cockleburr to the Fugate name.
The Blue Fugates. She's a Blue Fugate. Bluer than hell. Blue Fugate.
In the southeastern corner of Kentucky, a world in which skin came in white or black, or occasionally the olive hues of the Melungeons, the Fugate family - and the families they married into: Stacys, Smiths, Ritchies, and Combses - stood out like sore thumbs.
When one of the Combses, a woman with the maiden name of Fugate, came into Ruth Pendergrass' office, "her face and fingernails were almost indigo blue." In an interview reported in the November 1982 issue of Science 82, the now-deceased Pendergrass recalled thinking that the woman was about to have a heart attack. And when blue Luke Combs appeared at the University of Kentucky Medical Center with his wife in tow, the doctors there decided it was time to make the long trip to Perry County to see what was happening.
It was one of those doctors, Madison Cawein, who persisted in unravelling the mystery of the Blue People. The former World War II Army medical technician was in love with the beauty of blood cells: He'd helped find an antidote for cholera and was an early researcher in the search for L-dopa (the drug used to treat Parkinson's disease). And then, in the early 1960s, when America was deep in the space race and life was triple-speeding into the computer age, Cawein took on a new 'raison d'etre: to find an answer to the question that must have rattled through the heads of every Blue Fugate, Combs, Smith and Ritchie along the creek: Why are some of us blue?
Dr. Cawein isn't listed now in the Lexington long-distance information bank, and no one in the University of Kentucky Hematology Department seems to know who or where he is now. So all there is to go on is what science reporter Cathy Trost recounted in her seminal article, "The Blue People of Troublesome Creek":
Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off 'the two mean dogs that everyone had in their front yard,' the doctor and the nurse would spot someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and take off in wild pursuit. By the time they'd get to the top, the person would be gone. Finally, one day when the frustrated doctor was idling inside the Hazard Clinic, Patrick and Rachel Ritchie walked in.
What Cawein reports remembering is the Ritchies' embarrassment about their skin color. " 'Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. Rachel was leaning against a wall. They wouldn't come into the waiting room. You could tell how much it bothered them to be blue.' "
After ruling out heart disease through examination, Cawein began to ask genetic questions, charting the Ritchie family tree with Patrick and Rachel as best they could. The hematologist began to suspect that the people along Troublesome Creek were suffering from methemoglobinemia, a relatively rare hereditary blood disorder stemming from abnormally high blood levels of methomoglobin, a nonfunctional form of hemoglobin. Functional hemoglobin - the substance that carries oxygen - is red. Nonfunctional hemoglobin - methomoglobin - is blue. And so were many of the people living along Troublesome Creek.
The science behind the miracle cure Cawein discovered for methemoglobinemia takes some studying to comprehend; that biochemistry is explained in the sidebar below, "Take One Methylene Blue Pill A Day ... For the Rest of Your Life.''
But it is the people of Troublesome Creek - the social history of Perry County and its tangled family intermarriages - that hold the imagination fast. There are still a few Fugates and Stacys old enough to remember the stories that are the bedrock of Troublesome Creek. And one young enough to be, understandably, a little angry and defensive about what some outsiders make of them.
But that is now. A long time ago, Ray Fugate was born in the Hardburly coal camp and then moved 20 miles back to Troublesome Creek to grow up next to his grandfather, Blue Anse Fugate (born Lorenzo Dow, or LO.), and his great-aunt Loonie (Luna), who, he remembers, was "blue as a fish-hook.”
"My mother and father were third cousins," Ray says matter-of-factly. "But I grew up with a strong admonition not to marry close kin.''
In fact, many of the people along Troublesome Creek did marry their kin, and that intermarriage lies at the root of the Blue People puzzle. Methemoglobinemia results when two carriers of the recessive gene marry and produce children - and if most of the eligible mates belong to families carrying the gene, what you've got are pretty good odds of producing offspring in which the recessive genes become dominant.
The question worth pondering is why? Why intermarriage in the mountains? Was it studied ignorance? Moral turpitude? The answer is quite simple: Cousins married cousins in southeastern Kentucky because there was no one else to marry. Until the railroads came in 1912, fewer than 600 people lived in all of Perry County; just about everyone was descended from one of the pioneer families who'd made their way over the mountains from Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Roads were few, often impassable, and in this natural isolation tank, is it any wonder that recessive genes found one another, producing dwarfism, mental disabilities - and blue people? Intermarriage in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky wasn't a matter of appropriateness or ignorance; it was an inevitability.
"If it hadn't been for the Ritchies and the Combses, we would all be absolute and unmitigated fools!" he says with a smile.
Ray Fugate was of the generation of Kentuckians who found their way out of the mountains: World War II, the Korean War and the promise of jobs in the industrial North put them in contact with the larger world. He served in Korea and recalls clearly his time recovering from a wound in a Tokyo hospital.
"In the next bed was a British soldier, who told me repeatedly that the Turk beside him was giving me odd looks. He was fooling with a Turkish ceremonial knife, and I learned later that he thought I was Greek. He didn't like me much!" Ray was moved to another ward to recover in safety.
In fact, Ray does have Mediterranean features, and the question of whether the Fugate family carries Melungeon blood is an interesting one. The black-and-white family photographs suggest some connection. "When I first heard about the Melungeons, I thought, yes, the Blue Fugates must be connected. When Brent Kennedy described the Melungeon physical traits, I thought immediately of my own family."
Melungeon researcher Brent Kennedy says that he is part Stacy.
"Yes, the 'Blue' Fugates are kin to us. But the blue coloration was the result of a talotable blood condition that's been corrected with medication in more recent generations." They are, it seems, separate genetic inheritances which in some cases overlapped.
Ray Fugate considers himself a privileged man for several reasons. First, to have been part of the last generation to listen to the Elizabethan speech patterns of the Appalachians. "I think about my Aunt Fairlenia (Pharalee) and my mother, who were cut from the same bolt of cloth. Pharalee still said 'thar' for 'there,' and 'fetch' for 'bring.' "
Nowhere were those speech patterns more obvious than in the stories told "over many a hearth, generation after generation." Ray Fugate remembers that "haint" stories abounded when he was growing up, but it is the story of Bad Amos Fugate that he has made his passion in retirement. Legend has it that Bad Amos (from the Blue Fugate side of the family, who were quicker to anger than the milder Black Fugates) killed a woman over a goose, and spent time in the Frankfort, Kentucky prison for the crime.
Which, according to Fugate lore, he did not commit. It was, they say, actually Amos' sister, Phoebe, who killed the woman, and Amos took the rap to spare his pregnant sister.
This code of honor is something about which Ray Fugate speaks eloquently.
"The idea of honor lay at the root of the mountain feuds. You couldn't be a coward - you did what had to be done - but you did it to protect the family honor, and you did it fairly. What happened to Amos - the ambush that resulted in his murder - wasn't honorable. Striking people who were unprepared was the lowest form of human behavior." (See sidebar below, "The Day Bad Amos Fugate Died.")
"They came out of the Benton Combs line - it would take a book as long as an eight-day rain to straighten it all out," Haven says.
Haven Fugate made a fortune in coal, now lives in Lexington and is somewhat skeptical about all the family guesswork being done. "That article from the science magazine - it's got a lot of mistakes. Those doctors got hold of the story and turned it all on its head. They ran up and down the creek and got it all mixed up. I don't have anything agin’ the article - it's just all wrong."
Also riddled with errors, according to Haven, is the Fugate family genealogy posted on the Internet. "There are only a few Fugates left in Perry County, and Mary Fugate, who does the family newsletter out there in Arizona ... well, she doesn't know much about them. Anyone who's really interested in unravelling the mysteries of the Fugate family and those they intermarried with, they'll need to go study the cemeteries of eastern Kentucky.''
But it is to the Internet that the Fugate family has turned for communication. A University of Virginia Website posted by Dr. Robert J. Huskey (people.virginia.edu/-rjh9u/blk ysc82) provides the Web surfer with a copy of the Science 82 article by Cathy Trost, as well as a Blue Fugate genealogical chart. Huskey, a human biology professor, has used the Blue Fugate story as a classic case history of inheritance, biochemical pathways, and the function of oxygen in the human body.
If you go to the Genforum site (genforum.geneology.com/fugate/messages/227.html), myriad messages from Fugate descendents and interested others focus on theories on the origin of the Fugate name (which range from the French word for the purple-blue color fuschia to the Latin phrase Jugate, "you fly"). You'll find requests for information on the various branches of the family tree like the following:
hi my name is liddie. vina miller married john Jugate son of zachariah fugate and mary/polly napier. vina miller and john Jugate children were andrew fugate m. pally napier. pally fugate b. 1875 wm fugate b. 1877.zack fugate b. 1979. john fg9ate b.1866 and jeremiah fugate b.1897. This are my ancestor's. I am part of the blue family fugate's since this is my blood kin. my husband is also possible kin to the blue fugate's also through the stacy side of his family. please if you can give me more info of the blue family fugate i would be so grateful to you. thank's liddie
To this request, the family genealogy newsletter editor, Mary Fugate, responded clearly: "Liddie: Your Fugates are NOT part of the 'Blue Fugate' families.'' She distinguishes between the Henley Fugate line, whose descendents do not carry the blue trait, and the Martin Fugate line, whose descendants do.
Internet users can also tap into the Hazard/Perry County message board (hazardkentucky.com) and find Fugates and Stacys and Combs looking for links with their families and friends, notices of high school reunions and reminiscences of life on Troublesome Creek.
Which is where you have to go - after all the articles and Internet messages are read, the biochemistry mastered, genealogies considered - if you want to understand the heart of the Blue People.
That's not what we talk about at first, though. I tell them I'm writing about the Fugate family, about life along Troublesome Creek; I've read too many stories about curiosity seekers coming to the creek looking for blue people to use the word "blue" in front of the Stacys. (Legend has it that a television crew from "That's Incredible" approached Dr. Cawein about doing a show on the Blue Fugates, and when he declined, they came to Troublesome Creek and were chased off forthwith.)
What the Stacys generously offer me is a rich oral history of 70 years of life in Perry County. The Stacy living room is lined with family portraits, a fine backdrop for their stories. They remember when the first car came to Troublesome Creek - 1941 - and how the driver used Lick Branch Creek as a road. Electricity didn't come until 1947; telephones came in the 1960s.
As a young man, Bill Stacy broke a red roan bull to ride, and he'd come off the mountain to get the weekly supplies - 25 pounds each of flour and cornmeal, a pound of coffee, a nickel's worth baking powder, and soda, lard and sugar - which cost a total of $1. He mined coal for 15 years at the Ball Creek mines, earned 40 cents an hour to start, and in 1951 he did what so many Appalachian people did: He left home to work for the railroad. His wife stayed behind and raised their children without a car, without electricity, using a washboard and boiling water to clean their clothes. Most of the children went to boarding school over the mountain at Hindman Settlement and came home on weekends.
In 1971 Bill Stacy retired from the railroad and came back to Troublesome Creek, where he and his wife ran a grocery store and Gulf station for 15 years in the building where Mr. Stacy and his daughter, Sharon Davis, now make things: dolls and wreaths and dipper gourds and horse-collar mirrors and miniature wooden sleds, the kind that were used for logging and hauling in the mountains. Retail business is a little' slow - traffic is way down on Ky. 476 with the coal mines pretty well shut down - but the Stacys make some money at crafts shows, and if they wanted to do mail orders, they'd have more business than they could handle.
Stacy mentions her grandson, Benjamin, who was born at the Hazard Hospital 24 years ago.
"His skin was dark blue," she recalls. "They raced him up to the clinic in Lexington and did tests on him. Then I mentioned the Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek, and they stopped worrying."
Benjamin's great-grandmother on his father's side was Luna, a Fugate, the woman that Ray Fugate recalled was "blue as a fishhook." And his greatgreat-grandfather, Levy Fugate, was also blue. Because he had relatively normal skin tones within a few weeks of his birth, Benjamin is thought to have inherited only one gene for the blue condition. The enzyme diaphorase is low in most newborns, and increases gradually so that, now, it is usually only his lips and fingernails that turn blue in cold weather.
"Just for your information, I am 24 years old now and am in my senior year of college at Eastern Kentucky University. The color of my lips and fingernails usually draws some attention, but mostly out of concern for my health or curiosity. I have had no major health problems related to the disorder and simply try to live an average life in spite of being 'blue.' "
Still, despite the medical explanation for the blue-skinned Fugate trait, it isn't always easy to be Ben Stacy. He tells about sitting in a college seminar and having a female student ask the professor to confirm that what she'd heard was true - that there were "people as blue as [the professor's navy blue] shirt up on the mountaintops in Lecter County.'' Calmly, Ben asked if he looked blue to her. The entire room fell silent, he remembers. Another time a student from Ohio approached him and said she'd been taught in high school that to this day there were still cousins marrying cousins in the mountains, and that's why the blue people existed.
"This is the kind of stuff I have heard all my life," he says.
It is, most likely, that kind of judgment that kept Luna's husband (Ben's great-grandfather) from talking about the fact that his wife was blue, though it was plain as day. That silenced Polly Fugate Begley's grandmother when the phrase "Blue Fugate" was spoken, even though she married a Fugate and has Stacys on her side of the family. That made John Graves, whose mother was a Fugate, state that "no one involved in [researching the Fugate family] has any interest in sensational headlines about inbred mountaineers."
Maybe the best we can do now is to collect a few of those stories, report them well, and keep them safe. Then believe that good people like Benjamin Stacy will lead far-better-than-average lives in a world that understands the science and sociology of being blue.
The author thanks John Graves for his generous sharing of family genealogy and photographs.
He allegedly, with a Clemons, killed Sheriff Green Watkins in Breathitt County and a 14-yearold boy. "Amos always felt bad about that boy," says Ray Fugate, who is working on a definitive history of his ancestor.
The day Bad Amos Fugate was murdered - March 21, 1921, Ray Fugate thinks - was "a right pretty day for so early in the year." A Fugate relative, Woodrow, recalled the scene clearly. "He was just a kid - he saw all these men with guns around his house on Ball Fork of Troublesome Creek. Woodrow ran to his mother, America, and told her there were men fishing in the creek. America then ran to find her schoolmaster-husband Elhannon, who was shaving on their front porch," Ray Fugate says.
"About that time, the men came into the house demanding to know where Amos was, and when America and Elhannon said he wasn't there, the men broke up their house looking for him. Well, they found him outside, and shot him to death, unarmed. It was an ambush, plain and simple."
The story goes that most of the killers were Hollifields. Ray Fugate remembers that as a boy attending the two-room Ball Fork schoolhouse, rumor had it that Rob Hollifield's children were planning to come to school that day, and the older students left school to tell the Hollifields not to come to Ball Fork School - that they had better go to the Hindman Settlement school instead, if they knew what was good for them.
No one knows just how many people Bad Amos actually killed.
Like most stories, the facts and numbers shift according to the teller. But one thing the Fugates do agree on: According the mountain code, Amos Fugate's death was a dishonorable affair.
Author E.M. Scott believed that it might be the result of the absence of the enzyme diaphorase, which converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin, in their red blood cells. Scott believed that the trait was recessive - that in order to manifest blue skin tones, a child would have to inherit the gene for it from both parents. Naturally, then, in an insular community, where intermarriage was common, even necessary, the disorder would be seen much more frequently than in a more open, fluid society.
"I brought back new blood and set up my enzyme assay," Cawein said. "And by God, they didn't have the enzyme diaphorase." Their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it overwhelmed the red hemoglobin.
Methylene blue had been used effectively in other treatments acting as an "electron donor." 'And when Cawein injected the blue dye into the blue Ritchies, within minutes their skin turned a healthy pink color.
Because the pill's effect is temporary, being excreted in the urine, the Ritchies were told to take a pill each day. One blue man is said to have told Cawein, "I can see that old blue running out of my skin!"