Colonies Failed There: My Narrative Inheritance

by Marshall Moore

1. 

Inbreeding. Although my mother wouldn’t say the word, she implied it when asked why she married a Marine from Louisiana instead of a local North Carolina boy. Down East, as that part of the state is nicknamed, wasn’t a place people moved to; as a result, everybody looked kind of alike. Sir Walter Raleigh’s famously lost Roanoke Colony washed ashore in the late 1500s, and in the centuries after that, others—the ones who settled by choice and not force—drifted down to grow tobacco and cotton in the fertile flatlands east of the fall line. Otherwise, there was no immigration to speak of. 

Eastern North Carolina subsides. It’s a vastness of swamps and flat sand. There are pine trees and tidal inlets. Palmettos the further south you go. A garrotte of scenic barrier islands—the Outer Banks—has kept the state from prospering like its unencumbered neighbors. This state that juts so far out into the ocean lacks a Charleston, a Baltimore, a Hampton Roads. Nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic, North Carolina’s coastal waters are the final resting place of some 5000 ships. Amid all that devouring, sandy entropy, things tend to shift. The dunes on the barrier islands support houses and highways until a hurricane pounds its way through. Afterward, choppy waves sparkle where second homes used to stand.

I just didn’t want to have a baby with somebody from here, our mother would say, often repeating the words verbatim with each new retelling of the story. I didn’t want to look at my own child and see one of those Eastern North Carolina faces. I didn’t want to take one of those last names. I just couldn’t.

2.

I knew the word paradox from an early age but was forcibly taught not to apply my critical-thinking skills to the task of unlocking the big one in our lives: why was our family so big and so small at the same time, and why couldn’t we talk about it? In this region the size of Vermont or New Hampshire where in theory we were kin to just about everybody, at least on our mother’s side, we didn’t seem to have much family around. Some of that was circumstance. Both parents were only children. Their siblings died young of illnesses that could have been treated today. Lacking uncles and aunts, we visited Granny’s two brothers and their families now and then. Heard mention of distant cousins up and down the Outer Banks and along the coastal mainland. There was a cousin in Duck, a property developer, who had money. Some relatives in Englehard and Stumpy Point. Another remote contingent in Ocracoke or Rodanthe. The names shifted; the places shifted. Bayboro, Shackleford Banks, Oriental, Minnesott Beach: I couldn’t keep them all straight. We never actually met these people we were related to, and the stories seemed to cover up more than they revealed.

The white variant of Down East’s immigrant narrative goes something like this: Umm… we’re from England. The Lost Colony vanished. The Mayflower brought the pilgrims from Plymouth to Massachusetts to eat turkey and corn on the cob with smiling Indians, and everybody lived happily ever after. No mention of slaughters and smallpox blankets. Over time, some of those settlers drifted south like the silt in our murky waterways. Apart from the Swiss and the Palatines who founded New Bern at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent Rivers, plus a few sprinkles of Irish and Scots, we remained officially English stock. The Slavs, Italians, and Hungarians moved out of Eastern North Carolina, not in. Colonies failed there. 

Since growing up in the South confers a certain immunity to logic, I became convinced we were secretly Swedish. I’d seen pictures of Scandinavians. They looked more like me than anyone I saw in daily life: blond, tall, pale. My mother had olive skin and dark hair; my father looked French or Black Irish; my sister was an olive-skinned redhead with brown eyes. Surely there had been a Nordic ancestor in the mix, somewhere down the line. If not, then I had to be a mutation. Or adopted. Hence my interest in genetics. There was no other explanation for me, and I craved one.

‘In these stories, the pronoun we expanded. In that expansion, the past and present converged: we became our forebears, and they became us.’

3.

Southern families tend to be dynastic, or to think they are. There are clans, although that word is rarely used in the States because of its deplorable homophone. Delusions of bygone greatness linger. They fester into a genteel decay that’s beautiful only from a distance. All that imaginary blue blood is in eternal conversation with itself.

Granny’s stories filled in gaps we didn’t know were there. These tended to be an old lady’s context-free ramblings, but we gleaned what we could. In these stories, the pronoun we expanded. In that expansion, the past and present converged: we became our forebears, and they became us. On Granny’s side, we were Bogarts. As in, Humphrey. One of the silver screen’s most famous faces. He was Granny’s father’s second or third cousin, kin but just barely. That relationship connected us to, among others, the actor Rudolph Valentino, the magnate JP Morgan, and the Spencers, which made us Lady Diana’s nineteenth cousins or something like that. We were not invited to the wedding, nor to the funeral.

Although we seemed to be a typical-ish middle-class family, these stories of Hollywood royalty and actual royals suggested roads not taken, choices that hadn’t worked out. There were undiscussed tensions, vague resentments. And from my father’s side, silence and evasions. He was French and a little bit Welsh. Typical Louisiana. Maybe not fully Cajun, but partially, maybe. Were we Cajun-adjacent? Was that even a thing? Were we related to anyone famous? Anyone who’d even been in the news? As it turned out, we were.

4.

In Eastern North Carolina in the late ‘70s, genealogy could be managed more easily than genetics. Scientists lived in big cities, which Greenville was not, so I shelved the idea of becoming one. Besides, Southerners tend to be morbid. The only thing our mother liked talking about more than her own death was Granny’s. I saw the deeds to the family plot in New Bern at least as often as I saw other keepsakes like her scrapbooks and the family Bible. Our mother spun legends up as ardently as Granny did—how she and therefore we were part Indian, for example, but she remained vague about which tribe. We’d been in North Carolina at least a few hundred years, so it didn’t seem far-fetched to believe her when she said we had a Cherokee ancestor or two. Having been sternly taught not to interrogate these claims, I didn’t check a map until much later in life. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee lived in the westernmost corner of the state, so far from our ancestral patch of gravel and pine trees that they might as well have been in New York.

Older now, I had questions. On our father’s side, the blank wall of silence: we were ordered not to ask about it; nothing was discussed. I read the histories of immigrants. Families who saw their bodies as inseparable from their land, their customs, had centuries of meaning stripped away at Ellis Island. They’d arrive, have a few syllables lopped off their surnames, and stagger forth into America scoured of history. I imagined coming from generations of Irish farmers or Silesian miners. Grandparents from a village in Tuscany with an olive tree older than Italy itself. In the absence of family stories of migration and erasure, I imagined that could be us. Secretly Armenian. Jewish. Portuguese.

Since there was no discussing the history of our father’s side of the family, I focused on our mother’s. For a school project, I attempted some basic genealogy. There were enough records around the house to piece together a family sapling if not a full tree. I visited the university library and looked up old census records on microfiche. The finished product relied mostly on my grandmother’s reconstructions, though: the Fulfords, the Whites, the Berrys, the Credles, the Gibsons, the Cartwrights. Marriages, entanglements, begats. We visited the family plot in New Bern and looked at gravestones that dated back to the early 1800s. I got a C on the project, one of the lowest grades I’d ever gotten in my life. No real explanation either, just a dismissive “Try harder next time” from my teacher, who seemed annoyed but wouldn’t say why. Perhaps I should have done another book report instead.

‘ Immigration obliterates history. It also creates it.’

5.

After a divorce that was as amicable as two drowning tomcats in a bag, both parents plunged into genealogy. Prior to that, my father’s chief ambition had been to find a neon beer sign for his new house, and my mother’s chief ambition had been stalking him. Newly freed of each other, they had chasmic silences to fill. Their approaches couldn’t have been more different.

My father kept his findings to himself. Now and then, he’d grunt something in passing: a Mayflower ancestor, a branch of the family from Ohio or Canada. There were French surnames: Thibodeaux, Delahoussaye. I couldn’t work out how we were related to them. No picture emerged. There was also an apocryphal ancestress five generations back who might have been Black or Indian. In 19th-century Louisiana, many Black or mixed-race people who could pass for white, did. Those with lighter complexions but who didn’t look white would sometimes identify themselves as Indian. This didn’t allow them to bypass racism altogether, but it mitigated it. Ergo, we might be fractionally Choctaw or Chickasaw or Houma. Or Black. Or something. How long he kept on with his research, I never knew. My family’s baseline of shouty alcoholic rancor kept these stories in the background, never really discussed.

My mother’s genealogical research gave her a purpose and dignity she felt that she lacked. Still staggering inside from being discarded, she confirmed all those royal connections and found or made up new ones. Oliver Cromwell this. Stately homes in Devon that. Fourth sons of minor nobility. Mayflower ancestors. In fact, the same Mayflower ones as my father, or some of them. Some had gone up to Quebec and made their way back down the Eastern Seaboard around the time his own family had migrated south. These intersections made my parents seventh cousins eighteen times removed, related but in such a random, obscure way as to laugh about it instead of worrying we’d be born with three heads. But talking was how she clung. After an hour of her begats, sometimes more, I’d be praying one of us could go join our ancestors. Her or me, it didn’t matter. I missed the silences.

6.

Immigration obliterates history. It also creates it. In our goodbyes a few weeks before I sold my car and boarded a one-way flight out of America, my father overturned much of what I’d been told. In my teens, I figured out the reasons for his own silences: his father died in Angola State Prison, serving out a life sentence as an accomplice to murder. I never met the man. That much was real. There was probably no Black or Indian or mixed-race ancestress five generations ago. DNA tests and whatnot. Some of my mother’s stories were nothing more than that: fictions spun up to help a sad woman make herself the center of attention, to conjure a heritage of glamour and relevance where sometimes there was none. She wanted to matter. She did that by compiling two filing cabinets’ worth of documents, almost a thousand years of genealogy, much of which was probably real and none of which she published.

Since her baseline was often bonkers in the first place, it took longer to realize something was wrong, or more wrong. Things had always been wrong. There had been diagnoses. But her habit of trying to type and entire email in the subject-line field was weird, even for her. She’d claim Gmail’s new format didn’t work on her PC. The subject lines of her emails would be fragments of her usual family ramblings from centuries ago: she’d discovered a branch of the family in New Zealand, somebody had fought in the English Civil War, there was a castle up in Scotland. There were times she made sense, like when she talked about a project to trace the Lost Colony with DNA. Apparently the Tuscarora Indian tribe took them in, and because of the lack of inward migration, we were descended from them. It seemed there was a connection with the Lumbee tribe as well. Or perhaps there wasn’t. She’d sail off into the ether again. Weeks would pass, sometimes months. I was in Hong Kong by this point, getting tear-gassed along with the rest of the city, so my attention was elsewhere.

The end, such as it was, came suddenly: dementia, memory care, liquidation of assets. The kind souls she’d appointed as her powers of attorney locked me out of the process and sold the belongings they didn’t keep for themselves, only looping me in when most of the arrangements had been made and the bank accounts were empty. What did I want to do with those filing cabinets? After all those years of never knowing what was real and what was true, I contemplated having them shipped over, but I’d accepted a job in England; it would mean sending boxes of documents I wasn’t sure I wanted across not one ocean but two. I made arrangements for the New Bern historical society to take them. And when I spoke to her again, after I’d moved, and told her I was living just down the A30 from our ancestral stately pile in Exeter, she had no idea what I was talking about. All of it, gone. I’ve made a certain peace with my thousand years of family blankness. The stories have shifted in a truthward direction. The past bears down—history itself bears down—but the gist is enough.