Re: Melungeons and Eboshins
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In reply to:
Melungeons and Eboshins
Lou Sparks 6/10/08
Nancy Morrison,
What evidence did Darlene Wilson provide which substantiated any of her assumptions of someone choosing "to wear the word as a self-label"?Other than Wilson's assumptions, what could you suggest as evidence Browlow's usage "changed the meaning of" "malungeon"?
Lucy Suder
http://198.66.252.234/sparks.htmlhttp://198.66.252.234/sparks.html
In her paper, Race, Face, and Place: On Becoming Color-Minded, Darlene Wilson writes that "When people ask me for a definition of 'Melungeon,' I like to say that it depends on the century in which someone chose to wear the word as a self-label. In the sixteenth-century, to say 'I'm a Melungeon' might have been a way of saying, 'Don't kill me, I'm not English!' In the seventeenth, it could easily have been a way of saying: 'Don't kill me, I'm not a Virginian or a Carolinian!' But, by the eighteenth-century, the lingo had so changed that to say, 'I'm a Melungeon,' probably meant: 'Don't kill me, I'm not White!' since it was, along Appalachia's ridge tops and river-bottoms, mostly 'Whites' who caused grief and misery for anyone who displayed anything other than a lily-white face and features."
Brownlow can certainly be counted as one of those 'whites' that caused grief. By the nineteenth century, his application of the term 'malungeon' changed the meaning of that term, yet again. We must read the term in the context of his time and place. It is this changeable feature of the word 'malungeon'/Melungeon, that is of interest here. We must ask this question; what did Brownlow mean when he used the term 'malungeon?' It is not what did the word Melungeon originally mean. It is not where did the word come from or any of the other meanings that it became over time.
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Re: Melungeons and Eboshins
Lou Sparks 6/10/08