My great-grandmother hid her race. Two decades later I understand why.

[Jilly_in_VA]

16. Melungeons

live in the area of northeast Tennessee (especially northeast Claiborne and northern Hancock Counties). I am pretty familiar with them as I did home health in rural east Tennessee. A lot of them could pass for Hispanic. I remember when I was working in neonatal at the local hospital and we had a Melungeon baby born there--she was the prettiest baby I'd ever seen. The dad brought the older kids in to see her and all three of them could have walked down any street in Spanish Harlem and not stood out. Later on my daughter dated a boy who was very light skinned Black with light eyes. When I met his mother I thought she looked Puerto Rican...she had the kind of brass-blonde hair and green eyes you sometimes see on Puerto Rican people. She said she was Black, and the boy's father was, but when she told me where she grew up I knew, because it was a Melungeon settlement. It's just that when she grew up, it was less "shameful" to be Black than to be Melungeon. It's different now and Melungeons have reclaimed that title. BTW, the word "Melungeon" is thought to come from the French "melange" meaning "mixture", but nobody knows when they started being called that.