"What make you such a fighter?" I am asked from time to time. In my lineage, both my maternal and paternal foreparents were Indians. Usually I respond to this question by saying , "That's the Indian in Me." My Grandfather who was born into slavery told me this story when I was in my early teens. He said that this story had been told to him by his mother Rosalyn, a fourth generation slave from their lineage to be born in America following the capture of her great-great-great grandparents, Baatsi and Ashanti who had been kidnapped in Africa around the time of the Revolutionary War and enslaved in America.
About two years after being in America Ashanti, now separated from her husband who she would never see again, gave birth to twins, Andrew and Isabella whose father was their slave master.
Shortly after the death of her mother Isabella and her Inidan Lover, a Muskogean Indian named Hitchitaw who was also a slave, joined sixteen other slaves from three plantations in Georgia and escaped to Spanish Flordia where Choctaws and Seminole were giving refuge to runaway slaves.
The episode that follows is one of many that occurred during the one and three-quarter centuries journey that began with the kidnapping of Baasti and Ashanti and ended with the death of Grandpa Benjamin. This episode is presented verbatim.
"Soon after their escape posters asking for help in capturing them were posted in Georgia, Florida and Alabama. One poster described Isabella as a young Negro woman who had scars on her back and a gash on the right side of her buttock occasioned by the whip and a Choctaw Indian who had the letter "S" branded on the left side of his face and lower left forearm. At the bottom of the poster was a warning: "The Indian may be violent!" A reward was offered to anyone returning these slaves to their slave masters.
A few weeks after they arrived in Flordia a posse numbering twenty white slave catchers from Georgia and Alabama came to Flordia with the intention of capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their slave masters or selling them to other slave owners. Isabella and the other runaway slaves with her resisted the slave cathchers as they put up a "hellava" fight. Isabella's Indian Lover Htchitaw overpowered one of the slave catchers, took his gun and killed him, one other slave catcher and a horse before he was killed..... A few months later Isabella's slave master leraned that she was pregnant. She had been impreganted by her Indian Lover, as she affectionately called him. ... Although Isabella called her daughter Betty in the presence of her slave owner and other white people she never called her by that name at other times. She named her daughter Dehgewanum, after her Indian Lover's mother. The name means "The two-Descending Voices." (There's more to this story.)
(To read this story in full click on "Short Stories" at the upper left of this page and then click on "That's the Indian in Me." There you will also learn how you can obtain your copy of my book, "Grandpa Benjamin" that contains this and many other stories about the life and times of Grandpa Benjamin, the man who had and continues to have the greatest impact on my life.)
