Chapter 7: Second Sight

 

     "Better use that second sight, young fellow!"

Benny stumbles back from the cold fire circle in a frantic search for the unexpected voice. Then he sees the coonhound wagging her tail and staring up into a white-barked sycamore behind the abandoned campsite. The white horse turns his big head to briefly glance over his haunches from the nearby engorged stream before resuming slurps of muddy water.

"What the devil are you?" Benny blurts, flabbergasted by the sight of a dark-skinned man sitting on a thick branch, his deer hide moccasins and leggings dangling below a burgundy woolen breech cloth. Most astonishing of all is what appears to be a frizzy black hat unlike any Benny has ever seen.

"Don't you mean where is she?" the man laughs, his grin triggering a round of wags from Queen Charlotte. 

     People of African descent were just beginning to be brought over the Blue Ridge to the Valley of Virginia as household servants and farm hands in the eighteenth century, but most of the homesteads in the hollows and hills were small family farms. Native American dress on an apparently free person of color was so unexpected as to conjure up the supernatural.

     European settlers venturing into the more remote mountains of western Virginia and Tennessee would soon find they weren't the first non-natives. Free blacks, former indentured servants, and escaped slaves had been moving into the hills for over a century, sometimes forming communities with the remnants of Native American tribes. Towns with such a melange of peoples came to be called Melungeon communities by those who came into the mountains after them.

     Most of those late comers were of Scotch-Irish descent. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the English monarchy had forcibly sent the clans from the border area across the Irish Sea to work the flax plantations around newly claimed Belfast. After a generation or two of tenant farming or worse, many of these Ulster Scots departed for better prospects in the American colonies. 

     "Supposing I do mean where is she," Bennie queries right back at the apparition in the tanning leaves of the old sycamore. "How did you know?"

"Well now, you Irish with the wild eyes aren't the only ones can see."

"A lot of good it does in the here and now."

"Look with that darker eye and you'd have seen Aggie Cornett going back to Nepernine."

"Do what?" Benny stalls before formulating the question he needs answered. "Which trail?"

"Just head west and follow the creeks until they become the river that runs to the licks."

"Much obliged, Chief Red Pants," Benny recovers enough to regain his sarcasm. "Now Lottie, Ajax and I will be taking that second sight over to the Licking River."

"That's more like it," laughs the Melungeon medicine man. "Just don't you go counting on her being home in that here and now of yourn. They done lit out for the salt licks for curing winter stores."