Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South

Chapter 2: Melungeons and Media Representation

chapter two Melungeons and Media Representation While most unsolved mysteries hold a limited interest in the popular imagination, the Melungeon story forges on, releasing a slew of synonyms that evoke their alleged enigmatic nature. Writers depict Melungeons as unusual, rare, mystical, strange, exotic, colorful, puzzling, hidden, forgotten , unknown, vanishing, secretive, fascinating, peculiar , odd, sinister, dark, tribal, and clannish. Writers revel in redundancy when describing Melungeons. Despite hundreds of different popular articles on Melungeons over the last one-hundred-plus years, the depictions are remarkably consistent. In the 1890s headlines promise stories of “A Strange Tennessee People.” In the 1940s writers continue to talk about the “Mystery Men of the Mountains,” and a 2002 headline reads: “The Melungeon Mystery Remains Unsolved.” Scholarship on the representation of Melungeons in popular media is limited. Winkler (2004) and Ivey (1976) provide the greatest breadth in their analysis of written sources, although both tend to focus more on historically significant writings rather than on the cultural meanings embedded in the written representations in general. Winkler’s work is more current; thus he deals with important shifts in representations that weren’t available when Ivey wrote her dissertation . Still, Winkler’s work shies away from any kind 52 Melungeons and Media Representation of critical analysis of the social construction of identity vis- à-vis the popular media. Sovine’s (1982) work provides a far more critical analysis of the manipulation of sources, although her presentation of content is rather telegraphic and includes only a brief analysis in the opening discussion . The analysis she provides, however, continues to be relevant and can be applied to articles that have been published in the last two decades. Vande Brake (2001) provides an overview of Melungeon characters in fiction that tends to be more descriptive than analytical. In this chapter, I employ text from media representations from 1880 to the present to examine ways in which the media reproduce the Melungeon legend through an inspired repetition of fanciful tropes. My analysis of media portrayals of Melungeons delineates specific themes that present an image of Melungeons as fugitives from normative society whose history is unknown and whose presence is disappearing. Early Melungeons are rendered as primordial savages who find sanctuary in the swamps and ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. This picture changes little from 1880 to the late 1960s, when an outdoor drama on Melungeons is staged in Hancock County, Tennessee. Though the media continue to perpetuate the traditional mythical image of the Melungeon, new themes emerge in the 1960s to create a Melungeon whose primitive isolation resulted from racial discrimination. In the 1960s drama, Melungeons are heroic, and, in the media, Melungeons become a lure to draw tourists to Hancock County. By the 1990s Melungeon representations are further compounded by new twists on old themes. In particular, Melungeons become ever more exotic in portrayals of swarthy Appalachians who hail from Mediterranean seamen. As thousands of individuals begin to invest personally in the Melungeon story, they come to occupy an important space in media representations. However the new Melungeons do Melungeons and Media Representation 53 little to alter the fundamentals of the Melungeon legend; instead, many of the legendary themes simply serve as fodder for individuals to shape their own individual and collective histories. A critical analysis of hundreds of Melungeon articles yields an incredible truth—the Melungeon story is a respindled yarn with little or no basis in ethnographic reality. As I examine the context in which the earliest Melungeon articles were written, I argue that the media manufactured a Melungeon legend that has little to do with any lived experiences of an identifiable group of people. The Pilgrimage One of the most common tropes in journalistic writing about Melungeons is the pilgrimage, whereby writers strive to validate that Melungeons do exist. The most convincing validation, of course, is for writers to actually see and interact with Melungeons, yet few writers offer convincing firsthand accounts. The fallback to actually finding Melungeons tends to be using descriptive accounts of trying to find Melungeons; thus one’s pilgrimage becomes what folklorist Brunvand (1991) calls a “validating formula”—a tactic to persuade audiences of legendary truths. In addition to posing as a kind of corroboration, the pilgrimage to Hancock County adds an element of suspense that works particularly well with the Melungeon legend. In most of these articles, journalists typically do not have a lot to report once arriving...