In Spite Of

By Benson Johnson

Benson Johnson's family saga began two hundred years ago when his 3X-great grandmother and her twin sister came to America in shackles and chains after being kidnaped in the Cameroon, West Africa. Their story has been passed down in the family ever since, along with that of each succeeding generation. This book is filled with the family's fascin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885908771

Benson Johnson

Benson Johnson grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Wayne State University with a BA in business administration. Then for almost a decade, he worked as a sales representative for IBM and ITEK. After leaving corporate life he was proud to be a small business owner in Detroit for over 40 years. He started his business as a one-man operation in his upstairs spare bedroom with just a phone, a manual typewriter, and an answering machine. For three years he worked solo, 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, until his beautiful wife, Nerassia, quit her job and became his assistant. With her help and support, the business he had begun from nothing really took off. Five years ago, Nerassia retired after more than 30 years of dedicated service. For the past 25 years more than a dozen members of Benson's extended family and friends have worked with him. He feels immense satisfaction being able to pay the people he loves twice a month. It is one of the greatest joys of his life. The wealth he has enjoyed over the years is a direct result of capitalism, a system he loves. Benson and Nerassia currently reside in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and he runs his Detroit business from there.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

I am a descendant of the Bamileke tribe of Cameroon, in West Africa. The Bamileke are known as merchants and are very industrious and hardworking people. They resisted conversion to the Islamic religion in the seventeenth century by migrating to another part of Cameroon. They also migrated to the southwest of Cameroon to avoid being taken as slaves to America. They are known as entrepreneurs and hold significant economic clout in Cameroon.

My great-great-great-grandmother, her twin sister, and the sister's boyfriend were kidnapped by the American white man about two hundred years ago. They were about thirteen years old. This story has been told in my family since that time.

The African culture of verbalizing events has always been prevalent. Historical events were recorded verbally in villages by very wise older men with outstanding memories. It was not common for events to be written down, as was common with Europeans. Our events were instead repeated over and over again by older men known as griots.

Cousin Arthur, my father's first cousin, was a modern-day griot. He chose me and my oldest sister as the ones to tell our family events to. He spoke to me at length at a family reunion some twenty years ago.

My cousin told us that the twins and the boyfriend traveled across the Atlantic on a slave ship. It was owned by the plantation owner. They were part of the ship's cargo. Other slaves were also on board.

I often wonder about the voyage with tears in my eyes, thinking about the intense pain, hunger, fear, and suffering my ancestors had to endure on that months-long journey to an unknown place at thirteen years old.

The slaves were all shackled to each other and the ship. At some point in the voyage, the boyfriend died. People died during these arduous voyages. He, of course, was unshackled and his body thrown overboard. Sharks always followed the ships. They had millions of meals from those ships.

When the ship docked at the port of Savannah, Georgia, the slaves were finally unshackled, and they disembarked from the vessel. At the moment of being unshackled, one of the twins jumped overboard. She could not swim.

My great-great-great-aunt ended her life right then and there as thousands of slaves had done in the exact same manner before her. Her sister, my great-great-great-grandmother, made the choice to endure the life of a slave in America. She was thirteen years old.

She later had a child of mixed race named Luranee. The only thing known about Luranee's father is that he was a Caucasian.

Luranee and her mother were slaves on a plantation in Roberta, Georgia. Luranee was classified as a mulatto slave in the census of 1837, the year of her birth. They were two of about twenty slaves on the plantation.

Luranee was one-half white and evidently quite beautiful. She worked in the plantation owner's house, as the mulatto slaves did. At some point or points, she was raped by the plantation owner's son. She begat twin boys, Madison and Mathew. Madison was my great-grandfather. Her sons, Madison and Mathew, also began working inside the plantation owner's house.

The twins were born in 1861, the year the Civil War began. Their mother, Luranee, was twenty-four years old at the time of their birth. They were taught to read and write—the plantation owner and his wife became quite fond of the boys. Of course, they knew that their son was the father of the boys.

The Civil War was raging in Georgia. William Sherman was the Union general, and he was busy destroying Georgia plantations and their economies. In 1864 Sherman and his Union soldiers began taking over Georgia plantations. The plantation owners and their Caucasian sons were all away fighting the war, trying to maintain their way of life, which, of course, included slavery.

In his effort to break the South and end the war, President Lincoln had declared an emancipation of the slaves in the rebellious states. That included Georgia. Many of the slaves were running off to the west and the north. Many were also joining the Union army. Abraham Lincoln had opened up the army to black men.

Slaves could not believe their good fortune. Black men could actually kill white men and not be hanged for it. Lincoln had finally taken Frederick Douglass's advice and allowed blacks into the fight. However, Lincoln had no choice. The North was losing the war, and morale was low. Many of the Northern soldiers had begun deserting. The blacks fought ferociously. They fought as if their very freedom depended on it, which, of course, it did. Douglass was an escaped slave himself and a noted abolitionist. Five of his own sons signed up and fought for the Union.

Many of the slaves who fled west got jobs as ranch hands and were referred to as cowboys. Twenty-five percent of the western cowboys were black.

Northern armies in Georgia were feeding their hungry troops by slaughtering the farm livestock meant to go to market. They were eating the dairy products and vegetables also meant to be sold for profit to benefit and perpetuate slavery and the plantation way of life.

In spite of all the fighting, the Union soldiers found time to entertain themselves and the twins by riding them around the plantation on their horses. Of course the boys loved it. They were very cute little boys.

The plantation owner's wife, their grandmother, Ms. Flo, got very nervous whenever the soldiers handled the boys. She told the remaining slaves to tell them they did not know who they belonged to. She was terrified the soldiers would take her grandchildren with them out of spite if they discovered their relationship to her. None of the slaves told, and Ms. Flo breathed a sigh of relief when the Union soldiers finally moved on to the next battle and left the boys there. They were her only grandchildren.

Oftentimes the departing Union army took the remaining slaves with them as what was referred to as contraband. Lincoln thought, correctly, that if he crippled the plantations’ labor force, the war would end sooner.

In spite of the fact that the twins were brown skinned, Ms. Flo began taking them to her white church with the plantation owner. Of course this was unusual, she being Caucasian and they being slaves. She told her husband that the twins would attend church with them and she did not care to hear any objections whatsoever. She did not. Years later, upon Madison's death, he was laid to rest in the church cemetery out back. He remains there to this day.

During those times the plantation owner was the law. He controlled everything and everyone. That included the mayor, sheriff, council, KKK—everyone. Whatever he said was the way it was going to be.

As Madison and Mathew grew up, Big Flo decided that they would have a high school education. She sent them ninety miles away to the only black high school in the area. It was in Atlanta. There, they received their high school diplomas. It was not normal for people living in rural Georgia to have high school diplomas in the 1870s, let alone blacks. They went to Atlanta's high school for blacks.

Madison Wilson continued living on and farming the land. Slavery and the war were long over. He married a young lady from the most prominent family in that area. The young lady was a Bentley. The Bentleys buried all the black folk in the area. They also sold burial insurance to everyone. The Bentleys were the most prominent family in the county—and because of the mortuary and insurance businesses, the wealthiest. The Bentley girl was quite the catch. After a while Madison Wilson and the Bentley young lady begat twin girls. They named my grandmother Allie Wilson. It was around 1890. I have a copy of a photo of my grandmother outside playing with her twin sister. The photo is over a hundred years old.

Twins run in our family. Big Flo was crazy about Allie. She oftentimes had her comb her hair. Big Flo loved that. Allie Wilson grew up to be a very beautiful young woman. She married a young man named Mark Russell Johnson, also from the Roberta, Georgia, area.

Realizing her mortality, the plantation owner's wife had added my extended family to the family will. The plantation owner had passed away some years before. In her will she broke off two hundred acres of land for my extended family through my great-grandfather and great-grand-uncle, Madison and Mathew. Of those two hundred acres, I myself presently own an acre of land. The land has been in my family for about 150 years.

My grandfather was not much into farming. People in the area referred to him as lazy. I don’t believe that at all. I never did. He had other interests and preferred those to farming, which he hated. My grandfather was a hustler, a type of businessman. Besides being a barber and boxer, he did do a minimum amount of farming.

Upon the deaths of the plantation owner and his wife, the wife's sister inherited the plantation.

Mark Johnson spent a lot of time in Atlanta. It was about ninety miles away from his family's sharecropping farm in Roberta, Georgia. He enjoyed cutting hair and was very good at it. Mark was able to work his way up to being the first-chair barber at Atlanta's largest and most popular black barbershop. Being the first chair meant that he sat closest to the door. That meant that he garnered the most customers as they walked into the shop. He was awarded that chair for being the most accomplished barber. Of course he sent money home to his growing family, but it also meant that he was away a lot from the family.

Sharecropping was a scheme devised by white farmers to keep their former slaves on the plantation in servitude after the war and slavery had ended. You were assigned a plot of land to farm and consigned seed and supplies and materials to make the crops grow and harvest them. The white landowner/farmer then took the crops and livestock to town to sell at the end of the growing season. Your deal with the white man was that you shared equally in the profits after the costs of seed, materials, and supplies were deducted, along with your rent. It was a wonderful deal for the white man but a terrible deal for the black man. The white man received an ample supply of cash. The black man received his and his family's room, board, and meals, essentially. That's it. By the time all the expenses were added up, the black man's balance was always in the negative column. As a matter of fact, the black man always owed the white man, and the debt grew larger each and every year. If he attempted to end the relationship and get a regular job, he could be arrested and put on the chain gang as a debtor. Congress enacted a debtors’ law to put people in prison and work them at hard labor for not paying their debts. Of course the black man never got any ownership in the land either, so essentially, as a sharecropper, he was still a slave. The white farmer kept the books and, of course, cheated you. It was very rare for a sharecropper to be able to read and write as soon as the war ended.

My grandfather's problem with sharecropping was that he was much too intelligent for it. He was literate. The man could read and write, and most of all, he could count. He knew the sharecroppers were being cheated by the white farmers. They never made any real money for their servitude. My grandfather did, however, sign up for sharecropping so that his family could eat and be housed while he was away. He also sent back as much money as he could. His family, including mostly my father, worked the farm.

My father, Willie Johnson, was born in 1913. He and the family lived in a slave shack on the plantation. He had seven siblings. The house they lived in was also referred to as a shotgun house. As you walked through from the front to the back, there was a room on either side of the hallway. Those rooms were bedrooms. There was a large portion of the house in the front that served as the kitchen. At the front of the house, before you walked in, there was a wide front porch with a rocking chair or two. The house sat on stilts, and any number of dogs hung out under the house, cooling themselves from the sun. The dogs did not have names; they were all called dog. There were five or six, and they all ate scraps from your plate. There was a churner in the front where the women churned milk into butter. There was a well a few steps from the front of the house where you retrieved your water with a dipping bucket and dipper. There was a five-foot-tall circular barrier for safety around the well. My father picked up my brother and me one at a time to let us look down to the bottom of the well where the water was. He told us never to climb up on the barrier because if we fell in we would drown. He said the only thing down at the bottom was water and snakes. I saw no snakes, but I trusted him. My brothers and I never went close to that well. Our father explained that to us as soon as we arrived at our cousins’ house. My younger brother, Calvin, and I were about two and four on that first trip down south. A few hundred yards from the house was the outhouse.