7k_without_punctuation.txt

To get here we'd spent a day riding motorbikes over a bumpy mountain pass fording knee-high rivers winding our way up switchbacks and even sidestepping a poisonous snake Now we were close to our destination a black cardamom forest on a nearby peak but couldn't find the approach trail among the shrubs and wildflowers Lang's husband Duong had just wandered off to look for it As it turned out Lang and the hunter were from the same village not far from Hoang Lien National Park He had been farming cardamom in the park for years he said and knew exactly where her family was camped We had entered the park a collection of rugged mountains and valleys near Vietnam's border with China to see cardamom being harvested in the wild Giang Thi Lang and Nguyen Danh Duong are trekking guides in the nearby town of Sa Pa I had befriended them years earlier while living in Hanoi the Vietnamese capital Lang's family has cultivated cardamom in the Hoang Lien Mountains since the 1990s and now her younger brother Cho who leads the family's annual harvesting expedition had agreed to let me tag along Even in a country with exceptional biodiversity and natural beauty Sa Pa stands out The mountain town sits beside Vietnam's highest peak Fansipan (10312 feet) and on the doorstep of a national park that's more than twice the size of San Francisco It's a great place to hike and to experience the customs of the ethnic-minority groups who have lived in Sa Pa and an adjacent river valley for generations The trip was both a grand adventure and a lesson in Vietnam's recent environmental history Black cardamom was first planted in the Hoang Lien Mountains in the 1990s as a replacement for opium a banned crop that once helped prop up Indochina's colonial economy The national park meanwhile is a symbol of postwar Vietnam's efforts to protect plant biodiversity Hence this conundrum How could a forest be a haven for conservation and cash-crop agriculture at the same time I started my journey in Hanoi more than 200 miles southeast At a market near my old apartment I bought six black cardamom pods for 9000 Vietnamese dong or 39 cents They were about twice as large as their thumbnail-size green cousins which are used widely in Indian cuisine and they smelled intensely smoky and fruity an aromatic cross between a cigar box and a jug of mulled wine Black cardamom known as thao qua grows along streambeds in high-elevation forests under the canopy of tall trees As a dried spice it is used in pho Vietnam's ubiquitous noodle soup and a few other popular dishes Trinh Thi Quyen the vendor who sold me the pods explained that thao qua's smoky flavor complements cinnamon and star anise the other usual members of pho's spice trifecta Thao qua has less of a market in the West than green cardamom It is primarily sold to Chinese brokers and used in traditional medicine to treat constipation and other ailments Through the years rising Chinese demand has made Sa Pa an important hub for black cardamom trading That night I rode a northwest-bound train from Hanoi toward the Chinese border When I arrived in the Vietnamese border city of Lao Cai the next morning I took an hour-long taxi ride west to Sa Pa where Lang met me for coffee She then took me around the corner to a cardamom warehouse where workers were sorting freshly harvested pods under a bare light bulb Business at the warehouse appeared to be booming Every few minutes a farmer would pull up on a motorbike carrying fertilizer bags stuffed with thao qua Then the warehouse's owner Nguyen Thi Hue would pay him on the spot from an ostentatiously fat bundle of cash I saw many thousands of pods waiting to be sorted A flotilla of small trucks had parked outside waiting to whisk them to Lao Cai and north across the border Sa Pa once a summer retreat for French colonial officials sits among terraced rice fields and cloud-draped forests In Vietnam such highlands often are farmed not by Vietnamese but by people from some of the country's 53 officially recognized ethnic minorities Some of these groups cultivated opium as a cash crop under French rule and continued even after Vietnam declared its independence in 1945 and fought successive wars against France the United States and its allies and later China which briefly invaded northern Vietnam in 1979 Lang's family is from the Hmong ethnic group and lives in Ta Van a village outside Sa Pa that has profited in recent years from Sa Pa's boom in trekking tourism Cardamom farmers still face risks however The crop's rising value has prompted some villagers to steal their neighbors' harvests for example and an uptick in extreme weather in recent years has disrupted the crop's year-to-year supply Sarah Turner a geographer at Canada's McGill University who studies Vietnam's black cardamom industry told me there was a high probability that the recent extreme weather was linked to climate change Lang's family is a case in point Lang and husband Duong who is from the Muong ethnic group don't need cardamom for security because they run a trekking agency But Lang's brother Cho who never had much interest in being a tour guide still sees it as a key to his prosperity despite the financial risks We arrived at the campsite around sunset and greeted Cho who had arrived earlier to set it up I paused to take in the scene Hundreds of cardamom plants the height of basketball hoops each with thick electric green fronds roughly the size and shape of banana leaves lined a nearby streambed The fronds seemed to move through the forest in waves following the stream's contours as if they were swirly brushstrokes on a van Gogh canvas High above the cardamom stood old trees whose mossy trunks and craggy branches soared hundreds of feet in the air Some had a shaggy Seussian look I wondered how these exquisite specimens had managed to survive here for so long even as large swaths of northern Vietnam's forests were logged for timber The streamside campsite was basic a giant blue tarp hoisted on bamboo supports over an earthen bunker that Lang's father had once hacked out of the mountainside Inside I saw a campfire and a bed of dried thao qua fronds This is where the harvesting crew would eat sleep and roast black cardamom pods for the next two days The cardamom harvest began early the next morning after a breakfast of rice instant coffee and greasy slabs of salted pork that had been cooked on the campfire The cardamom plot 2100 plants in all according to Lang's father was split between two gently sloping mountain valleys Cho divided the group into two teams and they began scrambling up parallel streambeds Each farmer carried a machete The basic idea was to extract raw red pods from a plant's base while also clearing nearby vegetation That way barring extreme weather events the plant would have room to grow lots of new pods before next year's harvest For long hours the farmers silently navigated the streambeds stopping only to drink water and wipe their brows The air was colder here than in the valley below and the sun had ducked behind some gathering rain clouds By late afternoon they had trudged back to camp and built a fire big enough to roast and smoke a few refrigerator-size mounds of raw cardamom I watched as a few pods turned from candy-cane red to coffee brown giving off a heady medicinal smell in the process Roasting them was essential because it would significantly reduce their weight making it easier to carry the harvest down the mountain The farmers opened a bottle of ruou the Vietnamese equivalent of moonshine to celebrate what looked like an impressive haul There were rounds of shots and more rations of salted pork We eventually nodded off beside the fire huddling for warmth as the wind whistled through the cardamom fronds I must have fallen into a deep sleep so deep that I didn't notice when a heavy rainstorm broke in the wee hours and dumped a bulge of water onto the blue tarp above our heads By the time I bolted awake around 4 am the campsite was in a panicked frenzy Cho's 350-kilogram cardamom harvest was on track to be worth nearly $2000 at then current prices almost as much as Vietnam's annual median wage But the bulge with enough water to fill a Jacuzzi was sagging directly above the campfire We worried that the tarp would rip under pressure flooding the pods beyond repair Shouting ensued Pots and pans clanked Flashlight beams canvassed the darkness Cho scrambled up and leaped over the fire flames licking at his heels and tried to retie a ripped tarp flap to the tent poles But the rain kept coming By the time the storm tapered off nearly an hour later it was almost daylight The tarp had been further battered and ripped and many of the people underneath including me had been half-soaked in the process Miraculously though the thao qua was dry As the sun rose Duong donned his camouflage jacket and poured out two mugs of coffee My muscles ached from the hiking and scrambling and my head was throbbing with a ruou hangover On our way up this mountain Duong had been full of energy and bravado Now he looked chastened Once back in Sa Pa we'd have time for a bowl of steaming pho and a soak in a cardamom-infused herbal bath at a village guesthouse But before we could relax we still had a long journey ahead of us back across the streams and mountain passes we'd traversed on the ascent this time with the harvesters carrying their precious load As fires continue to rage across Australia destroying ecosystems and killing millions of animals it's hard to imagine any good emerging from such devastation But it's long been known that some small plants can benefit from a fire because they grow back faster than grasses and trees giving them an advantage in the battle for resources A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives another explanation for that success at least for one prairie plant that has been in decline reproductive advantage Purple coneflowers also known as echinacea angustifolia produce more seeds in years following fires the new study shows not just because there are fewer competitors for resources but because a fire also changes the mating opportunities said Stuart Wagenius a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden Dr Wagenius who led the research tracked a 40-hectare plot or nearly 100 acres of prairie land in Minnesota for 21 years as part of the Echinacea Project The study found that coneflowers produced more seeds and were more genetically diverse in plots that were burned every few years compared to those where fires were prevented Coneflowers don't bloom every year because it takes energy to produce a flower Controlled burning in fall or spring triggered the flowers on the study plot to put out blooms   often more than one   the following summer Dr Wagenius found this synchrony both in terms of the years of flowering and the dates within those years So in the summer after a fire more flowers were open at the same time and bees were better able to pollinate the coneflowers he said It just makes sense that if there are more plants flowering there's going to be better pollination he said Several other researchers not involved in the work said the group's findings were surprising and persuasive They show that the effect of fire isn't what everybody assumed that it is said Ingrid Parker chair of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Santa Cruz It shows that the role of fire is even more interesting than we realized and there's a lot more to learn Small-scale fires may kill off some pollinators but the area will readily be recolonized if other pollinators are close enough to discover the new-growth plants said Elizabeth Crone a population ecologist and biology professor at Tufts University Dr Crone said the paper confirms in practice what has already been assumed in theory that fires can be good for prairies I think it's neat that this was mostly a pollination and reproductive effect not only a better-nutrients-in-the-soil effect and I think most of us would have expected it to be the other way around Dr Crone said It is the first time I have seen that idea in response to fires The fires that helped the patch of prairie tracked in the new study are not at all like the infernos burning in Australia or the ones that tore across California last year Lightning causes frequent fires across the prairies and prescribed fires have been set for centuries largely for land management and food production so the prairies have evolved with low-intensity fires every few years Without controlled burns or occasional fires flammable materials like brush and dead grasses accumulate Then when a fire does occur it burns hotter and travels farther causing more damage Dr Wagenius said The natural fires tend to come in the spring and fall when many animals are hibernating and many plants are dormant so they are protected from the blaze Dr Wagenius said The midsummer prairie is green and moist and less likely to burn he said Going forward Dr Wagenius plans to continue following his coneflowers taking a closer look at the reaction of individual plants in burn years versus non-burn years He also wants to examine other plant species to see how widespread this fire-effect on reproduction might be Some of the 778 coneflower plants he mapped in his first year of graduate school more than two decades ago were still alive in his latest count last summer I had no idea of what I was getting myself into he said The vote was 5 to 4 with the court's conservative justices in the majority The court's brief order gave no reasons for lifting preliminary injunctions that had blocked the new program Challenges to the program will continue to move forward in courts around the nation The administration announced in August that it would revise the so-called public charge rule which allows officials to deny permanent legal status also known as a green card to immigrants who are likely to need public assistance In the past only substantial and sustained monetary help or long-term institutionalization counted and fewer than 1 percent of applicants were disqualified on public-charge grounds The administration's revised rule broadened the criteria to include noncash benefits providing for basic needs such as housing or food used in any 12 months in a 36-month period Use of two kinds of benefits in a single month counts as two months and so on The new rule was challenged in courts around the country and five trial judges entered injunctions blocking it Appellate courts stayed some but not all of the injunctions while appeals moved forward and the appeals themselves have been placed on fast tracks The Supreme Court considered two cases brought in New York one by groups that provide services to immigrants and the other by New York Connecticut Vermont and New York City The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan denied the administration's request for a stay of two nationwide injunctions issued by a trial judge and it scheduled arguments in the first week of March Justice Neil M Gorsuch joined by Justice Clarence Thomas issued on Monday a concurring opinion addressing what they said was the growing problem of nationwide injunctions It has become increasingly apparent that this court must at some point confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice Justice Gorsuch wrote As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable sowing chaos for litigants the government courts and all those affected by these conflicting decisions I concur in the court's decision to issue a stay Justice Gorsuch continued But I hope too that we might at an appropriate juncture take up some of the underlying equitable and constitutional questions raised by the rise of nationwide injunctions Kenneth T Cuccinelli the acting deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security on Monday praised the Supreme Court decision It is very clear the US Supreme Court is fed up with these national injunctions by judges who are trying to impose their policy preferences instead of enforcing the law Mr Cuccinelli said He noted that the Supreme Court has permitted the administration to move forward with other aspects of its immigration policy In September the court let the administration bar most Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States In July the court allowed the administration to begin using $25 billion in Pentagon funds for construction of a wall along the southwestern border In 2018 the court upheld Mr Trump's ban on travel from several majority Muslim countries Ghita Schwarz a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights which represents groups challenging the new program said in a statement that the court's decision to lift the injunction is very disappointing but our challenge to the draconian public charge rule is still moving forward In asking the Supreme Court to lift the injunctions in the new case Solicitor General Noel J Francisco wrote that the new rule was authorized by a federal statute that made immigrants inadmissible if they are likely at any time to become a public charge The new rule Mr Francisco wrote was a permissible interpretation of that phrase An alien who depends on public assistance for necessities such as food and shelter for extended periods may qualify as a 'public charge' even if that assistance is not provided through cash benefits or does not provide the alien's sole or primary means of support Mr Francisco wrote Barbara D Underwood the New York solicitor general responded that the new policy would radically disrupt over a century of settled immigration policy and public-benefits programs The rule's vast expansion of public charge   to include employed individuals who receive any amount of certain means-tested benefits for even brief periods of time   is a stark departure from a more-than-century-long consensus that has limited the term to individuals who are primarily dependent on the government for long-term subsistence she wrote Public charge has never included Ms Underwood wrote employed persons who receive modest or temporary amounts of government benefits designed to promote health or upward mobility Lawyers for the private groups challenging the new policy relying on estimates published by the Department of Homeland Security wrote that the rule will cause hundreds of thousands of individuals and households in many cases noncitizens not even subject to public charge scrutiny to forego public benefits for which they are eligible out of fear and confusion about the consequences for their immigration status of accepting such benefits That could lead they wrote summarizing the department's findings to increased malnutrition (especially for pregnant or breastfeeding women infants or children) and increased prevalence of communicable diseases increased poverty and housing instability Sara Rosenbaum a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University said the new program has already had a measurable effect on Medicaid enrollment adding that we have documented evidence of people just disappearing off the rolls Mr Francisco told the Supreme Court that discouraging immigrants seeking green cards from using public benefits was a lawful goal And to the extent that the rule might cause disenrollment by aliens who are not subject to the rule such disenrollment is unwarranted easily corrected and temporary he added It does not outweigh the long-term harms the government will experience while the rule is enjoined House impeachment managers and Senate Democrats have been clamoring to persuade Republicans to allow new evidence and witnesses into President Trump's Senate trial In particular they want John R Bolton Mr Trump's former national security adviser who has already said he would be willing to appear if subpoenaed Those calls intensified on Sunday night when The New York Times reported details from Mr Bolton's upcoming book including Mr Bolton's assertion that Mr Trump said he wanted to continue a freeze on military aid to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Mr Trump's political rivals The revelation could undercut a key element of Mr Trump's impeachment defense that the hold was separate from the investigations Mr Trump wanted It was not yet clear whether the details from Mr Bolton would be enough to persuade the handful of Senate Republicans needed to join Democrats voting in favor of calling witnesses But one of the Republicans who has been open to hearing new witnesses Senator Mitt Romney of Utah said late Monday morning that he expected other Senate Republicans to come around It's rare to see a defendant attack the lead prosecutor in the middle of a trial But that's what Mr Trump did a day after his defense team began their opening arguments making the case that the president should not be removed from office Mr Trump on Sunday lashed out at Representative Adam B Schiff Democrat of California who led the House impeachment inquiry and is serving as the lead prosecutor in the Senate trial For this experiment Greene and his colleagues placed speakers in 60 locations near Missoula Montana and in three locations near Mazama Washington all of them near known populations of wild nuthatches The team then played recorded sounds of the very dangerous pygmy owl the less dangerous great horned owl and a third control bird that does not pose any threat to the nuthatch In the second stage of the experiment scientists played warning calls of chickadees that had seen the same predators Then they recorded the sounds that the nuthatches made to see if the birds responded to hearing about a predator secondhand in the same way that they would if they heard the predator directly Greene and colleagues found that when the nuthatches heard the predator calls directly they would put out their own mobbing call a series of rapid single-syllable chirps to their own kind that communicated the size of the threat Bigger threats such as the pygmy owl produced shorter higher-pitched calls When nuthatches heard alarm calls from the chickadees the birds would repeat the call with a vague general warning call regardless of the threat level It's unclear why the nuthatches don't repeat the same level of alarm that they hear from the chickadees but the researchers speculate that the information from the chickadees could be unreliable so repeating the call but with less certainty is a good survival strategy There are many reasons why a secondary source of information is less reliable than firsthand knowledge so it's possible that natural selection has favored nuthatches that are cautious with repeating rumors even if they are incredibly alarming the study says In 1865 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the Civil War that had devastated the nation was the Almighty's judgment on that sin After the war ended and slavery was abolished the displaced Africans from the Clotilda put down roots as free Americans but they didn't relinquish their African identities Settling among the woods and marshes upriver from Mobile they built simple homes planted gardens tended livestock hunted fished and farmed They founded a church and built their own school And they created a tight-knit self-reliant community that came to be known as Africatown Many of their descendants still live there today The story of these extraordinary people their trials and triumphs their suffering and resilience is one the people of Africatown are proud to remember and a legacy they are fighting to save By 1860 enslaved people were the foundation of the American economy more valuable than all the capital invested in manufacturing railroads and banks combined Cotton accounted for 35 to 40 percent of US exports says Joshua Rothman a historian of slavery at the University of Alabama Importing slaves into the United States had been outlawed since 1808 and by 1859 the price of domestic slaves had soared cutting deeply into planters' profits and spurring some to clamor for reopening the trade One fiery proponent was Timothy Meaher Born in Maine to Irish immigrants Meaher and several of his siblings had moved to Alabama and amassed fortunes as shipbuilders riverboat captains and lumber magnates They also owned vast tracts of land worked by slaves During a heated argument with a group of northern businessmen Meaher made a bold wager He would bring a cargo of African captives into Mobile right under the noses of federal authorities In late February or early March 1860 Foster and his crew set sail for the notorious slave port of Ouidah in present-day Benin So began one of the best documented slave voyages to the United States Foster left a handwritten account of the trip while Meaher and several of the Africans later told their stories to journalists and writers Two of the former slaves who lived into the 1930s appeared in short films The 110 young men women and children who boarded the Clotilda in May 1860 came from Bant Dahomey Kebbi Atakora and other regions of Benin and Nigeria Among them were people from the Yoruba Isha Dendi Nupe and Fon ethnic groups Their parents had named them Kossola Kupollee Abile Abache Gumpa Some were long-distance traders likely carrying salt copper and fabric They may have produced iron Others may have woven cloth harvested yams or made palm oil Some women were married and had children they likely worked as farmers or market traders One man Kupollee had a small hoop in each ear which meant he had been initiated in an ile-orisa house of the god into the religion of the Yoruba Ossa Keeby came from Kebbi in Nigeria a kingdom renowned for its professional fishermen Like 19-year-old Kossola (later known as Cudjo Lewis) several were victims of a raid by the slave-trading kingdom of Dahomey Kossola said he came from modest means but his grandfather was an officer of a Bant king At 14 he trained as a soldier and later began initiation into the Yoruba oro the male secret society A young girl Khounco (Lottie Dennison) was kidnapped as were many others Their forced journeys ended in a slave pen in Ouidah Amid the sheer horror and misery the captives found support and solidarity until foreign slavers irreparably tore their newfound community apart According to newspaper interviews and oral histories given by the survivors over the years and detailed in my book Dreams of Africa in Alabama The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America when Clotilda captain Foster entered the grounds people were ordered to form circles of 10 After inspecting their skin teeth hands feet legs and arms he selected 125 individuals In the evening they were told they would leave the next day Many spent the night crying They had no idea what loomed ahead and did not want to be separated from their loved ones In the morning the dejected group waded neck-deep across a lagoon to reach the beach where canoes transported them over the dangerous sometimes deadly surf to the Clotilda What happened next haunted them forever They were forced to remove their clothes The Africans' total nakedness was a rule of the slave trade officially although quite ineffectively to maintain cleanliness The last Clotilda survivors still bristled years later at the humiliation of being called naked savages by Americans who believed nudity was African Before the transfer was over Foster saw steamers approaching Afraid he would be caught he sailed away leaving 15 people on the beach For the first 13 days at sea every captive remained confined in the hold Decades later in 1906 when Abache (Clara Turner) talked of the filth the darkness the heat the chains and the thirst to a writer from Harper's magazine her eyes were burning her soul inexpressibly agitated at the memory Despair agony and horror were compounded for powerless parents unable to alleviate their children's fears and suffering One woman later known as Gracie had four daughters on board the youngest Matilda was about two years old The lack of water was torture and the meals molasses and mush did not help The sugary foods only intensified their thirst One swallow twice a day was all they got and it tasted like vinegar The rain they caught in their mouths and hands was a fleeting relief There was sickness and two people died Slave ships were places of unspeakable misery Solidarity was vital and those who suffered together forged lifelong relationships that sometimes spanned generations if they were not separated again On the Clotilda over a month and a half such a community was born On July 8 the shipmates glimpsed land in the distance They heard a noise they likened to a swarm of bees It was the sound of a tugboat towing the Clotilda up Mobile Bay They were transferred to a steamboat owned by Timothy Meaher's brother Burns and taken upriver to John Dabney's plantation while Foster took his ship to Twelve Mile Island There was no hiding the squalid remnants of a slaving voyage and Foster risked the death penalty if caught He lit loose wood or perhaps lantern oil and the ship he had built five years earlier went up in flames Short of workers for their developing plantations slaveholders in the Deep South had for years bought people from the upper South at prices they found outrageous With the international slave trade illegal some turned to smuggling In Alabama despite Foster and Meaher's precautions the secret arrival was all over town and in the press within a day or two Meanwhile the young Africans had disembarked into the desolate mosquito-infested canebrakes of Dabney's Clarke County plantation Moved from one place to another to avoid detection they were fed meat and cornmeal that made them sick They welcomed the rags pieces of cornsacks and skins they were given in lieu of clothes When federal authorities sent a crew led by a US marshal to find them the Africans had already been moved to Burns's plantation They almost grieved themselves to death they confided half a century later Timothy Meaher eager to quickly settle his affairs organized a sale As their new family was separated once again the shipmates cried and sang a farewell song wishing one another no danger on the road While about 80 were taken to Mobile the Mercury newspaper of July 23 1860 reported some negroes who never learned to talk English went up the Railroad the other day ' There were twenty-five of them apparently all of the pure unadulterated African stock As the group was walking a circus passed by and when the Africans heard an elephant they screamed Ile ile ajanaku ajanaku (home elephant in Yoruba and Fon) They spent the rest of their lives scattered across the Black Belt of Alabama Gracie was sold along with two of her daughters but agonizingly she never knew what happened to her other two Timothy Meaher was arrested released on bail tried and cleared of all charges Federal cases against Burns Meaher and Dabney were dismissed because said negroes were never found Foster was fined $1000 for failing to pay the duties on his imports Timothy Meaher awarded himself 16 males and 16 females Burns took 20 of the captives including Khounco and James Meaher took Kossola and seven of his companions Foster received 16 individuals among them Abile (Celia Lewis) Each person bought for $100 in Ouidah was now worth $1000 and once acclimated could be sold for $2000 or $60000 in today's dollars The next phase of the shipmates' tribulation was their entry into the savage plantation world inhabited by black and white strangers Up to then they had been Yoruba Dendi Nupe or Fon with different languages and cultures At that moment they became Africans Identifying with a continent was as alien to them as it was to Europeans But they embraced their new identity with pride regardless of others' contempt Noah Hart enslaved on Timothy Meaher's plantation recalled that they looked fierce yet they never threatened the African Americans on the plantation or quarreled among themselves Acting as a group they wouldn't stand a lick from whites or blacks Several times they engaged in collective acts of resistance unafraid of the consequences When Meaher's cook Polly slapped one of the young girls she screamed like a wild cat in the darkness Hart said Her shipmates came running from the fields with rakes spades and sticks in hand Polly darted up the stairs to Mary Meaher's room They followed her and banged on the door Polly quit One day Burns's overseer tried to whip a young woman They all jumped on him grabbed the lash and beat him up He never tried to brutalize them again One of the Africans Sakarago argued with a white man and was unconcerned by the high price he could pay for his audacity But it appears that where the shipmates were isolated just two or three to a plantation they were poorly treated Redoshi (Sallie Smith) told civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson that the slave masters and overseers beat us for every little thing when we didn't understand American talk The Africans largely kept to themselves and maintained practices they had grown up with The people from Atakora in present-day Benin buried their dead in deep graves the corpses wrapped in bark The Yoruba plunged their newborns into a creek looking for signs of vitality One Fon couple tattooed their son's chest with the image of a snake biting its tail a sacred symbol of the kingdom of Dahomey For five years the shipmates labored in the cotton rice and sugarcane fields In Mobile several men worked on the river ships firing the furnaces with tons of timber loading and unloading bales of cotton During the Civil War forced to build the city's fortifications they lived in abject conditions The men found work in Mobile's lumber and gunpowder mills and at the rail yards The women grew vegetables and sold their produce door-to-door To structure their recomposed community they chose a chief Gumpa (Peter Lee) a nobleman related to the king of Dahomey and two judges Charlie Lewis and Jabe Shade who was an herbalist and a doctor And as any family would do they reconnected with their shipmates about 150 miles away in Dallas County Surviving on meager rations they saved all they could longing to return home but it was not enough So they settled on a new strategy as Kossola explained to Meaher Captain Tim he said you brought us from our country where we had land and home You made us slaves Now we are free without country land or home Why don't you give us a piece of this land and let us build for ourselves an African Town They were asking for reparations Meaher was incensed Far from giving up the community intensified its efforts and succeeded in buying land including from the Meahers Pooling their money four families put down roots on seven acres known to this day as Lewis Quarters named for Charlie Lewis Two miles away the largest settlement of 50 acres was nestled amid pine trees cypresses and junipers As they would have done at home the new landowners built their three dozen wood houses collectively Surrounded by flowers each had a vegetable garden and fruit trees They later built a school and church Old Landmark Baptist Church was adjacent to Abile and Kossola's land and faced east toward Africa Close by was their own graveyard They called their hamlet African Town Africa was where they wanted to be but they were in Mobile to stay Timothy Meaher had pressured the African men who had been naturalized in 1868 to vote Democrat the pro-slavery party But he doubted they would so on Election Day he told the polling station clerks they were foreigners Charlie Pollee and Cudjo were turned away Meaher jumped on his horse and prevented them from voting at two other locations The men walked to Mobile five miles away They were told to pay a dollar each almost a full day's wages to vote They did Each received a piece of paper attesting he had voted They kept them for decades Khounco and her husband North Carolinian James Dennison joined the first reparations movement When James died Khounco continued to petition for his Union Army military pension In Dallas County 72-year-old Matilda walked 15 miles to see the probate judge in Selma and inquire about compensation for Africans who had been torn from their homelands The Africans' habit of standing up for their rights took a new turn in 1902 Kossola was hit by a train and badly hurt six months later so was Gumpa They sued the railroad companies Gumpa passed away before his case was settled his grandchildren received some money and the following year Cudjo Lewis v the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company went to court Despite expectations the jury awarded him $650 But the L&N appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court and won By the early 1900s the shipmates had spent more time in America than in their homelands Most had taken American surnames and converted to Christianity several married African Americans They had adopted local ways while maintaining the cultures that they loved The children who went to school grew up between these two worlds Some American-born children spoke their parents' languages Matilda interpreted for her mother Each had an American name to use in the outside world where they were often ostracized and called monkeys and savages Their African name was for the extended family If their hometown was a nurturing haven the African homelands were the idyllic places their mothers and fathers dreamed of I seen them sit down and shed tears Kossola died in 1935 Redoshi the following year Others may have lived a while longer In slavery and freedom from youth to adulthood these men and women resisted oppression They vigorously praised and defended their cultures and passed on what they could to their children Those who established African Town which still exists created a refuge from Americans white and black Their community adapted but their success was clearly built on the fundamental African ethos of family and community first The Africans were soon joined by a few African-American families who were moving off the farm to find work in the nearby mills and port In 1910 the community built the Mobile County Training School which over the next decades would graduate dozens of preachers teachers entrepreneurs even some professional athletes Most famously alumni Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee helped win the 1969 World Series for New York's Miracle Mets By the 1960s two giant paper mills were running night and day jobs were plentiful and more than 12000 people called Africatown home Anderson Flen grew up during Africatown's heyday and remembers it as a place where children were sure to speak to elders sitting on their porches and where elders made sure no child went hungry Today Africatown is a shadow of its former self Blocks of dilapidated shotgun houses are sprinkled with the occasional neat brick ranch with flowers in the yard About half the homes are occupied the rest are somewhere between vacant and condemned A large public housing project built in the 1960s that residents called Happy Hills sits boarded up and slated for demolition Heavy industries including chemical plants a petroleum tank farm and one remaining paper mill line the riverfront and encroach on the community The four-lane Africatown Bridge completed in 1991 was built over the heart of the business district The busy Bay Bridge Road now bisects the community separating the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church from the graveyard where several of its African founders are buried Environmental justice issues have long plagued the historic community says Joe Womack a retired Marine Corps major and founder of Clean Healthy Educated Safe and Sustainable Community a local group whose name mirrors its aspirations for Africatown The industries that brought jobs turned out to be a double-edged sword Womack says by leaving a legacy of pollution and cancers that many residents think were caused by emissions from the paper mills and other heavy industries A few years ago Africatown residents helped forestall a plan to build another oil tank farm directly across from the Mobile County Training School Residents are also suing International Paper for contaminating the air soil and water during its operation and for failing to clean up polluted soil which residents believe continues to contaminate the local groundwater and streams Meanwhile Mobile's chamber of commerce is seeking to attract more industry to the area promoting it as part of the Alabama Gulf Coast Chemical Corridor It's all part of their big-picture plan to build a two-billion-dollar bridge and take out the tunnels under the river so supertankers can get up here Womack says The city has not taken care of the community because they want to industrialize the whole area They just want to make money But they could make money with tourism We just have to bend them the right way Womack and other community leaders say the discovery of the Clotilda has created an impetus to heal old wounds and breathe new life into the area The Africatown Connections Blueway project and other efforts are under way to reconnect communities to the river and to each other