Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South by Melissa Schrift (review)

A few weeks ago, a longtime friend and colleague, Theresa Burchett Hammons, Director of the Carroll Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University, suggested that I read Melissa Schrift’s new book, Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South. Theresa and I met over a decade ago, when both of us were working on separate projects for the Vardy Community Historical Society in Hancock County, Tennessee. I was heading up the historical society’s oral history project, focused on documenting the experience of the students who attended the Presbyterian settlement school there. Theresa was helping them organize their new museum and archives. Since the school served a historically Melungeon community on Newman’s Ridge (these are the folks to whom Schrift refers as “core Melungeons”), both of us learned quite a bit about the community’s history. I must admit that I quit reading texts on Melungeons a few years ago, finding that most of them were simply a rehashing of old, unsubstantiated theories. Many were poorly edited and hard to read, and many were—for purportedly academic texts—based largely on unsubstantiated evidence. When Theresa urged me over lunch to give Schrift’s book a try, I must have looked skeptical. I shouldn’t have doubted her; Becoming Melungeon is substantial, well-written, well-edited, thought-provoking, and academically responsible.

Schrift treats all sides of the Melungeon identity issue with both frankness and respect. Her main concern, in her own words, is how “the Melungeon legend has been socially constructed vis-à-vis the media and how that social construction evolved into a fervent movement of self-identified Melungeons in the 1990s” (3). She argues that that “the … revitalization of Melungeon identity borrows from the past to create a new white ethnicity that capitalizes on the caché of the cultural exotic while underplaying stigmatized aspects of heritage” (28). She points out, for example, that many of the people who have begun to self-identify as Melungeons (she refers to these self-declared Melungeons as “Melungeon descendants”) have a tendency to focus not on their predominantly white ancestry, but on the idea that they have more exotic progenitors—Turkish and Portuguese being two of the most common claims. Often, they also proudly claim Native American heritage. Many of these descendants, however, are less comfortable acknowledging the likelihood of African-American blood in the mix. Ultimately, Schrift claims that “the collective Melungeon story has become something much larger: a metaphor for racial politics in the contemporary United States” (184). Exploring the history of this particular “ethnic” movement and tracing not only its history but the many lines of argument that converge in this context, Schrift demonstrates how it can offer important insight into contemporary racial politics. For example, Schrift points out how the Melungeon movement fills individuals’ needs for community and a shared historical narrative. Many Melungeon descendants note, for instance, the shared narrative of having overcome discrimination and oppression.

Schrift spent quite a bit of time collecting oral histories. She also asked numerous Melungeons, both core and descendants, to complete a lengthy and detailed questionnaire regarding the ways in which they viewed their heritage. She uses both as convincing support for her assertion that “Melungeonness has long been, and continues to be, a social construction related primarily to social class” (23). Ultimately, she argues, “compounded by a dearth of convincing archival material, there is simply no evidence that Melungeons [ever] existed as a culturally bounded group of people” (22). In other words, in spite of the various narratives about the mysterious Melungeon past, Schrift found no reason to believe that Melungeons are truly culturally distinct from other Appalachians. I was interested to to see that her findings fit very closely with my own observations. Schrift references an exhaustive list of texts—academic, popular, and journalistic—to reinforce the conclusions that her fieldwork suggested. As a person who spent quite a bit...