Darker Days

“‘We’re only doing this for your own good’—words that hide a multitude of sins,” surmised Samuel Carter III in his historical account of the crimes committed against the Cherokee. Many shameful atrocities against fellow man have been rationalized, in one way or another, throughout millennia.

Persecutions of the Cherokee, Melungeons, Waldenses, and others who originated in or came to the Southern mountain region are among the ugly, disappointing moments in human history, and be forewarned that some of these accounts are disturbing, abhorrent, and graphic. Whether through physical violence or emotional manipulation, oppression casts a lasting, devastating shadow on individuals, communities, and entire populations.

But as the old adage insists these histories are worth recording—lest we repeat them.

Blood-Stained Roots

Valdese is a small North Carolina town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, an area settled in 1893 by Waldenses (from the French Vaudois and Italian Valdesi) seeking religious freedom and opportunity. They came from Italy, where for centuries they endured gruesome acts of brutality and forced exile because their beliefs diverged from those of the Catholic Church.

Some believe the Waldenses actually predated a leader named Peter Waldo—a merchant in France who relinquished his wealth to take up the cause of evangelism—while others document him as the movement’s founder. At the core of the Waldensian Christian doctrine, like that of Martin Luther, was the strong conviction that the Bible was open to interpretation by everyone, not only priests; they believed in individual freedom of conscience. Spreading the gospel was an essential part of their religious practice. 

For this, the Catholic leadership in France sentenced the followers to excommunication and exile, and they fled in the late twelfth century to the Alpine valleys of the Piedmont region in Italy. The movement continued to grow, with the School of the Barbas established to train their spiritual leaders.

“Waldensians were unbelievably organized in their mission work,” explained Anthony Collins, director of the Waldensian Trail of Faith museum in Valdese. “They were sending out young men two by two across Eastern Europe, and they were converting folks to Christianity in a huge kind of way—so much so that they became a threat to the Catholic Church. If you got started converting people to your religion, then you were going to have problems with the Catholic Church.”

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, popes ordered expeditions of inquisitors to seek out these heretics and exterminate them. Stories of these attacks and massacres are recounted in graphic detail. The seventeenth century scholar J.A. Wylie documented the history of the Waldenses in great detail in The History of the Waldenses, with citations throughout. “They were ever and anon fulminating their persecuting edicts, and their inquisitors were scouring the valleys in pursuit of victims. An inquisitor of the name of Borelli had 150 Vaudois men, besides a great number of women, girls, and even young children, brought to Grenoble and burned alive,” wrote Wylie. 

When under siege, the pious villagers would flee their settlements in the Alpine valleys and head for the mountains to cloak themselves in caverns and caves—some large enough to hold 3,000 people. But on one such occasion, they were detected by their assailants and smoked out of the cave by fire, a slaughter awaiting them as they emerged. They adapted to a life of exile and persecution in other ways. “They kept raw dough on the table at all times, so if someone did come and try to seize the building while they were studying, they would take all their stuff and wrap it up in the dough and put it on the fire like they were making bread,” Collins said. Some homes had loose stones in the fireplace behind which documents could be hidden.

Many more wars and attacks followed as decades and centuries went by, but none so horrific and ghastly as the infamous massacre of 1655, the “Great Massacre.”

Wylie drew from the account of the Waldensian pastor and historian Leger, which was held at the University of Cambridge, which described terrible scenes: children’s heads dashed against rocks, the sick and aged burned, limbs cut off, some buried alive, some dragged behind plows. “My hand trembles,” wrote Leger, “so that I scarce can hold the pen, and my tears mingle in torrents with my ink, while I write the deeds of these children of darkness.” Concluded Wylie: “These cruelties form a scene that is unparalleled and unique in the history of at least civilized countries. There have been tragedies in which more blood was spilt and more life sacrificed, but none in which the actors were so completely dehumanized, and the forms of suffering so monstrously disgusting, so unutterably cruel and revolting.”

Some challenged the accuracy of Leger’s accounts, but the horrifying tales of the massacre were memorialized by others, including the great poet John Milton. He wrote this sonnet about the massacre:

“Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones,

Forget not: in Thy book record their groans

Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow

O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundredfold, who having learned Thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.”

Despite these trials, a few Waldenses survived. The Reformation transformed Europe, and in the mid-nineteenth century the Waldenses were granted civil rights. Some emigrated to Uruguay and Argentina in South America and to North America. Valdese was the largest American settlement, with 29 arriving in May 1893 and 178 more following in November of that year. Collins estimates that 25 to 30 percent of the Valdese population is of Waldensian descent, and many Waldensian names are common.

Distrust of the Unknown

Although the arrival of the Waldensians in America around the dawn of the twentieth century was most certainly a welcome change for that population following centuries of suffering in Europe, other groups living in the states at the time were subject to exclusion, injustice, and brutality because of racial discrimination, including a people who settled in the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee known as the Melungeons.

“Melungeons have lived in the mountains so long that no one remembers where they came from,” noted Tim Hashaw, author of Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America.

Although recent DNA studies have indicated that Melungeons descended from northern European and African ancestors, for more than a century their origins were considered a mystery both within and outside of Melungeon circles. Some maintained they were some cross between multiple races and nations of forebears, including Portuguese, Cherokee, Hebrew, Romani gypsies and Turks. This peculiar and ambiguous lineage, Hashaw posited, may have in fact been developed as a defense mechanism for those seeking to avoid the vitriol directed at blacks in the South: “Much of the attention in the past has focused on sensational theories of Melungeon origins, ignoring evidence that the Melungeon ‘mystery’ was a diversion to conceal African ancestry during slavery and Jim Crow,” he wrote.

Rumors and fear of the unknown morphed into folklore; some called them “boogeymen.” Hashaw cited one early description of the mountain dwellers as “dark-skinned devils with blue eyes.” Blacks and whites alike shunned them. Unruly boys and girls were sternly reminded by their parents of the tale of the winged, six-fingered Melungeon ogres that would swoop down to carry off disobedient children. Mattie Ruth Johnson grew up in the Melungeon area of Newman’s Ridge in the east Tennessee county of Hancock, where some portrayed them as “a bunch of dirty-faced, lowdown scoundrels living in shacks with no floors, sitting around spitting tobacco juice, and watching everything with hard, keen eyes,” she wrote in her autobiography, published in 1997. But “there has never been a more wonderful bunch of people,” she remarked, “people who have frequently been portrayed inaccurately by writers and by many others.”

Melungeons fell victim to the same crimes as were depicted in the recent film 12 Years a Slave, in which free blacks were kidnapped and sold into slavery. An April 10, 1778, ad in the North Carolina Gazette was placed by Johnson Driggers—a Melungeon father, Hashaw says—seeking information about “two men in disguise, with marks on their faces and clubs in their hands, beat and wounded” the free black woman Ann Driggers “and carried away four of her children.” “By 1750, these and other free Melungeons lived in constant fear of abduction and loss of liberty during the long night of American slavery, when the slightest trace of African blood might lead to abduction,” Hashaw told. “After the United States banned the importation of African slaves in 1807, the lucrative domestic slave market tempted man-stealers to prey on mixed people regardless of their free status.” And in 1831, the Virginia state legislature was petitioned to send all free Americans of color to Liberia, Africa, for fear their presence “stirred up the slaves”—despite the fact mixed families had lived in America for two centuries and had fought for independence.

Before and after the Civil War, Southern states denied many civil rights to those of perceived mixed race. The Tennessee state legislature passed a law in 1834 excluding those with more than one-quarter mixed blood from the enjoyment of many rights. “For the Melungeons, there was always the assumption, which was correct, that the Melungeons had African ancestry,” said Wayne Winkler, a former president of the Melungeon Heritage Association and a Melungeon descendent. Winkler has conducted extensive research on Melungeon history, published a book on the topic and frequently gives presentations.

“The persecution that African Americans faced was also a plight of the Melungeons. They weren’t enslaved, but they faced legal discrimination,” Winkler said. “They weren’t permitted to vote in Tennessee until after the Civil War. Even then, they were not really encouraged to vote. They were not permitted to go to the public schools. They weren’t permitted by law to marry with white people. Socially, they were just looked down upon.” Some stories assert that Melungeons came to Tennessee after their land in North Carolina and Virginia was seized; because they were not able to testify against white people, they were unable to defend their land titles, Winkler explained.

The Melungeon essayist and poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson recalls being ostracized by darker black children, who taunted her in school, calling her “a light n——, with straight hair!” “Bitter recollections of hair ribbons jerked off and trampled in the mud. Painful memories of curls yanked back into the ink bottle of the desk behind me, and dripping ink down my carefully washed print frocks,” Dunbar-Nelson wrote.

“Some Melungeons were very dark skinned, and some were not,” said Winkler. Many family names were tied to Melungeons, and those attempting to assimilate married outside of their group and eagerly adopted new names. Parents and grandparents withheld information about Melungeon heritage from their children in efforts to shield them. “

There was a fear that they might be found out,” explained Winkler. “I found out about my own Melungeon ancestry when I was 12 years old. It was one of those things that had been kept from me.” 

Winkler didn’t grow up in Hancock County, Tenn., but he visited family there when school wasn’t in session. Hancock was one of the poorest counties in the nation, and in an effort to stimulate economic development, an outdoor drama about the Melungeons, “Walk Toward the Sunset,” was presented. It ran from 1969 to 1976. It was an intrepid, precarious undertaking.

“Melungeon was considered sort of an epithet—it was certainly not a word that you wanted to insult somebody with. It was the equivalent of the N word,” Winkler said. “But it was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and people were starting to take pride in their heritage. The outdoor drama had a real impact on the way people in the county looked at Melungeons and the way Melungeons looked at themselves.

“That play was a watershed moment in history for the Melungeons.”

Melungeons today enjoy much greater acceptance, though there are lingering pockets and remnants of racism. The Melungeon Heritage Association held its eighteenth annual Union in June, attended by 107 individuals from 14 states. The event culminated with the announcement of a new Center for Melungeon Research at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Va.

The ‘Whitening’ of the Cherokee

Decades before more than 15,000 Cherokee were forcibly removed from their homelands and forced to relocate to territory that is now Oklahoma, debilitating actions were exacted upon them that served to undermine Cherokee sovereignty and dignity as a people. Politically, treaty after treaty brokered with Indian nations turned out to be mere lip service as American eyes turned increasingly to tribal lands, and U.S. policies trended ever closer to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Culturally, white settlers and American leaders pressured the Cherokee to forsake their traditional customs and ways of life in favor of more “civilized” practices.

Cherokee men were instructed to give up hunting and instead to take up farming; tending the fields was previously a responsibility that fell to women. In a more literal way, “whitening” of the Cherokee took place as European colonists took Cherokee wives and later during the Revolution, when British officers married into the clans and remained in the nation, raising mixed-blood families, Samuel Carter III wrote. “The mixed-bloods tended to desert the mountains and settle in the flatlands and the valleys, where they could raise crops and engage more readily in frontier trade.” Some Cherokees owned black slaves—a commodity “regarded as one of the ‘civilized’ contributions of the white economy,” said Carter.

The Cherokee learned to speak, read, and write the English language, even drafting their own Constitution. Efforts to assimilate the Cherokee continued with the establishment of schools led by missionaries, who in time went about the task of converting their pupils to Christianity. Some resisted, however, including the Indian Tecumseh, who implored the Cherokee to abandon the English conventions and to “put on paint and buckskin, and be Indians again.”

Carter cites documents of Thomas Jefferson’s remarks to Cherokee chiefs who visited him in Washington in 1806 as an example of the patronizing attitude with which whites treated the Indians:

“You are becoming farmers, learning the use of the plough and hoe, enclosing your grounds and employing that labor in their cultivation which you formerly employed in hunting and in war; and I see handsome specimens of cotton cloth raised, spun and wove by yourselves. You are also raising cattle and hogs for your food, and horses to assist your labors. Go on, my children, in the same way and be assured the further you advance in it the happier and more respectable you will be.”

This confused the Cherokee, of course, when Jefferson would later suggest that they abandon the very land he had urged them to improve.

“There would always be a naïve rationalization in the United States approach to Indian affairs,” noted Carter. “A principle of this approach was the dubious parental edict: ‘We are only doing this for your own good’—words that hide a multitude of sins against humanity. The Indians were exhorted to improve and farm the land and in the same breath told that they would be better off—and happier!—somewhere else.”

The Cherokee would come to realize they were gradually being betrayed, however. Between 2,000 and 5,000 Cherokee are estimated to have perished on that long march to Oklahoma.

The scars of fear and persecution

It may go without saying that living under fearful conditions is bad for one’s health, but research indeed bears out that assumption, with evidence that multiple generations may suffer from the impacts of persecution — mental, physical, and emotional.

A study published by The British Journal of Psychiatry in 1996 examined the impacts of persecution and exile among 231 refugee patients at the Psychosocial Centre for Refugees in Oslo, Norway. More than 46 percent of patients had a post-traumatic stress disorder, and experience with torture “emerged as an important predictor of emotional withdrawal and retardation. Refugee status also predicted for hostility and aggression, the study found.

“The results confirm earlier findings that refugees constitute a population at risk for mental disorder,” it stated.

The psychiatrist Hans Keilson in 1979 presented the first systematic analysis of children who had suffered from persecution by the Nazis, examining Jewish orphans who had been held in concentration camps or who had hidden in Holland and then re-examining 204 of them an average of 25 years later. Keilson found what he referred to a “sequential traumatization,” determining that a sequence of several similar negative psychological experiences may compound each other’s effects over prolonged periods of time. Reinhart Lempp concluded that children persecuted while they were young struggled with social contacts and their sense of independence, while children persecuted in adolescence exhibited depressive personality disorders.

“Mental stress caused by Nazi persecution did not cease on May 8, 1945,” wrote Lempp. “Even though they had no longer to fear for their lives, the young in particular felt their uprootedness, became aware of their loneliness, the loss of all their relatives, and an uncertain future. Mental stress in many cases lasted for years.” Some are unable to watch documentaries about their own past. The effects of persecution manifest physically, as well; suppressing troubling memories can lead to psychosomatic symptoms such as gastro-intestinal disorders but also in cardiovascular symptoms such as high blood pressure.

And the negative impacts of persecution may carry on, affecting future generations. Those exposed to extreme stress at an early age frequently have severe problems with their marital partners and children, and they describe themselves as “often impatient, nervous, aggressive and unjust towards their children, which leads in turn to feeling guilty about their children, and interferes with, even destroys, their relationship,” writes Lempp, and “thus the children often grow up with an emotional deficit.

“It may even be stated with some certainty that those persecuted in childhood and youth … practically their whole lives are characterized and determined by persecution.”

Sharing Waldensian heritage

The North Carolina town of Valdese shares its Waldensian heritage with thousands of visitors each year through a year-round museum, a summer outdoor drama, and an annual festival.

The Waldensian Trail of Faith offers guided and self-guided tours of multiple buildings and structures that are accurate representations of the Waldensian story, and many of the buildings on which the replicas are based still exist in Italy today, said Anthony Collins, Trail of Faith director.

“We consider it to be absolutely historically accurate,” said Collins. 

For more information, call 828.874.1893 or visit waldensiantrailoffaith.org.

“From This Day Forward” is the fourth oldest outdoor drama in North Carolina; it chronicles the story of the Waldenses from their trials in Europe to their settlement in North Carolina. It is performed from mid-July through mid-August. And on the second Saturday of August, the town of Valdese hosts the Waldensian Festival, with crafts, food, and entertainment.

For information about the drama and the festival, visit visitvaldese.com or call 828.879.2126.