While the male elders talked, they tried to ignore the nudging and giggling from the women of the village. The women were looking the young man over: Though he was not tall, he was inordinately handsome. His forehead was high, and later, the people would discover that was a natural characteristic—he did not pluck around his hairline, as some men in the village did. The young man’s kinky hair stood at some length. His dark-dark skin was smooth. His muscles were well formed. His teeth were white as sweet corn, and when he smiled, there was a warmth to his entire face.
As the older women watched the young man, they reminisced about the days when they still visited the moon house during their bleeding times, when their breasts were high and their bellies did not carry pouches of fat. And the younger women who still saw the moon fantasized about rolling on top of the young man and riding him fast, like a warrior chasing battle.
The male elders came out of their huddle, and their leader asked the young man what was his name?
“My name be Coromantee,” he said.
Yet we can tell you, the young man was lying; this was not his real name.
And we can tell you that, though he had been born here on our land, his mother had been born across the water. She had been pushed out of her mother in a place in Africa called “Gold Coast” by the English, who had been traders in slaves and riches and goods for many years. The white men had invented an aberration and called the African people of the Gold Coast “Coromantee.” In the future, no one would know where this term had come from, or why the white men had invented it, only that, as white men are fond of doing, they decided that whatever moniker they gave those that they encountered was right. And so when the white men traded with the residents of the Gold Coast: Coromantee. When the white men took the Gold Coast women for temporary wives: Coromantee. When they herded these people into the dungeons of the slave castles along that coast: Coromantee.
We can tell you the origin story of this young man’s grandparents, and the origins of their parents, until we reached the very beginning of what you know as time. We can tell you the lives of gods—but truly, don’t you want to return to this charming young man with the beautiful, dark-dark skin?
He stayed more than mere days in the village, for each time the young man declared his intention to go south the elders urged him to stay. They did not want him to leave. When Scottish deer traders came through the area, their arrival was never a surprise, and by the time these traders rode their horses into the village, the villagers had hidden the young man they had begun to cherish. Eventually, he was so loved and admired that he was adopted by a Creek family who was of the Panther clan.
Thus, the young man’s name became “Coromantee-Panther.”
From an uncle in his adopted family, he learned manhood skills, as is the Creek way. He learned how to use poison on the water or a net to catch smaller fish and how to catch the bigger ones by grabbing into their mouths. He should ignore the pain of their bites. And Coromantee-Panther told his new uncle he was grateful for these skills, for he had not been allowed to learn how to feed himself in the place from which he had escaped. That is all he would say, and because Coromantee-Panther seemed sadly pensive whenever he mentioned the time before he came to the village, the uncle did not ask him to elaborate.
Coromantee-Panther showed himself to be courageous. Once while hunting a bear attacked his uncle, who would later say a red-colored spirit—a spirit the color of war—entered his nephew, giving him strength. Right when the bear jumped on the uncle, Coromantee-Panther leapt on the animal’s back, slit its throat, and pushed the bear off the uncle before he suffocated from the weight.
“That was risky, eh?” The uncle spat out red phlegm and laughed along with his adopted nephew. When they brought the dead bear to the village, the family feasted on its roasted ribs as the uncle told of the courage of Coromantee-Panther. The tale would be repeated for many years among the people. Coromantee-Panther did not have a chance to prove himself in battle, however, for the village in which he lived was called a “white” town because it was committed to peace. There were other villages throughout the Creek confederation who believed in war, and they were called “red” villages. The young men of these villages would shed blood without thought. Yet Coromantee-Panther was a hunter who brought more than enough meat to his adopted family regularly, proving himself capable of supporting a wife. There were many young women who wanted to marry him, too, though they knew he’d probably been a slave and he continually repeated his intention to leave the village and go south.