A Melungeon's HomePage: Article Reprint, Winter 1994, GEORGIA JOURNAL
"Winter 1994
Georgia Journal
SAGA OF THE MELUNGEONS
By N. Brent Kennedy
IN 1988 N. Brent Kennedy was diagnosed with a potentially debilitating disease called erythema nodosum sarcoidosis. It attacks the immune system and can leave its victims crippled or blind. In many cases it results in death from pulmonary failure. It has no known cause. Nor is there a cure. Its only treatment is anti-inflammatory drugs. The only hope physicians offer is that it will go into remission. But Brent Kennedy is a stubborn man. He was determined to know why this disease had singled him out.
What he was stunned to learn is that while it is not unknown among people of Scandinavian and Irish extraction, sarcoidosis is more common among people whose ancestors came from Africa and the Mediterranean. In the American South, curiously, it seems to be common among both blacks and whites who share no apparent ethnic bonds, and it is equally common among Portuguese descendants in New England.
Fortunately for Kennedy, his acute sarcoidosis went into remission after six months. But his brush with death and initial findings about the origins of his illness rekindled in him a zeal to find his roots that had once so enthralled him as a child. It was not always a pleasant journey. For he was to discover that his family were 'Melungeons', a name of derision in the Appalachian Mountains of his forbears, something akin to Poor White Trash elsewhere. It was then easy for Kennedy to understand why his family had buried so much of its background. What he also discovered was a tangled, sordid history of racism, disfranchisement and forced displacement, a history of a people who were among the first from the Old World to occupy North America, yet were the victims of the same Northern Eu"
Georgia Journal
SAGA OF THE MELUNGEONS
By N. Brent Kennedy
IN 1988 N. Brent Kennedy was diagnosed with a potentially debilitating disease called erythema nodosum sarcoidosis. It attacks the immune system and can leave its victims crippled or blind. In many cases it results in death from pulmonary failure. It has no known cause. Nor is there a cure. Its only treatment is anti-inflammatory drugs. The only hope physicians offer is that it will go into remission. But Brent Kennedy is a stubborn man. He was determined to know why this disease had singled him out.
What he was stunned to learn is that while it is not unknown among people of Scandinavian and Irish extraction, sarcoidosis is more common among people whose ancestors came from Africa and the Mediterranean. In the American South, curiously, it seems to be common among both blacks and whites who share no apparent ethnic bonds, and it is equally common among Portuguese descendants in New England.
Fortunately for Kennedy, his acute sarcoidosis went into remission after six months. But his brush with death and initial findings about the origins of his illness rekindled in him a zeal to find his roots that had once so enthralled him as a child. It was not always a pleasant journey. For he was to discover that his family were 'Melungeons', a name of derision in the Appalachian Mountains of his forbears, something akin to Poor White Trash elsewhere. It was then easy for Kennedy to understand why his family had buried so much of its background. What he also discovered was a tangled, sordid history of racism, disfranchisement and forced displacement, a history of a people who were among the first from the Old World to occupy North America, yet were the victims of the same Northern Eu"
posted by Helen Campbell @ 2:59 PM
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