'YOU WILL NEVER FIND THE TRUTH'

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'YOU WILL NEVER FIND THE TRUTH'

By Donald N. Panther-Yates

Georgia Southern University

A human life is like a single letter in the alphabet. It can be meaningless, or it can be part of a great meaning.

---Jewish Theological Seminary of America

"You will never find the truth about my mother's people," shrieked Elzina when we visited her in Huntsville shortly before her death last year. My wife and I had both recently found out we were Melungeon. Teresa wondered especially about her Rameys. So we paid a visit to this formidable maiden aunt, keeper of skeletons and reigning matriarch of the family, whom Teresa remembered from her youth as invariably tight-lipped, scowling, always garbed in black satin dresses and lace-up boots. Elzina LaVera Grimwood was a schoolteacher, the daughter and granddaughter of schoolteachers, and sixth in a series of Tennessee Elzinas that stretched back to the days of Daniel Boone. As we drove away empty-handed over the mountains, Teresa remarked that Elzina would not have used those words if the big sin was that the Ramey family had Indian blood or came from France. "Maybe it was that they were bootleggers," I suggested, “or Gypsies.” Speculate as we might, it was hard to guess what dreadful ancestral guilt lay concealed in Elzina's fearful heart. She carried the secret to her grave.

FIG. 1. FOUR GENERATIONS of Ramey women are shown in this 1916 photograph, from right, Mary Ann Jean Ramey, Redema Elizabeth Ramey Goode, Etalka Vetula Good Grimwood, and Elzina Vetula Grimwood. All are buried in the Ramey cemetery plot in Huntsville, Ala. The Ramey family has stories of coming from Egypt and the land of Israel, one branch fleeing from Spain in 1492 to France and subsequently to Westmoreland County, Va. Rameys later donated the land and helped build the first courthouse in Wise County, Va. Of the names here, Etalka is Yiddish (diminuitive for Adelaide), Elzina is Hebrew/Arabic, Redema is Portuguese, and Vetula is Romano-Gothic for “little Wett” (a tribe). In DNA testing, the Ramey gene matched the Caldwell-Yates-Stuart haplotype, thought to be French Jewish.

FIG. 2. THE AUTHOR (at podium) and Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman were the first to break the Jewish origins of Melungeons. They are shown here at the Melungeon Heritage Association's 4th Union, held in June 2002 in Kingsport, Tenn. Hirschman's book Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America will be published by Mercer University Press in fall 2003. Panther-Yates spoke on the subject of Sephardic Jewish influence and intermarriage with the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole, following up on an article that had appeared in the June issue of Appalachian Quarterly, "Shalom and Hey, Y'all: Jewish-American Indian Chiefs of the Old South." Hirschman is from Kingsport and lives in Princeton, N.J., where she holds a chair of marketing at The Rutgers University School of Business. Photo courtesy Sara Frooman, Durham, N.C