A Genealogy of Trees and Flesh

Abstract

There is not a drop of blood in my veins that does not come from some British line or other, and yet I?along with my paternal line of fathers for generations back?have the dark skin and hawk features of an American Indian.1 Originally, my ancestors came to this country from England, early in the eighteenth cen tury. They were Quaker ironsmiths?brothers?and they landed in Virginia. They must have had moments of strange recognition when they gazed upon some of the Indians they met. They must have sensed a physical kinship, or at least the simulacrum of one, in the lighter-skinned Indians they saw. There is an old legend that the Mandans, a western tribe exterminated by small pox before the Civil War, were eponymous descendants of Madoc, the Welsh ex plorer. Some of their women even had blue eyes and beautiful silver hair, as revealed in the portraits of George Catlin. The similarity seems to be more than superficial. It is said that both Celtic peoples and the American Indians have a larger than normal representation among them of people with O and O Negative blood types. People with this type of blood, I have read, tend to be clannish, emotional and secretive. Part of their deepest mechanism of mind and body is set against the regimented and the overly socialized. It is their fate, I suspect, to see the darkness that sur rounds every light, and to feel insidious hatreds and resentments, so that they whisper, No, amidst cries of asseveration. But my subject at this moment is not the Indians, but my own Celtic, and pre-Celtic Iberian ancestors. The Indians come to mind not only because of the chemical, psychological and physical likenesses mentioned above, but also be cause the Indians?as my ancestors knew them?along with my ancestors them selves, have vanished. Because of this, they no longer have literal and practical effect; but they are, for this same reason, vested with mythical power. Existence precedes essence; and like a lot of people, I have spent a great deal of my waking life searching for, and striving to define and create, my es