My father had explained how "regular folk'' held these swarthy mountaineers in extremely low esteem. How they kept to themselves, didn't take to school, and lived in dirt-floor shacks that no one else would ever lay claim to. It was hard to accept the logic for such misery. Especially when they didn't look all that different from some of my own family.
As I was to discover some 25 years later while engaged in genealogical research, there was a reason for that. Like those painfully shy people I had met at the lake, I too am a Melungeon.
And then I knew. The location of the people, their physical characteristics, their surnames—all blended perfectly into the circumstances of my own family. Further reading and combing through archives yielded a wealth of historical data, and even autobiographical statements from, and stories about, my own long-deceased Melungeon ancestors.
Ironically, it fell to me to tell my mother and father of their heritage. That my mother was five-eighths Melungeon and my father one-third. That nearly half (three-sevenths) of my genes and those of my brothers were inherited from 19th-century Melungeons. For my mother, the memory of being dressed in long sleeves at the height of summer—and admonished to "not get black"—took on a new, more poignant meaning. The old story of her grandfather and his brothers being denied their right to vote—and then reclaiming it at gunpoint—suddenly made sense. The nicknames of ancestors (Black Ike, Black Jim, Black John, Spotted Dave) came looming out of a foggy past with startling new clarity.
But what had not been made clear was the origin of these mysterious people who had inhabited the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia for centuries. Who were they, and from where did they come?
Armed with a wealth of general theories and questions, I set about to solve the mystery. To my continuing amazement, the answer to this tantalizing question was found with surprising speed. In fact, Chattanooga attorney Lewis Shepherd stumbled onto the truth, with a few excusable errors, in 1872 (see Schroeder's article). Despite his insight, he nevertheless lacked the supportive evidence necessary to confirm his suspicions and his good work went largely unnoticed. My tack was similar to Shepherd's; review the best available evidence, including that offered by the earliest Melungeons, and then place this evidence against related world events at the time. Once I had accomplished this objective, the truth loomed up so convincingly that the biggest mystery regarding the Melungeons' identity is that there was ever a mystery in the first place.
In 710 A. D., ships carrying an invading Muslim (Western Arab) army sailed from Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar and captured strategic southern points in both Spain and Portugal. After some scattered, ineffective resistance, much of both countries came under the domination of these "Moors," as the Spanish called their Arab conquerors. Some five centuries of generally humane Moorish rule followed (the Moors being surprisingly soft on their conquered foe, even permitting them to openly practice Christianity). This equitable but unwanted Arabic reign would prevail until King Alphonso and such renowned Spanish warriors as El Cid finally retook the two countries around 1200 A.D. Even though the Moors had been defeated, some 500,000 chose to remain behind in what they now considered their homeland. They were known as the Mudejars, or "tamed" Moors.
For 300 years the Spanish and Portuguese Moors did their best to blend in with their neighbors. They adopted Hispanic names, kept a low profile, and generally spoke Arabic and practiced Islam only in the home. However, on February 11, 1502, under the reign of King Ferdinand of Spain, the first throes of the Spanish Inquisition began. With the blessing of the Catholic Church, forced baptisms of the Moors, or "Moriscos" (as these Arabic converts became known), began. It quickly escalated until by 1582, under King Phillip II and the Portuguese Kings Joao (John) III, Sabastiao (Sabastian) and Phillip III, thousands of Moors—including some of the recently converted Moriscos—were being garroted and burned alive at the stake. It was a time of great horror and inhumanity, akin to the early American witch hunts and the Jewish Holocaust.
And wherever they went, they invariably claimed to be of either Spanish or Portuguese origin. Of course there was no guarantee that foreign ports would accept these uninvited guests. Historical records show, as but one example, that 16th-century Franciscan friars in Bombay, India, enthusiastically turned away a shipload of exhausted, refugeseeking Moriscos claiming to be sunburned Portuguese.
The hapless Moriscos, probably several hundred men, women and children, made their way inland, eventually settling in the mountains of extreme western North Carolina and east Tennessee. Undoubtedly they had some limited contact with stray English and French explorers and they documentably had contact with Native Americans. Indeed, the Cherokees and other tribes consistently told both the English and the French of the Melungeons' presence. And, as the well-meaning but naive Cherokees would later try to do with the Scots-Irish, they permitted this small colony of non-aggressive. dark-skinned people to coexist peacefully on Cherokee land.
The long-espoused argument claiming an English heritage for the Melungeons based on English surnames and their use of a halting English dialect does not prove English ancestry. Remember, the Moriscos had also adopted the Portuguese language and surnames, but they were in no way true ethnic Portuguese. These were simply survival traits of a disenfranchised people, similar in many respects to the Spanish speaking and Spanish-surnamed Filipinos, or the English-speaking, English-surnamed African-Americans.
The much-disputed word "Melungeon'' originated with the Moriscos, or the Melungeons themselves, and was a derivation of the word "Melongo." Who, other than an Arabic people, would have introduced an Afro-Portuguese word to the southern Appalachians? And in all probability the Melungeons did not resent the word until it was used in a disparaging fashion against them. Remember that during the Inquisition they had also denied their Moorish heritage, not out of shame for who they were, but from fear of what that classification would entail for them. In 19th-century Tennessee, Melungeons were legally barred from owning property, attending school, voting, and representing themselves in a court of law. It is only natural that they would grow to resent the term.
The mystery associated with the transition from "Melongo" to "Melungeon" has, in my opinion, resulted from two continually repeated errors. The first involves a lack of understanding of additional meanings of the word beyond ''shipmate'' or ''companion.'' A third, and critically important meaning of "Melongo" is "white person" or "European.'' According to research provided through the Embassy of Portugal, 16thcentury North Africans often used this term when referring to their Spanish and Portuguese neighbors. This is further confirmed by the present-day Swahili word, "Mzungo," translated as ''stranger'' and used by the West Africans when referring to Europeans. The answer is painfully clear: these browbeaten Moriscos, like the poor ''sunburned'' Portuguese seeking refuge in India, introduced themselves to the first Europeans they encountered as ''Melongo.'' Using their own language, a mixture of Arabic and Portuguese, they tried to say they were white! Unfortunately, no one understood the term, not that it would have altered their fate.
A second crucial error involved the assignment of a Spanish, as opposed to Portuguese, pronunciation of "Melongo." Although "Melongo" in Spanish is pronounced something like "May-lown-go," in 16th-century Portuguese an entirely different pronunciation would likely have occurred. The softer vowel sounds in Portuguese, as well as the Portuguese habit of giving an "un" sound to certain vowels at the end of the word, coupled with a "zhuh" sound for the letter "g" and - presto! "Melongo" is actually pronounced "Muh-lun-zhawn."
• The North Carolina Indians told the first English settlers of the dark white people they would encounter in the upper highlands. A people who lived in cabins and, at the regular ringing of a bell, would fall to their knees and pray. The ritualized praising (of Allah?) and the directionalized prayer (representing Mecca?) is nearly identical to the Islamic customs that the Moors, and even the Christianized Moriscos, purportedly left behind in Spain and Portugal.
• Much has been made of the Melungeons’ clannishness. A 16th-century Islamic creed prohibited Muslims from moving to "wild country" or living more than two miles from a city center. If these conditions were not able to be met—as they certainly were not for the expelled Moriscos—then the permissible alternative was to create "villages" of no less than 12 families. Furthermore, it was also impossible for a Muslim to marry outside his or her faith and remain a Muslim. These cultural traits, coupled with the mass adoption of the same English surname by so many unrelated Melungeon families, led the Scots-Irish to erroneously conclude that the Melungeons were guilty of not only extreme clannishness, but inbreeding as well. Interestingly, seven of the 11 Melungeon lines in our family are "Mullins," but there is no indication that there was a close blood relationship.
• The Melungeons had no written form of language, passing all cultural and historical information to succeeding generations by word of mouth. This was a trait common to the Portuguese Moors and even more readily exemplified by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. As a result, most of what we know about these ancient civilizations instead comes to us indirectly, from the Greeks and later the Romans, who conquered them.
• The Moors were known as outstanding herdsmen, a trait shared with the Melungeons.
• Melungeons have long included either traditional, or variations of traditional, Portuguese and Spanish first names among their own. Among my ancestors, such names have included Louisa, Lucinda, Helena, Lillian, Mahala, Eulaylia, and Sylvester, among others.
• The Melungeons’ physical appearance provides the most convincing evidence of their Moorish origins. These traits, especially in the 1600s and early 1700s prior to heavy intermarriage with the Scots-Irish, were apparently identical to the Moors of North Africa. So much so that the French, who were well acquainted with the Moors, as well as Governer John Sevier of Tennessee, confidently announced their discovery of "Moors" in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. Yet even then, the occasional blue-eyed, brown-haired Melungeon was to be found. This was possibly the result of intermarriage with the fairer Portuguese, but more likely a native trait of the Melungeons themselves. After all, the Moors were a race whose origins included the hybridizing of Eastern Arabs and the Western Berbers. The Berbers were a Caucasian, often blue-eyed people who claimed to be surviving descendants of a mid-Atlantic civilization that sank beneath the ocean (one of the earliest references to fabled Atlantis).
• Finally, the fact that this Melungeon scenario was being repeated worldwide during this same time period would seem to provide irrefutable evidence of the accuracy of this theory. Throughout the mid-to-late-1500s, hundreds of thousands of expatriated Moors claiming to be Portuguese or Spanish were showing up at ports all around the globe. Only in the New World were there no scribes to record the event.
Simply stated, they are the descendents of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, the conquerors of Spain and Portugal, the builders of Casablanca, Marrakech, and Tangier. And even in the midst of their most tragic epoch, they established a permanent New World settlement—some 300 miles inland—at approximately the same time, and most likely 30 or more years before, the English accomplished the same feat at a coastal village called Jamestown.\
They were a remarkable people, these Melungeons, caught up in a nightmare not of their own making. Perhaps, just perhaps, history can finally amend itself and belatedly recognize the incredible achievement of these brave and lonely people, among the earliest American pioneers, and bring, at long last, an end to the Inquisition.
• Descendents of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island who intermarried with Native Americans. The English surnames and the broken Elizabethan dialect spoken by those first Melungeons are offered in support of this theory. Also, the time period of the Roanoke settlement (1587) would seem plausible. The ''Mediterranean''—as opposed to either English or Indian—appearance of the Melungeons argues strongly against it, however, as does the earliest Melungeons' denial of an English heritage.
• Descendents of Madoc, a 12thcentury Welsh explorer. There isn't much evidence to support this theory, save that Madoc supposedly passed through the Tennessee hill country.
• One of the Lost Tribes of Israel. An interesting theory, but little supports it save the finding of a second-century Hebrew Bar Kokhba coins in Kentucky. Coins that could easily have been lost by later settlers or explorers.
• Descendents of ancient Phoenicians or Carthaginians (i.e. North African Arabs, or Moors). The Melungeon physical appearance fits perfectly into this theory. While the ancestry is ultimately correct, the difficult question of how these ancient people made their way directly to America more than 2,000 years before Columbus has always been cited as strong evidence to dispute the theory.
• Descendents of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors. Melungeons themselves have claimed to be Portuguese. According to the archival records I unearthed, this is what members of my own family had said as far back as 1830. Although widely accepted as the most probable theory, the original Melungeons' physical appearance (i.e. generally darker than the Portuguese, but lacking the "reddish" complexion and broader features of the Cherokees) and, once more, their use of Elizabethan English and English surnames, have been cited as strong evidence against this theory.
Please note, we’ve digitized these pieces just as they appeared in their original print form. Please remember that as a result, all quotes and references to “present day” things such as artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the time of publication rather than the current time.