North America gets to control this A lot of fun coming up That's Howard Bryant of meadowlark media thank you Howard Thank you You're listening to weekend edition from NPR news Today saint Simon's island along the coast of Georgia is a vacation getaway But in 1803 Africans arriving on a slave ship rebelled Natalie mendenhall of Georgia public broadcasting explains that rebellion has become a legend the meaning of which is still being debated today A warning this story contains references to suicide Dunbar creek looks like any other title creak you might drive across on your way to the beach at saint Simon's island But this place is special A new roadside historic marker only begins to explain why It reads in part in 1803 igbo captors from West Africa were vaulted while on a slave ship That's one history Amy Mitchell Roberts knows another He had to go to people once I heard it Roberts is descended from enslaved people who work this island which means she's got a Gucci She remembers a warning a childhood neighbor got from his mother about going down to Dunbar creek You know she wouldn't let her son go fishing down now because it was the end of the world The end of the world because once the 75 Evo finished the three month voyage from Africa to Georgia's coast they decided that this was not the life that they wanted This was not what they bargained for So they took control of the ship and drove their characters into the water but there were still men on shore waiting to force the evil onto plantations When the ship a boat stopped they just walked over into water What you believe happened next depends on what you or your ancestors needed from the story Even this story now has grown into something larger than what happened on that day That's Griffin lots of Amy's cousin in the vice chairman of the gullah gee cultural heritage commission He remembers being told by his father that when the igbo went into water they didn't drown they flew home And flying African stories come about because the only thing you've had in your mind like the Ebola was being free Freedom was not on the mind of the Georgia planters after the incident In a letter written not long after the rebellion slave trader William mines had to sympathy for a white overseer poor fellow lost his life mine wrote As for how binding others of his class felt about the 12 ebo in the group that ultimately drowned These africas are money to them They are wealth to them That's a mere Jamal Toure Fellow at Georgia southern university Choi says it's wrong to interpret what happened at the Ebola landing site as a mass suicide That's somebody else shaping the narrative Instead he says see the drowning as an act of resistance They're like saying that basically no man owns my soul Only God owns my soul Bobby and neck who says that's a story that's traveled the globe And it's called the first freedom match in the United States A neck will is an Atlanta attorney born in Nigeria He's also an ozone or spiritual adviser in the igbo tradition a neck wound other leaders from Haiti Brazil and Barbados believe the souls of the rebel evil were still trapped in the water After all these years but never left the diet of violent death So in 2016 an echo and others performed a right at Dunbar creek called equa ozo which means something like celebrating the dead Their actions that right fulfill the words now written on the historic marker for the rebel ebook which Amy Mitchell Roberts has known all of that The water brought us in the water will take us away For NPR news I'm Natalie men at home in saint Simon's island.