Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page A

high school. The previous year he ran into a goalpost headfirst, scoring a winning touchdown and breaking his neck. He was buried in a church cemetery in town. The footballer’s parents have divorced, and his mother is moving away. She’s suing the father for custody. She wants to dig up their son and take him with her.
    After lunch, I scale a steep hill on the edge of town. In the doorway of her attractive contemporary house I meet my grandmother’s cousin Hetty Swindall Sutherland. A decade older than my father, she wears her gray hair in a braid coiled atop her head. Vonda and Zella have reported that she sprints up and down her bluff, into town and back, every day. She reminds me of an aging Heidi. After assuring me that the rumors of a Cherokee in the family are untrue, she gives me a huge volume of oral histories collected early in the twentieth century by her late lawyer husband from the original settlers of the county.
    Back in the car I look up the references to my various ancestors. One concerns my four-times-great-grandmother Betty Reeves. Her great-granddaughter, a first cousin to both my grandparents, states that Betty was a Portuguese Indian. I sit in stunned silence. Is this what my grandmother doesn’t want me to know? Some of the early Melungeons claimed they were Portuguese….
    I also find several accounts of Civil War skirmishes in that area. I learn that my grandmother’s grandfather John Wesley Swindall (also my grandfather’s great-uncle) was a sergeant in the Union army. There’s a photo of him and his wife. He has straight black hair, a bushy gray beard that conceals his face, and small dark eyes. His wife, Polly Phipps, a granddaughter of the Portuguese Indian Betty Reeves, is a dark-eyed brunette. I read that John Wesley’s mother, Betsy Swindall, never married and that John Wesley’s father was named Solomon Tolliver.
    I discover that my grandmother’s great-uncle Eli Vanover injured an arm fighting for the Union in the battle of Cranesnest in 1864. Her great-grandfather George Howell also fought for the Union in that battle.
    My grandfather Reed’s parents, as well as some Vanover relatives of my grandmother, moved behind Union lines in Kentucky so as not to have to support the Confederacy. My grandfather’s grandfather Robert Y. Haynes was taken prisoner by some Confederate soldiers, who slaughtered one of his cows. Ironic that my grandfather put himself through medical school by caring for Confederate veterans, some of whom might have fought against his own relatives.
    Having at last accepted that Appalachians are as racist as other southerners, I now discover that most of my ancestors supported the Union. I’d revere my ancestors, whoever they are — but who the hell are they? No wonder my grandmother, self-proclaimed duchess of Dixie, doesn’t want me prowling around over here. If she’s a southerner, then Billy Graham is Jewish.
    Next I drive to the town of Wise to meet a distant cousin named Greg. We sit over glasses of iced tea in a coffee shop. He has dark, shiny hair and ruddy coloring. A few years younger than I, he’s writing a history of my grandmother’s family, the Vanovers. He, too, is a schoolteacher, and he tells me about tracing the Vanovers back to Cornelys Van Hovgem, who emigrated in 1684 to Flatbush in Brooklyn from Zeeland in the Netherlands. His descendants moved to New Jersey and then to North Carolina, where the fifth Cornelius Vanover married a woman named Abby Easterd, who is Greg’s and my four-times-great-grandmother. Greg says some of her earlier descendants applied for membership in the Cherokee Nation based on their claim that she was a full-blooded Cherokee.
    He shows me the first photo I’ve ever seen of William Vanover, my grandmother’s grandfather, himself a grandson of Abby Easterd. He has high cheekbones and dark eyes set deep in their sockets. If the rumors about Abby are