The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [49]
Peter Dunn, a colleague at The Independent in London, put me on to the Melungeon story when he heard that I was going to that part of the world, and kindly dug out an article he had done for the Sunday Times Magazine some years before. This was illustrated with remarkable photographs of Melungeons. It is impossible to describe them except to say that they were simply white people with black skin. Their appearance was, to say the least, striking. For this reason they have long been outcasts in their own county, consigned to shacks in the hills in an area called Snake Hollow. In Hancock County, ‘Melungeon’ is equivalent to ‘Nigger’. The valley people – who are themselves generally poor and backward – regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely-spaced intervals to buy provisions. They don’t like outsiders. Neither do the valley people. Peter Dunn told me that he and the photographer who accompanied him were given a reception that ranged from mild hostility to outright intimidation. It was an uncomfortable assignment. A few months later a reporter from Time Magazine was actually shot near Sneedville for asking too many questions.
So you can perhaps imagine the sense of foreboding that seeped over me as I drove up Tennessee Highway 31 through a forgotten landscape of poor and scattered tobacco farms, through the valley of the twisting Clinch River, en route to Sneedville. This was the seventh poorest county in the nation and it looked it. Litter was adrift in the ditches and most of the farmhouses were small and unadorned. In every driveway there stood a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back window, and where there were people in the yards they stopped what they were doing to watch me as I passed. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, when I reached. Sneedville. Outside the Hancock County Courthouse a group of teenagers were perched on the fronts of pickup trucks, talking to each other, and they too stared at me as I passed. Sneedville is so far from anywhere, such an improbable destination, that a stranger’s car attracts notice. There wasn’t much to the town: the courthouse, a Baptist church, some box houses, a gas station. The gas station was still open, so I pulled in. I didn’t particularly need gas, but I wasn’t sure when I would find another station. The guy who came out to pump the gas had an abundance of fleshy warts – a veritable crop – scattered across his face like button mushrooms. He looked like a genetic experiment that had gone horribly wrong. He didn’t speak except to establish what kind of gas I wanted and he didn’t remark on the fact that I was from out of state. This was the first time on the trip that a gas station attendant hadn’t said in an engaging manner, ‘You’re a long way from home, arentcha?’ or, ‘What brings you all the way here from I-o-way?’ or something like that. (I always told them that I was on my way east to have vital heart surgery, in the hope that they would give me extra Green Stamps.) I was very probably the first person from out of state this man had seen all year, yet he appeared resolutely uninterested in what I was doing there. It was odd. I said to him – blurted really – ‘Excuse me, but didn’t I read somewhere that some people called Melungeons live around here somewhere?’
He didn’t answer. He just watched the pump counter spin. I thought he hadn’t heard me, so I said, ‘I say, excuse me, but didn’t I hear that