1814: How Levi Got His Name

Hindy said,

—Coy, your father was a good man. He was good with horses and the Buckra set him most times to rounding up cattle. They’d stay out weeks on end. Then it seems they must have sold him on or was bit by a snake or I don’t know. Gone now. It was from him you have that Arab nose—he was from Berber people, or Fula, that was half Berber and half Wolof. Sam, they called him.

It was all children and women in that house. They could get a man if they needed one but they mostly didn’t seem to care. They were Poro people, not Methodist like the other people on the Place (Creel, 1988). The brothers and uncles lived in a house on the other side of the kitchen garden. Hindy didn’t like to have men in the house. Hindy liked the boys though. Hindy said:

—You go work with your uncles. They show you the work, and they show you how to be a man.

Coy worked the canals with the uncles and the brothers, and with the other boys in his house—Baako and Chidike, call them his brothers. They walked the dykes and worked the floodgates and harvested rice. They cleared the cypress swamp and dug new canals to water the lowland fields. When the work was done, Coy came back to the houses and tended the kitchen garden or made clothing or baskets with Hindy, that they sold in Charles Town (Pollitzer, 1999).

The uncles led him to a grove in the swamp where the old spirit Poro bit him—the less said about that the better. Poro taught him to build and farm and to fight. He wore the manscar on his shoulder. Time to time, he’d see the conjure horses, their iron hooves aglow amid the cloudy draw (Botkin, 1971).

Some Methodist boys pulled his sister Mary into the forest. Later on Levi would not say it was Methodists that were bad—only those boys in particular—but it did seem to him like the Book made folks blind to hants. Hants could get hold of a man and twist him. The brothers and uncles wanted to kill the Methodist boys. Coy’s mother wanted to put conjure on them. Hindy wouldn’t have it.

—We have our ways and the Buckra leaves us to them so long as we bring the rice crop in. If we set to feuding with the Methodists, the Buckra will interfere. Leave it be. Mary won’t die of it.

No one liked it, but the men assented. The brothers Baako and Chidike and Coy couldn’t do as she asked. Arming themselves with axe handles, they set on the Methodist boys. In the fight, Baako’s leg got broke. Chidike and Coy carried him home. Hindy was not angry.

—You’ll have to run. Go south to St. Augustine and join the Geechee men there. There’s Poro men among them. But don’t go down the coast, Buckra will find you. Run upriver, then turn west to the mountain country, then follow the mountains south. Don’t come back here.

So Chidike and Coy ran the cypress swamp, up the Santee to Lake Marion in a stolen canoe, then overland crossing the Edisto and the Salkahatchee, where their knowledge of the land failed them and they became lost. They took a wrong turn and came into Creek lands, where they were not safe. Chidike took sick and Coy left him in a forlorn Yamasee camp on the Flint River. At that place they told him the Buckra were shooting each other now, but the Yamasees had different names for the different kinds of Buckra and Coy wasn't sure what they meant. The conjure horses, eyes rolling, flames at their hooves, thundered in the ragged sky.

Coy came down the Apalachicola in 1814, starving and wild. They were Christian people at Barnet’s Town, they took him in. Weak with fever, he told them what had happened to him and they gave him a name from the Book: Levi.

From working on the Carolina rice plantation, Levi knew how to build earthworks along the riverbank. He went with Abraham, one of the men there, to the English fort to build earthworks and learn how the soldiers did. But the English left and the Americans fired cannons from a riverboat (Twyman, 1999). The explosion knocked the air from the riverbank, knocked the branches from the trees, the walls of the fort flung in splinters. Levi lay face down in the hard dirt of the earthworks, his back shredded with splinters. Abraham pulled him to his feet and they fled.

Levi married a woman called Sarah and they settled near Peliklakaha. Their son was Moses.