Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page B

true, he’d have been a quarter Cherokee, and he does look it.
    There are other nonwhites in the family, Greg says. When I press him, he replies that some Vanovers were described as Black Dutch by their neighbors. When I ask what this means, he hops in his car and speeds away. Later I write him several letters that he never answers.
    My fourth stop on this Heritage Trail is the cabin of my grandfather’s nephew Bob, the son of a man who drove a wagon from the lowlands loaded with merchandise for his father’s store in the mountains. Bob was like a kid brother to my grandfather. My mother says I met him at my grandfather’s funeral, but I don’t remember him.
    Banjo music drifts from his tiny cabin, which sits alone in a hilltop clearing in the middle of nowhere. Bob answers the door, holding the banjo by its neck. Well along in years, he looks like my grandfather’s identical twin, tall and lean with a large beaked nose and ears with unusually long lobes. Put a headdress on him, and he’d be a dead ringer for a Shawnee warrior.
    Nancy Skaggs, my grandfather’s paternal grandmother and Bob’s great-grandmother, was reputedly kidnapped by several renegade Shawnee from her family’s homestead in the Virginia backwoods. The story goes that a man named George Reed tracked these Shawnee to their encampment and rescued Nancy as the Shawnee slept. George and Nancy hid overnight in a cave while the enraged Indians hunted for them.
    Nine months later, Nancy, now Mrs. Reed, gave birth to my grandfather’s father, also named George Reed. Everyone apparently pretended to believe that old George was, in fact, the father of little George. But they must have wondered if it were really possible to make love in a cave while angry Indians were searching for you. Could one of the Shawnee have actually fathered little George?
    Every second family in the South claims descent from either a Cherokee princess or a European woman abducted by ravaging natives. Several volumes of Indian captivity narratives were published in the nineteenth century. Some of the kidnapped Europeans wanted to remain with their captors, saying that they found Indian society more congenial than the lives they’d left behind.
    The card-carrying members of Native American tribes that have achieved recognition from the federal government call such Europeans who claim Indian ancestry “wannabes.” I understand their scorn, stemming no doubt from an aversion to sharing their casino profits with those whose ancestors escaped the depredations heaped on others whose complexions left them no choice but to be labeled Indian.
    I once talked in Boston with a couple of members of a small California tribe who ridiculed the Cherokee for accepting so many wannabes. I felt as though I were at a meeting of the membership committee for the Virginia Club. (Future DNA testing will show that federally recognized tribes exhibit an average of 61.1 percent Native American ancestry, whereas the unrecognized exhibit 47.6 percent.)
    The function of such pervasive wannabe mythology may be to explain away darker-skinned family members. Also, if you can claim a few drops of native blood, perhaps you don’t have to feel quite so guilty about the relentless atrocities committed on Indians by your European ancestors.
    But in some cases wannabes could be actually-ares. Plenty of people with documented Indian heritage who were pale enough to dodge it didn’t want their names on some official government watch list, where they’d be sitting ducks for any new form of discrimination that might come down the pike. Even now some descendants of these unrecorded Indians sneer at the “reservation Indians” for having been bought off by government subsidies.
    As we sit down on Bob’s cot, he tells me about having been a miner and then a car salesman. He says my grandfather owned one of the first autos in the county — a Model T Ford. He