The Ramapo Mountain People

William Carlos Williams is often on my mind, since I grew up in Passaic, New Jersey, across the river from Rutherford where he was a practicing pediatrician. The oft-quoted Williams poem "To Elsie" that begins with the famous line "The pure products of America go crazy" is partly about an isolated group in the Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey and New York, known unkindly as the "Jackson Whites" and more respectfully as the "Ramapo Mountain People." They are what some anthropologists call a "tri-racial isolate," a mixture of white, black, and Indian. Although in this case the preponderance of the ancestry is African-American, starting with free blacks in the 17th and 18th centuries (some of whom partnered with white Dutch), and the Native American element if present is not genealogically traceable, the People themselves insist that they have no black ancestry and are mostly Indian, despite the fact that they look more mulatto than anything else. As with some other isolate groups, there has been in-breeding over the years, with the expected resultant higher incidence of polydactylism (extra fingers and toes), syndactylism (webbing between fingers and toes), and albinism. Where I grew up, 25 miles away, the People were considered "hillbillies" and were feared (for no especially good reason except their "strangeness"). They did tend to keep apart. David Steven Cohen's 1974 book about them, The Ramapo Mountain People, is fascinating but was controversial with the People themselves, because it properly insists upon their easily provable black ancestry. As least as of the Seventies, the People expressed both racism against blacks, whom they utterly refused to identify with, and also "skin tone racism," favoring the lighter-skinned among their own group.