Who is Chicken George?

But to get directly to Chicken George and how he came by his name I snagged the following from Wikipedia:

When George is born, Kizzy, who is only 17, is horrified to see that his skin is light-colored, not ebony black like her own. Her shame is intense. The other slaves at the Lea plantation advise her to forget about the father, although Master Lea continues to visit her frequently at night. The continual abuse drives Kizzy to depression. But when Master Lea finally leaves her alone two years later, Kizzy bonds to the other slaves and tends to her son as lovingly as she would a child born to her out of love rather than rape.

George is raised like a typical field hand. In his spare time, he enjoys hanging around the gamecock pen and Uncle Mingo, the gamecock raiser, who brings in a tidy sum for Master Lea each year in cockfighting revenues. George instantly takes an attraction to the fighting roosters because of their noble stature. Later he becomes apprenticed to Uncle Mingo and proves himself a quick learner in feeding, capturing, cleaning, and fighting gamecocks, earning himself the nickname, "Chicken George."

After George starts full-time rooster duty, there is a noticeable improvement in Master Lea’s winnings. Chicken George attends his first cockfight at the age of 15. As the years pass, he continues to go to tournaments and backyard fights, wins money, and saves it in order to buy freedom for himself and his family. He and Master Lea become very close. Much of the time, Master Lea treats Chicken George like a partner, not as a slave, thanks to the latter's skill with the gamecocks.

At the age of 18, Chicken George encourages Master to buy a slave girl named Matilda so George can marry her. Matilda gives birth to a large family of eight children named Virgil, Ashford, George, Tom, Lewis, James, Mary and Kizzy. Master Lea loses a bet with an English cockfighter, Sir C. Eric Russell, who has him pay by giving him Chicken George. After Chicken George is sent away Matilda and her children are sold to a kind couple, the Murrays, to pay Master Lea's debts.

In the meantime, Chicken George's third son, Tom, a blacksmith, marries a half-Native American slave girl named Irene Holt. The youngest of their eight children is Cynthia, Alex Haley's grandmother.

Bolstered by Master Lea's promise that he will receive his freedom when he returns, Chicken George comes back and gets his certificate of freedom from Master Lea. Though refusing at first, Master Lea is tricked into drinking before George makes a daring move and steals the paper out of Master Lea's safe. Kizzy and one of their old slave friends are dead by the time he returns. Chicken George finds his family, but he must escape to Canada to preserve his freedom. After the American Civil War, Chicken George and his family are reunited and they move to Tennessee to start a new life as free men and women, continuing to share the stories that their great-ancestor Kunta Kinte had his daughter commit to memory so many years before.

So that explains why I found this memorial in Tennessee. In case you can’t read what it says, “Here they lie from ‘Chicken George’, grandson of the African Kunta Kinte and on down the line to Kunta Kinte’s great-great-great-granddaughter, our mother, Bertha.”

Bertha was Alex Haley’s mother.  When you look at the photo below you see the fenced in area.  I walked in the fence and looked at the stones.  The stone shown above is centered outside the fence and you can easily read it then look up and read all the stones inside the fence.  Looking inside the fence in the photo below, Chicken George is on the far right and Bertha on the far left.

tags: chicken george  roots  alex haley  history  tennessee