Read The Headhunter's Daughter Online
Authors: Tamar Myers
O
n September 21 (which is my birthday), but in the year 1757, my eight times grandfather, Joseph Hochstetler, along with his father and one brother, were taken captive by a band of Delaware Indians during the height of the French and Indian War. This occurred in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Two days earlier the Amish family had looked out of their cabin to see a raiding party of Indians in full war paint standing near their bake oven. The two boys, ages ten and twelve, immediately begged their father to allow them to defend themselves with their hunting guns. But the family patriarch refused his permission; the Amish are pacifists and believe that there is no justification for taking a human life—not even in defense of one’s own life.
The Delaware began their attack by shooting flaming arrows at the cabin. It soon caught on fire and the Hochstetler family took refuge in the cellar. As it was autumn, the cellar had just been stocked with barrels of apple cider, so as the cabin burned to the ground over their heads, the family splashed the juice on the ceiling in order to keep the thick wood planks from burning all the way through and collapsing on them.
The family waited patiently until the ashes above them had cooled and they were sure the raiding party was gone. Then, one by one, they climbed out of a small cellar window. Unfortunately for them a young warrior known as Tom Lions had remained behind to gather ripe peaches from around the family’s fruit trees. When Tom saw the family emerge he called out to the others, who then descended upon the family and began the massacre.
That morning my many times great aunt (only two years old!) was tomahawked and scalped, and my many times great uncle (a boy about eight) was likewise tomahawked and scalped. Their mother, the patriarch’s wife, was apparently especially disliked by this particular band of Delaware. She was fat, and had gotten stuck in the cellar window. Instead of being tomahawked, which was an honorable way of dying; she was stabbed through the heart and then scalped.
The patriarch and his two older sons were taken captive. My ancestor, Joseph, was ten years old at the time. His father had advised him to stuff his pockets with fallen peaches as there was no telling when they would have their next meal. After a long march they arrived at the large village presided over by an important chief. Immediately the Hochstetlers presented him with the fruit Joseph had carried with him.
The chief was so impressed by the gesture that, instead of turning the captives over to be tortured in the traditional manner by the squaws, he decreed that their lives should all be spared. My ancestor Joseph was subsequently separated from his father and brother and taken to a different village. There a ceremony was conducted wherein Joseph was led down to a river by three Indian women and then plunged underwater. He was then held underwater while they vigorously rubbed his body, symbolically washing away his white blood. Later, in the council house, with all the Indians dressed and painted to the hilt, the chief delivered a formal speech of adoption.
In
Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler
(Joseph’s Father), by Harvey Hostetler, which is a genealogical compendium of my ancestors and relations, there is an account of what was most certainly a similar adoption speech. It was delivered to James Smith, also of Pennsylvania, who was captured in the year 1755. It can be found on page 35 of the Hostetler book. It is, in part, as follows:
My son, you are now flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. By the ceremony which was performed this day, every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins . . . you have nothing to fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend you, that we are to love and defend one another. Therefore you are to consider yourself as one of our people.
Now that he was a full-blooded Delaware Indian—and no longer an Amish boy of Swiss ancestry—Joseph was given to an Indian family to raise. He lived with his new family for nine years, growing to love his new parents and his new siblings. When at last Joseph was returned to his original family, he was nineteen years old. By then he spoke only the Delaware language, having forgotten all of his native German, except for a few words of the Lord’s Prayer.
Like many released captives Joseph did not want to go back home. He saw himself as an Indian, and home was with his tribe. In fact, for hundreds of captives that were released at the close of the French and Indian War, reunion with their birth families was a very painful process, one that involved many tears. It was recorded that their Indian families cried as well, begging them to come and visit whenever they had the chance. And they did.
For the rest of his life my eight times grandfather, Joseph Hochstetler, lived between two worlds. Whenever he could, it was written, he hunted and played sports with his Indian friends. You see, one is not just the color of one’s skin; one is also the color of one’s heart.
The Author Answers Some of Your Questions
The interviewer is Devil’s Advocate (D.A.).
D.A.: When and where were you born?
Author: I was born in 1948 in the Belgian Congo. The country is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo—although it is anything but a true democracy. At any rate, it is one of the largest countries in Africa and straddles the equator right in the heart of the continent.
D.A.: Is it true, as you claim, that you were raised with a tribe of headhunters? That seems to be so preposterous as to be a gimmick to sell your books.
Author: It is indeed true. After my parents had been in the Congo for eighteen years—having arrived in 1932—they were asked if they would be the first of their affiliation to establish a mission station among the Bashilele tribe. At that time the Bashilele were known as fierce warriors who didn’t take kindly to outsiders. Their coming-of-age custom for boys—think Bar Mitzvah—was to kill a man from another tribe. That man’s skull became the boy’s wine mug.
D.A.: Well then, how did you and your family survive?
Author: First of all, we didn’t violate any of their sacred taboos. Sadly, the previous missionary, who was of a different faith, immediately began to chop down the villagers’ sacred tree, The Tree of Life. His head became the witch doctor’s drinking cup.
D.A.: Oh my! It must have been really strange growing up with these people. What was it like? How did you feel about it as a child?
Author: It wasn’t strange at all; it was normal for me! Strange was coming to America. Strange was seeing the Midwestern countryside chopped up by fences—fences everywhere you looked. And pavement!
D.A.: What kind of house did you live in? What sorts of foods did you eat?
Author: I was born in a brick house on an established mission station. When my parents accepted the challenge to work among the headhunters I was two years old. My three sisters were five, seven, and sixteen, respectively, going up the ladder. We all lived at first in a house made of palm leaf stems (probably
Raphia hookeri
) and palm leaf thatch of the same species. This was the same material that the local people used when they built their huts.
At any rate, our house soon became a live-in buffet for millions of termites. It got to the point that just by pressing the walls one could get the entire house to commence shuddering as the insects “sprang to life.” Later my father built a concrete block house with a corrugated iron roof and we felt like we were living in a palace.
For food we relied heavily on canned goods that were shipped up by sea from South Africa, then by riverboat up the Congo River and its tributary, the Kasai, and lastly, carried overland by truck. Beef arrived by special bicycle messenger overland through the forest and the beef often wore a shimmer of green, so Mother cooked it until it resembled black shoe leather—but it is a taste I still enjoy. Occasionally we ate game, such as antelope, wild boar, guinea, and francolin. Once my mother even served us “hamburgers” made from an elephant’s trunk. She cooked these in a pressure cooker before pan-frying them to make them brown like real burgers. At boarding school—more on that later—we ate a lot of buffalo meat and hippopotamus meat.
D.A.: What did the Bashilele people eat? And tells us how they lived.
Author: The local people ate a very limited diet. They relied heavily on the manioc plant which was imported to Africa from Brazil centuries earlier. All parts of the plant are poisonous (they contain strychnine). The roots, which form the bulk of their diet, must be soaked in running water for three days. They are then dried in the sun and pounded into flour. The flour is subsequently stirred into boiling water until it forms a very stiff mush that is molded into a ball. When it is served, the person eating it tears off a piece and shapes it into a scoop using his thumb and forefinger. They he scoops up a palm oil gravy that may or may not contain some bit of protein, and the boiled leaves of the manioc plant (they must be boiled and drained twice to rid them of the strychnine).
The Bashilele men were renowned hunters. They hunted with bows and arrows. The bows were tightly strung and six feet tall. The arrowheads, made of hand-smelted steel and mounted on lightweight palm-wood shafts, came in a variety of shapes and sizes; each style had a different purpose. There were arrowheads for shooting down the giant locusts that flew like birds across the savannah skies to arrowheads meant to lodge deep into the hide of very large antelope, like kudu. Even an arrowhead this size could not bring such a large animal down immediately, but it could cause it to bleed considerably, allowing the Bashilele, along with their barkless dogs, the basenji, to chase the prey until it had “bled out.” But when game was scarce the tribe relied on alternate sources of protein such as grasshoppers, grubs, bird eggs, snakes, etc.
D.A.: You mentioned boarding school in the book.
Is that how you received your education?
Author: Yes. I was homeschooled for grades one and two. From third grade on, I was sent to a boarding school two days’ drive away. Sixty-five kids attended the school altogether—all of them white, and most, but not all of them, American. About ten children lived on my “route.” The two-day trip in a panel truck along a dirt track included three ferry crossings, one of which was always quite an adventure. You see, the Loange River was in Bapende territory, and the Bapende in years past had been cannibals. The people still filed all of their teeth to points and wore their hair in elaborate mud cones decorated with porcupine quills.
The Loange ferry consisted of dugout canoes lashed together and then straddled by a wooden platform. The ferrymen with their pointed teeth and mud cones would pole their way across this very wide muddy brown river and greet us with the chant: “
Tende mah-ye, tende mah-ye-he, wo-tende-mah-ye.
” Getting the truck onto the ferry was always exciting to watch, and we got to see it several times in one afternoon because there were huge underwater sandbars in the river that necessitated lightening the ferry load. Here the truck had to drive through the water and we children had to wade. To add to the excitement, the river was home to hippopotamuses and crocodiles. The latter could sneak up on us without our knowledge and snatch us in their powerful jaws. We successfully avoided that by holding hands and shouting, to make it seem as if we were one large animal instead of ten small frightened children.
D.A.: Were there any other dangers you faced during this period?
Author: Yes. In many cases the Belgians had treated the Congolese cruelly, so a lot of resentment had built up against whites in general. This was especially so if you were unknown to the locals. As the time for independence drew near, the Africans grew bolder and their behavior became—well, perhaps “combative” is the word. Here is one event I will never forget:
We were making the two-day trek back from boarding school and had stopped for a picnic in a clearing surrounded by elephant grass. Of course we didn’t have ice and thus no way to keep perishables, so when we traveled, we usually ate sandwiches of canned Spam. On this day no sooner did we settle in to eat, then suddenly out of the elephant grass poured about a dozen African boys, all begging for the empty Spam tin. They spoke in a language we did not know, but it was very clear what they wanted.
You see, at that time, in their society, a tin can was an extremely useful commodity. It could be used as a small cooking pot, turned into a cutting instrument, shaped as an arrowhead, or even fashioned into jewelry. I had even seen a Spam tin given new life as a pair of dentures. At any rate, my mother gave me the job of deciding which of the boys would be the lucky one to receive this treasure. Unfortunately, although I had a very generous eleven-year-old heart, I also thought with an eleven-year-old’s brain. I thought the fairest thing would be if I tossed the can up in the air and let them scramble for it.
Well, they scrambled for it! However, in the ensuing melee one of the boys received a laceration on his scalp from the sharp edge of the Spam can. Although the wound was shallow, it bled profusely. Then before we could offer him first aid, several angry young men emerged from the elephant grass and strode over to us. Although language was a problem, they spoke some French, and my mother spoke a smidgen of it. We understood enough to know that they were demanding an enormous sum of money on the boy’s behalf—but refusing first-aid care—and that if we didn’t pay it, they were going to take me as a hostage. Forty thousand francs was about eight hundred dollars, which is about ten thousand dollars in today’s money. Since my parents only made a thousand dollars a year, there was no way that my mother would have had that much cash on her.
Quietly, but firmly, my mother and the male driver ordered the ten missionary children back into the panel truck. Meanwhile the young men grew angrier and their threats more violent. If we fled, they said, we would be met by a roadblock—they would send a signal by drums to the next village—and instead of just being held captive, I would be taken off the truck and killed. But flee, we did. And when we approached the next village, I was instructed to lie flat on the floor of the truck, while the driver pressed the pedal to the metal. It was something we would repeat for the next several villages until we were well into another tribe’s territory. We did not encounter any roadblocks that day, but needless to say, on subsequent trips to and from boarding school, we skipped that clearing in the elephant grass when it came to choosing a picnic location.
D.A.: Goodness gracious!
What else?
Do tell!
Author: Well, just a few months later the chief of the Bashilele village nearest where we lived appeared on our front verandah during our noon meal. We were used to be being observed while we ate—we had the funny habits, after all—but usually the observers were women and children, not a chief and his warriors. So my father went out to see what this man wanted.
D.A.: And?
Author: The chief said that when independence came he was going to move into our house. He was also going to take us girls as his wives.
D.A.: So what did your father tell him in response?
Author: He told the chief that he wasn’t going to get his daughters and that he better get off our porch. So the chief left, but not before threatening to burn us out of the house.
D.A.: Did that ever happen?
Author: No. We left the Congo for America for a year-long furlough just one month before Independence Day. However, we were one of the very first white families to return to the interior of the country. By then many whites had been killed, tortured, and raped. It was a very difficult time to grow up—especially since now there was a tribal war waging between the Baluba and Lulua tribes and we found ourselves caught smack-dab in the middle.
D.A.: We’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to backtrack a bit and ask you about boarding school in the Belgian Congo when you were younger.
Would you please describe that?
Author: My sisters will hate my answer because I’m a more negative, less forgiving person. Well, to begin with, like I said before, there were sixty-five children and one set of houseparents—at least for my first two years. The only way to maintain discipline in that kind of situation—or so they thought—was to beat us for even minor infractions. For instance, my first morning there, as part of an initiation process, I was yanked out of bed by some high school students before the six-thirty gong had sounded, which was against the rules. Following classes that afternoon I was soundly beaten. Another time in sixth grade the school principal beat me with a mahogany cane until he was out of breath—paused to rest—and then resumed beating me. This was just because I did not understand long division and had not completed my math homework.
Sure, there were good times, like playing “lion and sheep” on Friday nights. The thrill of this game was heightened by the fact that the school was located in real lion territory and employed a hunter, named Samson, whose job it was to keep track of how close lions were to the campus. On days when lions were within a couple of miles, our activities were restricted. Anyway, one day when real life got to be too much I told the housefather I’d had enough of his cruelty and was going to run off into the forest. He told me to go ahead and to get a sandwich from the kitchen first—which I did. I’d gone less than a quarter of a mile from the campus when I heard a lion roar and came hightailing it back. When I reported the lion to the housefather he merely laughed. It’s possible that he’d known about it all along.
The school followed an extremely conservative Protestant theology. As a child I lived in constant fear of hellfire and damnation and being left behind. We were forever confessing to sins we couldn’t possibly have committed and yearning for our mansions in the sky. Our dorm was built at the very top of a steep hill, and when viewed from below the clouds seemed to sweep over it. One day a friend and I were playing below the dorm when a cloud appeared to land on just the other side of it. My little friend and I were positive that this was the Second Coming and that the cloud held none other than Jesus himself. We raced up the hill, our lungs bursting, lest we miss the big event and be left behind. Imagine then both our disappointment and relief to discover that this had been simply an optical illusion.
D.A.: Okay, now you’re straying into dangerous territory of another kind, Tamar.
You know that you’re going to get some flak for this.
Maybe it’s time to skip ahead to the tribal war.
Author: I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, I’m sure it was my own fault that I allowed tales of eternal torture to haunt me in the third grade. Now a word about the civil war: one possibly good side-effect of colonial rule (others will hotly dispute this viewpoint) is that it put a lid on tribal warfare. The Baluba and Lulua peoples were linguistic cousins who had, at times, lived peacefully with each other and often intermarried. The war actually began before independence, but erupted with renewed vigor afterward. In the end hundreds of thousands of people died on both sides.