The latest episode of Podcast Appalachia is now available! In this episode, I look at the Scots-Irish and their contributions to Appalachia and America. Are you or any of your relatives from the Appalachian region? Then you are probably of Scots-Irish descent. You can listen to this episode here or view a transcript here.
Around the world there are legends of human beings who have skin of a unusual shades, folk whose skin color wasn't some variation on brown or pink. These people, as they are remembered by their neighbor's descendants, were usually of a supernatural ilk - elves or gods or some other genre of sentient being. More often than not, these legends have been explained in our oh-so-enlightened civilization as the product of imaginative storytellers, bad translations, and artistic flourishes. Yet, in the relatively recent past, in the hills of eastern Kentucky, there was a clan of folk who seem to have shared a genetic anomaly that, in effect, rendered them blue.Lorenzo & Eleanor Fugate
(Image from Hazard, Kentucky &
Perry County: A Photographic History)
Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentucky's Lexington medical clinic in 1960. "I'm a hematologist, so something like that perks up my ears," Cawein says, sipping on whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to the summer he spent "tromping around the hills looking for blue people."Okay - that is only a slice of the article - - - you should really read the entire bit, frankly - it'll be well worth your time. When you've reached the end you'll understand why, even with diligent searches of the internet, you're unlikely to find many pictures of blue men or women, Kentuckian or otherwise - because those people affected with this genetic anomaly (I won't call it a defect or even a handicap, because I haven't read of any disabling physiological effects) fear, quite logically, that society would drag them out for public exposition. It is sad, really - a physical trait that could add to someone's uniqueness has had to be hidden out of fear that it will be exploited by the foulest pimps of the entertainment and yellow journalism - both printed and video tabloids. Indeed, I find it interesting that most of those folks interacting with the blue Fugates blame the geography of east Kentucky alone for their genetic inbreeding - I can't remember that any of them make the connection between their hesitancy to leave their family connections and the fact that these people, rational beings all, knew how they would be insulted, feared, abused, and most likely, very, very lonely. Ah well.
Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinson's disease. But his first love, which he developed as an Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. "Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me," he says.
Cawein would drive back and forth between Lexington and Hazard an eight-hour ordeal before the tollway was built and scour the hills looking for the blue people he'd heard rumors about. The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard, and it was there that Cawein met "a great big nurse" who offered to help.
Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a blood test.
"She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. "Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. It like to scared me to death! She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women." About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the clinic at Lexington. One look at Luke was enough to "get those doctors down here in a hurry," says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people.
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.
"They were bluer'n hell," Cawein says. "Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. After concluding that there was no evidence of heart disease, I said 'Aha!' I started asking them questions: 'Do you have any relatives who are blue?' then I sat down and we began to chart the family."
Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brother's and sister's faces. "They were really embarrassed about being blue," he said. "Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. Rachel was leaning against the wall. They wouldn't come into the waiting room. You could tell how much it bothered them to be blue."
After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected methemoglobinemia, a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood. Methemoglobin which is blue, is a nonfunctional form of the red hemoglobin that carries oxygen. It is the color of oxygen-depleted blood seen in the blue veins just below the skin.
The book I'm reviewing today is about just such a man. Pardon, let me rephrase. It is the product of just such a man, a man of Portyghee descent, who had no idea he was Portyghee, trying to uncover just what it means to be Portyghee. Specifically, it is a book that he wrote based on his research into 1) the hypothetical origins of the Portyghee people and 2) the definite trials and tribulations of those same people, and more particularly the people of Newman's Ridge, his heretofore unknown ancestral home.
Now, Lest We Forget isn't a scholarly book - it wasn't written by a professor of Southern history or sociology at some big-name university or institute, though it is well written (Callahan is a former Director of Agriculture in Mexico for Del Monte Foods). This is evident in some of the language and turns of phrase used - though this doesn't take away from it. And the book isn't strictly historical - it constantly delves into economics, politics, and most notably physical anthropology. And sometimes it does jump around just a bit. That said, the points where the writing becomes more informal generally tend to strengthen this work, rather than detract from it, making it approachable. And Callahan is unaffected by the dominant scholarly opinions as to origins of the Portyghee - that isn't to say he doesn't weigh them in, nor that he doesn't draw deeply from them, quite the contrary. But it is to say that he throws out every conceivable theory and hypothesis and discusses them in great detail, drawing on both the scholarly and the traditional for evidence, bringing up archaeological evidence that is often too quickly dismissed or simply ignored by professional scholars.
Combine all this with some excellent photographs and maps, a ton of information on particular cultural practices of the Portyghee/Melungeons and a trove of historical vignettes and you get a book that anyone interested in this dimension of Appalachian society, and at a decent price, which frankly just cries out to be read. Thanks for your labor, Mr. Callahan.
Okay, onto the meaty meat - first, you're gonna' want the publisher - head over to see the folks at Overmountain Press for that. Secondly, just to whet your appetite, I want to quote one of the most interesting sociological points that Callahan brings up. Ahem.". . .[William Allen Dromgoole] stated that people descended from a particular person were named individual given names and their surnames were those of the father or mother of their tribe (for example Benjamin Collins' offspring would be Andrew Ben, Zeke Ben, etc.) to differentiate between the many Collinses. For example, if Jordan Ben (son of Benjamin Collins) were to marry Abby Sol (daughter of Solomon Collins), they would have a son called Callaway Abbey after his mother. Before marriage, the daughter took her father's given name; after marriage, she took that of her husband. For example, Calloway's wife was Ann Calloway. Over time, the Collins prospered, and their increased numbers necessitated the formation of clans, which retained the names of key leaders (Ben clan, Sol clan)." (p.146-147)
Now, that's just flat out interesting.
Before I begin, I just want to say, neither I nor anyone here at HS is advocating any illegal act, including the production, transportation, or consumption of untaxed liquor. Seriously.By the time the United States entered World War I, there were twenty-six dry states. At least they prohibited the saloon and retail liquor traffic. They did not, however, prohibit the manufacturing of liquor. After all, whiskey-making was a major industry, particularly in the South. North Carolina, for instance, had 733 licensed grain distilleries in 1895 and more than 1,300 legal fruit distilleries, turning out over a million gallons of whiskey and brandy a year. The illicit industry was even bigger (much bigger!) - a situation that held true throughout most of the Appalachian Southeast.Damn.
Rum by many is preferred
And brandy makes its boast.
The Dutch and English like their gin
And ale goes well with roast.
Requests for rye in Eastern States
Quite Frequently are heard,
And the hill folk of the Southlands
Make corn a favorite word . . .
- Anonymous (MMS I, 4: 79)
W.J. Cash, in his The Mind of the South, noted that, as the politicians saw it, "Cuffey [a colloquial synonym for Negro], when primed with a few drinks of whiskey, was lamentably inclined to let his ego a little out of its chains and to relapse int the dangerous manners learned in carpetbag days - to pour into the towns on Saturday afternoon and swagger along the street in guffawing gangs . . . It seems genuinely to have been believed that to forbid the sale of legal liquor, and so presumably to force up the price of the bootleg product, would be to deprive him of alcohol altogether and so make it easier to keep him in his place. Certainly the argument was much used in winning over the hard-drinking poor whites."
But there was considerable wet sentiment in the South - mainly among the moderates and the realists who wanted to see liquor remain legal but controlled. In 1907, Captain Swift Galloway of Greene County told the North Carolina House of Representatives that he was upset by the rising dry sentiment:There is an era of fanaticism upon this country, that came here along with the epizootic, the trippe and hog cholera. It came here from the Puritans who landing at Plymouth Rock, who first go on their knees and then on the aborigines. I sometimes feel like wishing that instead of their landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had landed on them. They tell me that in some sections of this State you have laws which make a man a criminal if a certain amount of liquor is found in his home and that a . . . upstart policeman has a right to break into that sacred home, to find out if he can find it. I do not hesitate to say that if I lived in a community of free men who would submit to such a tyranny, I should want to get an occasional furlough and get relief from outraged feelings by brief visits to hell.
Intriguing, eh? It reminds me of the "war on drugs" that still rages today, a war which seeks not the practical goal of controlling drugs, but of "obliterating" their use - something that no rational man or woman assumes possible. More to the point, however, it reminds me of the patently economically discriminatory punishments attached to drug enforcement laws - punishments for the drugs of the poor (not just dealer's punishments, which I can accept, but user's punishments), such as crack (a form of cut and adulterated cocaine), are radically more oppressive than those for drugs usually used by wealthy patrons, such as unadulterated cocaine.
