Indian Annie was a young child in the northern hills of Alabama, when Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal law forced Native Americans to leave the south. Her family decided not to leave their sacred homeland, but to hide in the mountains, speak English, and blend into the rural farming population. They called their young child, "Indian Annie" because she declared herself proud to be Indian. Annie tells her family's story of surviving in what became known as Freedom Hills, through the hardships of the 19th century, including the starving years of the Civil War. Indian Annie, a Grandmother's Story is historical fiction, based on real history, told in first-person by an imagined woman of those times.

Sally Bermanzohn has ancestral roots in northwest Alabama where Indian Annie's story takes place. She grew up in New York and in the 1960s went south for college. In North Carolina she became deeply involved in the movements for civil rights, women's equality, and labor movements. In 1979 she participated in a demonstration when the Ku Klux Klan attacked, killing five people and critically wounding her husband. Years later, Sally earned a PhD at City University of New York, and taught at Brooklyn College. Now a grandmother, she resides with her husband in the Hudson Valley.