Storytime: Pahokee

When I was a wee one, about 5 years old, I had an invisible friend. My parents were quite used to this phenomena; they knew by that time I saw dead people, but didn't yet know what that looked like for me. They would often here me talking to people who weren't there, having conversations, listening quite intently to whatever they said, and setting up spaces for them with whatever I was doing. Often my friends were invited to dinner and my parents would set a place for them.

We moved quite a bit when I was young, and my dead friends didn't always follow me from house to house. Some of them only visited for a short while; one stayed for nearly a year before she moved on. At this time we lived in Jacksonville, Florida. My dead friend was a Native American. It wasn't terribly strange to me or my parents because I already had a connection to a local Seminole tribe that had "adopted" me as a part of a celebration my parents had been honoured guests at. To me this woman looked much like them, except she wore different clothes that were more like the old pictures.

Her name was Pahokee. She wasn't an "Indian princess," but she did tell me she'd been a leader for her people for a very short while. She came because I was always looking, always listening. She would tell me stories about living in the forest and swamps, adventures escaping soldiers, hunting wild animals, and leading her people first into safety and then into battle. That's where she died. She would often sit and braid fronds while she was talking to me. One day we moved and she didn't come along with us.

When I was 16 my parents and I visited family up in the Boston area during the summer. They left me behind to spend a little extra time with them while they had some "adult" time driving back down to Miami. They took the slow way down, stopping whenever they wanted to explore an interesting spot. After a week my parents called very excitedly. I could hear my dad in the background while my mother asked me if I remembered Pahokee from my childhood. I did. My mom laughed and said, "We found her!"

Apparently they'd seen an exit for the town while driving along an old highway. Wondering if I'd somehow heard of the town as a child and picked up the name, they stopped to find out a little about it. What they discovered was that Pahokee means "grassy waters" in the Creek language and that the town had been built around the site of a battle. Slaves escaping during the Civil War found themselves in the Everglades and met up with the survivors of a tribe that had been attacked and driven into the swamps to die. They came together first to survive, then to raid encampments to steal rifles and ammunition. They were lead by a young woman who simply stepped into a leadership role because it was needed.

One day, while being chased back into the swamps, tired of her mixed tribe always running and unable to have a home, Pahokee turned and stood her ground. While the rest of her people ran into the safety of the swamp, she and a few former slaves kept their pursuers busy. Their bodies were left for the wild animals, so there is no burial ground for them, but when the tribe was finally able to set up their own camp, they did so in the local area. That camp eventually became a settlement and then a town named after the young woman that fought so hard for them.

I still think of Pahokee occasionally, but more often I think of my parents' excitement in finding her story. I think they loved the history of my dead friends as much as they loved knowing I was never really alone.

#personalstories #seeingdeadpeople #storytime