A Tale of Two Cities

Here in my part of the country, northern Indiana, there once lived a nomadic tribe of ten thousand people. They descended, or so it was thought, from southeastern Native Americans, escaped African slaves, and Irish and Scottish apprentice workers. They came up from Kentucky in the eighteenth century, roamed the Midwest during the nineteenth century, and settled in the Indianapolis area by the beginning of the twentieth. They called themselves the Ben Ishmael Tribe,...

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