Written by Lisa Alther
Are you washed, in the blood,
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
The beloved Christian hymn, “Washed in the Blood,” was not written until 1878, but its theme of blood as purifier runs with great irony through the five centuries of Lisa Alther’s sprawling historical novel, Washed in the Blood. The author’s specific take on the history of the southeastern United States is that, no matter how fervently color-obsessed southerners want their family tree to be descended from proper lily white British immigrants, many of us are actually the result of a long and vigorous mixing of different bloods.
While the founders of Jamestown (1607) imagined that the land to the west was inhabited by a homogenous block of indigenous peoples, the truth is far more interesting. Native Americans, Europeans (including Mid-Easterners) and Africans had been mixing their blood for decades since the French Huguenots (1562) and then the Spanish conquistadors started invading “La Florida.” The various human infusions into the native population came from runaway slaves, castaways, war captives, rapists and other unsavory progenitors, as well as that most unstoppable force in history—young lovers.
The racial mixing was so complete that many southeasterners haven’t the foggiest idea where their ancestors really came from. With the rising popularity of genealogy however, more and more Americans are digging up their biological roots. Some are horrified to discover the different branches in their family tree, others revel in the diversity.
Washed in the Bloodis Tennessee-born Alther’s sixth novel. It takes place in three periods of time in the Appalachians, where Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky converge. This is the area now recognized as the hub of the Melungeons, a distinct tri-racial group, characterized by dark hair and olive or swarthy skin.
Though Alther never uses the word Melungeon in her novel, it’s obvious that she is using Melungeon lore to tell her story. Also, as a reading of her autobiographical journey reveals (Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors,Arcade Publishing 2007), Alther also enhances true stories from her own family history to dramatize the novel’s larger story.
DNA testing has shown that Melungeons can trace their ancestry mostly from Europe, but also from Africa and native America. They are known to suffer rare diseases of Mid-Eastern origin. (It’s fascinating that ancient Cherokee garb, with its turbans and toga tops, has an uncanny similarity to Turkish clothing.) This fact provides the springboard for dramatic details in the novel’s first story.
In the 1560s, orphan Diego Martin is a swineherd from Galicia, the northern coastal area in Spain neighboring Portugal. He’s unaware that his parents were executed because they were conversos, Sephardic Jews who pretended conversion to Catholicism. He sails to the New World with a second wave of Spanish conquistadores, who followed the path of Hernando De Soto—the first European who traveled deeply into the interior of the new land (1539), so deeply, in fact, that archaeology excavations have attributed to his expedition the remains of a Spanish fort near Asheville.
Before Diego left home he was given a pendant of a large black stone with veins of ruby. By the end of the 400+ pages of Washed in the Blood, this stone has been handed down for centuries to Diego’s distant daughters—who have long forgotten the origin of the exotic stone or what their name Galicia means. Abandoned in the wilderness, Diego comes under the spell of an Indian girl, who has six fingers. This polydactyly re-appears among Diego’s far-flung descendants.
The second part of the novel takes place in Virginia near Tennessee, during the late 1830s Trail of Tears tragedy, when thousands of Cherokee were rounded up and forced to emigrate to Oklahoma. Daniel Hunter is an idealistic Quaker, who comes to small town Couchtown to teach disadvantaged students—and falls in love with a woman named Galicia Martin who wears a red pendant around her neck.
In the early 1900s, darkly handsome Will Martin, a baseball pitching wizard thanks to his six fingers, leaves his racially mixed outcast family on Mulatto Bald and marries spoiled town girl Galicia Hunter. By this time, the characters in the story have no idea of their ancestry and are unaware they are bonding with their cousins.
Phrases such as half-breed, mongrel, Portuguese Indian and secret nigger flow through the narrative, as well as free people of color, a concept that covered anyone with dark skin who wasn’t a slave.
Alther writes in a compelling style, creating a haunting combination of mystery and romance, meticulous historical research, and wild speculation. It’s a can’t-put-down brew that offers entertaining adventures into the past, as well as triggers to inspire your own historical research.
Bottom line: A readable, eye-opening historical saga of the southeast that both natives and tourists will enjoy.
Washed in the Blood; written by Lisa Alther; Mercer University Press (2011); 420 pp.; $26.
Marcianne Miller is an Asheville writer/reviewer. She can be reached at marci@aquamystique.com.