Liza Bramlett was a slave. She lived on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta during the nineteenth century. White men raped her repeatedly throughout her life. They traded her body amongst themselves in exchange for calves and piglets. In the end, Liza gave birth to twenty-three children, twenty of whom were conceived by rape.

One of Liza’s daughters, Ella Townsend, was born after emancipation, but remained in the bondage of sharecropping in rural Mississippi. As an adult, she carried a pistol with her in the fields, determined to protect herself and the surrounding children. One day, a white man on horseback rode into the fields. He had come to abduct a young black girl.

Ella, carrying her pistol in a lunch pail, intervened. “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children,” she told the intruder. “If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.”