Little known fact: I write mysteries under a different name. No, I won’t tell you what it is. One of these days I want to write a novel about some of the people and events I’ll detail in these columns. I thought about creating a different domain name for these columns but decided to use this one and move my church, personal, and mental health columns over to Tentpegs (link to right). 

 It started the morning I woke up and my legs wouldn’t work. Try as I might, the brain/leg connection was broken. Slowly, they began to move but only with great reluctance and pain. I made it down the stairs eventually but it was obvious there was something terribly wrong. My wife got me in the car and to the doctor’s office where tests were run, heads were scratched, and shoulders shrugged. My legs began working a little better but they would swell and discolor before shutting down again for hours. Two weeks of this went by as the doctors pulled Kami aside and told her to look for a one story home, to prepare herself for hearing bad news like Lou Gehrig’s disease or MS, and welcome to the rest of our lives.

At that time we lived in Morgantown, West Virginia so, predictably, we ended up at University Hospital (Ruby Memorial), one of America’s finest. No kidding. I don’t know what they put in the water there but everyone from the janitors to the chief of surgery has time to talk to you and answer your questions. After tons of tests I was shunted to a lung specialist. She looked to be about 18 years old and what she did next didn’t inspire confidence. She took my hands and looked at them carefully as if she was about to tell my future. In a sense, she did. She asked, "Do you get winded when you go up stairs?" As a matter of fact, I did and had done for a couple of years. I could lift weights and seemed to be at the right weight but put me on a stairmaster and I’ll collapse within a minute or two. She left and sent in two senior pulmonary specialists, both of whom were smiling like "this is SO cool." Unnerving.

The older one felt the back of my head. What’s this? I wondered, phrenology? He then looked inside my mouth with a dental mirror. "We need X-rays right now!" he said and I was slapped on a gurney and wheeled away. Not long afterward the pulmonary guys came in and hung up X rays of my lungs. "See these things?" the older one asked, pointing to strange looking things in both lungs. I said I saw them. "You see, that’s a problem," he said. "You can’t have these."

Excuse me?

"You’re a white male. These growths are your lymph nodes. They have grown so large that they are filling your lungs with fluid. Some of that fluid is getting shunted down to your legs making them swell and become useless. White males don’t get this disease except very, very rarely. This is a disease of people — mainly black, mainly women — who come from North Africa. I assume you are neither of those?" I shook my head. "You’ve got sarcoidosis. We’ve got nothing to treat it except steroids and you don’t want those. We’ll give you diuretics to get the fluid off." On the way out of the door I heard the younger pulmonary specialist say to the older, "I’ve never met one of them before. I’ve heard about them, but never met one."

Thus began a journey that has consumed a lot of the last eight years of my life. I went to my father and asked him pointed questions about our family. He had never given me straight answers before, cloaking his answers, being cryptic, ignoring them. I asked him, "Are we related to black people or North Africans?" Because of the seriousness of the issue at hand he finally answered me and it was then that I began learning about one of the world’s great mysteries and my part in it. As I pulled at each thread I was given it became clear that this world was much more complex and interesting than I had imagined.

Why, I asked him, has our family traveled back and forth across the oceans, having some children here and some there? (this includes my family. My daughter was born in Scotland, my son in Ohio. This is the pattern in my family for over 300 years). Why would a Scotsman from the Isle of Skye have a disease that comes from the Mediterranean? Yes, my father assured me, we were an old Scottish family. However, we were not your usual kind of Scot. We went back and forth from the US since before there was one, and when we did, we married into a hidden mountain people called the Melungeons. That is why half of my family has a bit of a Scottish accent and half look more at home on the front porch of a cabin right out of L’il Abner.

That didn’t answer my question. Who are the Melungeons? After eight years I have some answers, but the deeper you go the stranger it gets. My father finally brought out a partial family tree (he still will not reveal all). Written on a crumbling, yellow piece of paper was a story from the year 1640 where one of my great grandfathers was working in the colony of Virginia. He fell in love with a landowner’s daughter and they eloped, escaping west across the mountains into what would become Kentucky territory. There, they joined a large community of white people and dissappeared for a long time. Who were these people and how did he know to go to them? No white people were supposed to be living in that area at that early time. My grandfather took the name of his wife and her prosperous father (and the county in Virginia that was named after him). Mead — or Meade — wasn’t our name until then. What it was remains our secret. He had appeared mysteriously in Virginia, found a woman that would have him, and escaped to the hidden people.

There are many different kinds of hidden people in the US. The Melungeons are one of the most controversial since they don’t fit into standard histories. When the great explorer — and future governor of the new State of Tennessee — John Sevier ventured into the mountains of northeastern Tennessee for the first time he found Indians telling of a large settlement of white people who lived there. They were bearded (so, not Native American), spoke a strange language, and worshipped a bell that hung in the middle of their village. They were warlike, practiced slavery, and had no interest in forming alliances with the Indians in the area. Sevier came across some of them but was never able to capture them. None of his guides would take him into their area. Other Scots-Irish explorers came into the Appalachian and Smokey Mountains and found that land that had been promised them was already inhabited by people who were… well, kind of white. The people claimed they were Welsh (many still do, especially those who settled in southern Ohio around Carmel, Jackson, and Athens) which explained their exotic clothing and strange speech. Some writers said their speech was Elizabethan English. Others said it was unintelligible.

But where did they come from? How long had they been there? How can they still survive into the present day? Before I answer those questions, I can fully attest that they are with us and in large numbers. The doctors at University Hospital, with their strange examination, were looking for some of the tell-tale signs that I had Melungeon blood. One, a disease that has Mediterranean roots. Two, the shape of my hands. Three, a large bony ridge on the back of my head. Four, front teeth that are scooped , shovel like, on the inside only, like those of Native Americans. But I’m a Scotsman, so what is the explanation?

Continuing….