Africans In NYC
Using Africans in New York, who’s stories we discovered by historians, we filled in the blanks using creative writing. Here is mine.
Good “Fortune”
I remember the stories mama told me. Her village in Lower Guinea raided, husband killed. She told me how she was dragged toward the slave port, on to the slave ship. “I was chained up and beaten…” She had told me. “next to people I didn’t know, and I laid there, until they took me out of the chains. It was the first time I had seen the sun in what felt like years.” She told me how she ran from where she was to New York where she met a nice man, and had me, so I had freedom, but no matter what, it still felt like I was treated differently, and I was. People looked at me in odd ways and kept a far distance from me, no one seemed to like me. But that changed two years ago.
I was in love. She was a slave, I wasn’t, but I needed her. I bought her as a slave, with my son, Robin. It seemed surprising that and man like me would buy a slave, especially after the British passed laws that made free blacks like me less equal to the whites. So I made a big decision, and bought her freedom with the money I had from being a cooper, then I married her. It was a great life. I made the money, she took care of Robin. I was thought of as a rebel, John Fortune, and my name was disliked in the streets. We then had a daughter named Elizabeth, and people were now starting to treat us differently. We even hired a teacher for Elizabeth so she could learn to read and write, something, our family could not do. It was great. Now that we had an educated member in our family, people treated us normally. Now we were the Fortunes, just a family in New York.
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