From:
Federal Writer's Project - God Bless the Devil - James R. Aswell
University of NC Press , 1940 pages 207-214
Melungeon Tales
OLD HORNY'S OWN
Peolple was just naturally meaner and tougher in the olden days. There's still some pretty bad outlaws operating to-day, but they don't none of them compare to men like Harpe Brothers and old Mason or John A. Murrell, the nigger-stealer. But when it comes down to pure devils, why them old rascals ain't a patching to the Melungeon tribe that used to rove these mountains a-killing and a - burning and a-carrying on terrible. It's been a long time ago, but to this selfsame day womenfolks back through her curb down their young'uns by saying, "if you don't act purty, the Melungeons will git you."
Now Melungeon don't mean what church they are, like Baptist, Holiness, or Campbellite. It's a name for a seperated generation of mankind in these mountains. It's the name for them dark little people that hide their cabins yonder and away back on the ridges where briars and old razorback will set down and study hard before he'll take a venture through it.
There's two talke on how the Melunegons come to be in the mountains. The old grannies say that one time Old Horny got mad at his old shrew-wife and left Hell and wanderd all over the earth till he reached Tennessee. He set on a high bald and looked around him.
"I declare to Creation," he says. "This place is so much like home, I just believe I'll stay awhile."
So Old Horny found him an Injun and started in housekeeping. Time came and time went. Everybody knows the Devil's always busy, and soon the house was full of children. And mean!! LAW!! They was every onemean as the Devil - which is natural, seeing as he was their poppy - and as dark and treacherous as their mammy. They beat and hammered at Old Horny day and night. They tricked and mortified him till it was pitiful. Finally, he just couldn't stand it no longer at all.
"I might as well be in Hell with my crabby wedlock wife," says he. So he packed his traps and sneaked out of the house and went a shillyshooting back to Hell as fast as ever he could. And they do say it was those off-spring of Old Horny that growed up and started the Melungeon kind.
The Melungeons themselves tell another story. They say they come from Portugal a long time ago and sailed in a big ship across the wild seas till they reached this country. Then some sor of a hardness sprung up betwixt the captain and the sailormen and they had a bloody scrap and the sailormen won. Soon as they hung the captain and his friends, the sailormen set the ship afire and went ashore and hid out in the wooods. By and by they found a tribe of Injuns and made off with the women. Then they wandered and they roamed. Where all they went there's no telling. Some time or other they crossed over the high mountains into Tennessee, and set down to stay hereabouts and have been here since.
Anyhow, in the early eighteen hundreds the Melungeons was here. So the white settler commenced a-coming in and noticing what good creek-bottom farms the Melungeons had. Them great grandpappies of ours just wanted them farms till they hurt. They was a breed that got what they wanted. If the Melungeons had been plain Injuns, it wouldn't been no trouble to kick them out. But here they was, a-speakin English, and on top of that they was Christians. Some of them fought in the was against the English.
Well, the white settlers didn't want to do nothing that wasn't right with the Lord and the Law. So they scrabbed around and studied it from all sides and directions. They knowed the Melungeons, like the Cherokees, was enough to make our grandpappies see pretty plain that the Melungeons was a niggerfied people. The more they looked at them good Melungeon bottom lands, the plainer they saw the nigger blood.
So they passed a law. They fixed it so that nobody with nigger blood could vote, hold office, or bear witness in cuort. Then they got busy and sued for the bottom lands. Pretty soon the Melungeons lost all their holdings in law suits. They couldn't testify for themselves on account of the new law and the white settlers had the backing of that law and if they needed it, the militia. There just wan't nothing left for them Melungeons to do but move into the high ridges.
And that's when the trouble started. Yes, it was real murder and blood-shed trouble, not one of your little puny feud fights.
On black nights in the dark of the moon the Melungeons come a-raiding the farm people - man, woman and child - and slipping back to the ridges. They left burning barns and houses behind them, they killed the stock and fired the crops in the fields. Mighty few whites lived to tell of it when them devils had been around.
Time and again the whites would get up a big posse, armed to the boot-straps, and head for the Melungeon country. They never got much far. The Melungeons laid for them and bushwacked their daylights out. About the best the white folks could do was catch a stray Melungeon every once in so often and hang him high.
Yea, in yonder troubled times, old coves and ridges was nigh enough to hel to semll the brimstone smoke. But time run along and both sides sort of begun to let up a little by little.
All at once the whites wanted to plumb bury the hatchet. Yes sir, they decided it the minute the word spread out the Melungeons had come on some gold back in the ridges. Law yes!! The hatchet was just naturally agoing to be buried forever - or anyway till the Melungeons told where that gold was a-coming from. Well, it wouldn't wash, this peace and brotherly talk. The Melungeons just wouldn't listen. They started trading with the whites, but not a peep about the wherabouts of that gold would they let out.
They must've rigged up some sort of smelter or other and their own mint, because they begun bringing outa kind of rough-cut double eagles. Everywhere in these parts storekeepers took in them double-eagles and no questions asked. And for good reason, too! Must have been twenty-five or thirty dollars' worth of fine soft gold in them. So the store-keepers got fat and sassy on Melungeon trade and everything was fine.
By and By the news got around and even Washington heard it. The Government got hopping mad, so I've heard, and sent in a bunch of officers to stop the counterfeit making. And then there WAS hell to rip! The store-keepers just wouldn't stand for it. They got hot in behind the politicians and pulled strings. Pretty soon work come from Washington for the officers to com on home and forget it.
Finally, the supply of gold must've give out. Anyhow, the Melungeons stopped a-bringing in the double eagles. White folks still tried to find where it came from, but no sir, thank you, them Melungeons kept it their bosom secret. Today I don't reckon even the Melungeons know where the mine was. Leastwise, they don't say so if they do. Gold's been located in North Carolina, I hear, and a few years ago there was a to-do in the newspapers about a mine being found up in Kentucky. For all anybody can say, there's still plenty of gold back here in these ridges somewhere.
After the gold stopped a-coming, the Melungeons was as poor as gully dirt again. Oh, they still done some trading down into the valleys but it wasn't much, mostly herbs and ginseng and such. Whites left them alone because they were so wild and devil-fired and queer and witchy. If a man was fool enough to go into Melungeon country and if he came back without being shot, he was just sure to wizzen and perish away with some ailment nobody could name. Folks said terrible things went on back yonder, blood drinking and devil worship and carryings-on that would freeze a good Christian's spine.
Well, first thing anybody knowed the Civil War busted out. Most the men hereabouts joined up withe the Union and started in fighting. But you can bet a pretty the Melungeons didn't burn no shoe leather hotfooting it to the colors - the Stars and Bars nor the Stars and Stripes. After the war got a-going, a heap of them took up bushwhacking and made a proper good thing out of it. The old folks say for years after the war the Melungeons was still a-trying to get the blue and gray pants and coats they'd taken from supply trains wore out. They was plenty of killings enduring thosebad old war times, but all of them can't be hung on the Melungeons. Too many gangs of white bushwhackers, draft dodgers, and deserters rampaging about in the hills for that. But Lord knows they were up to enough mischief, though, at that.
Anyways, the shootings and burnings started the old trouble again and there were ambushes and raids a plenty back and forth for years. Even right lately it was might dangerous business for a Melungeon or a white to be caught in the other's stomping grounds. Peace officers never even tried to take the law back into them Melungeon ridges.
The whites always claimed the Melungeons was a nigger breed and nobody can deny some of them really was. Some of them mixed and mingled with niggers and the name of Blackwaters. They called themselves Ridgmanites or Hill Portughee and today there's not any difference much betwixt the Ridgmanite Melungeons and the rest of us.
Why, I don't reckon over twenty or thirty outright Melungeon families are left around us. Some of them moved west after the Civil War. I've heard tell of one patchof them that settled somewhere in the Ozarks and is still there to this self-same day. A good many Melungeon bucks was drafted into the army and during the German War and their families drifted off to the north.
But it will be a long old time before the Melungeons are forgotten back through here. Not as long as the old folks like to talk and the young'uns listen, nor as long as there's high old tales to tell. Now, take the stories of Shep Goins, the Melungeon fool-killer and Big Betsy, the Melungeon shed-devil moonshine queen, for instance......
(I have put the Big Betsy story on here. If I can find the others will add them later.)
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