Forbidden Fruit (9 page)

In many ways, though, the Blackburn riots, like the fires in a foundry, welded Detroit’s
fledgling black community into something stronger and steelier. In a sense, the riot
created the cohesion, the sense of coming together, that makes a community. Three
years after the riot, Tabitha and Madison Lightfoot, Caroline and George French and
other participants in that disturbance helped found Second Baptist Church of Detroit,
the oldest black Baptist church in the state and the city’s major stop on the Underground
Railroad. Originally, Second Baptist’s founders belonged to the mostly white First
Baptist Church of Detroit, established by Baptist missionaries from New York State.
Blacks had joined First Baptist as early as 1832, when William Butler was baptized
two days after becoming a member. However, black members grew weary of such indignities
as being confined to the balcony rather than being allowed to sit downstairs and of
not being allowed to vote in the business meetings of the church. Madison Lightfoot,
later ordained as an elder in Zion Baptist Church, was the chief spokesman when blacks
confronted First Baptist’s elders and told them black members wished to leave. In
1836, thirteen black Detroiters asked for letters of dismissal from First Baptist
Church so they could organize their own church. They also submitted a petition to
the state legislature to form the Society of Second Baptist Church, formally organized
in 1839. In 1839, the church established the first school for African-American children
and its first pastor, the Reverend William Monroe, became known as an antislavery
activist. Second Baptist also would spawn thirty or more other black churches, including
St. Matthew’s Episcopal, founded by Reverend Monroe, and Zion Baptist, where George
French became a deacon.

In the next three decades, a cadre of black leaders willing to risk their lives to
help escaping fugitives would emerge in Detroit, all of them heirs to the Blackburns’
legacy. They would include Monroe; Benjamin Willoughby, at whose house the Blackburn
plot was hatched; his son-in-law, William Lambert, a free black man from New Jersey;
George DeBaptiste, a Virginian who had run an Underground Railroad station in Madison,
Indiana, and who owned a ship, the
T. Whitney;
William Webb, a light-skinned black man who passed for white to spy on slave catchers
in taverns and pass on information to the Underground Railroad; and Obadiah Wood,
a barber from New York.

Others, black and white, Detroiters and Canadians, would join the struggle, including
Seymour Finney, a white abolitionist who arrived in Detroit from western New York
in 1834. He owned a hotel and livery stable. According to legend, he hid fugitives
in his stable while entertaining the men pursuing them in his hotel.

Just as the Blackburns remained antislavery activists after moving to Toronto, Second
Baptist remained a major force in the struggle for equal rights long after slavery
ended. After the Civil War, the church played a key role in helping freed slaves find
jobs and homes in Detroit.

And in a February 1957 letter to the Reverend A. A. Banks Jr., then pastor of the
church, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “On returning to my
office I found your letter with the enclosed check of one thousand five hundred fifty-seven
dollars and thirty-six cents ($1,557.36) from Second Baptist Church on my desk. Words
are inadequate for me to express my appreciation and the appreciation of the whole
Negro citizenry of Montgomery for this great contribution. It comes at a time of real
financial need. I think I am correct in saying that Second Baptist Church has contributed
more to the work of the Montgomery Improvement Association than any single church
in America. You can never know what this means to us….”

Americans have rioted for all kinds of reasons, including winning or losing a sports
game, drunkenness, rumors of rape and racial incidents. Unlike those incidents, the
riot triggered by Thornton and Rutha Blackburn’s imminent return to slavery did more
than ignite fires and fights. It changed the Blackburns’ lives and the lives of people
in at least two cities, establishing an enduring tradition of black self-help and
struggle.

H
ope wasn’t just alive, it was green and growing, spreading ripples of springtime joy.
A white Underground Railroad conductor, a man who’d single-handedly stopped two lynchings,
had set out for Alabama to rescue the enslaved family of a black man called Peter.
But all too quickly, green hope died on crackly, dried-up vines. Seth Concklin, Peter’s
supposed savior, was dead.

Concklin’s body had washed up on the shores of the Cumberland River near Paducah,
Kentucky, his head bashed in and chains still gripping his arms and legs. It looked
like a plain case of murder served up raw and bloody on a cold plate. Meanwhile, Peter’s
family had been carried back to Alabama, sailing down the same rivers they’d just
rowed up. His wife, Vina, was back in the hands of the men who’d tried to rape her
and who had whipped her until it damaged her brain. His three children were back in
the place where eight of their siblings had died. And the man who owned the family
celebrated the return of his slaves by declaring that a slave stealer like Concklin
had gotten just what he deserved.

Yet Peter belonged to a black family that had clung to its history, nourished by the
belief that they were special. Because of that belief, his father had purchased freedom,
his mother had chased it until she caught it and Peter had gained his own liberty
through a daring combination of bravery, hard work and trickery. He was not just a
former slave, not just a man once known as Peter Gist and Peter Friedman. His name,
he had just discovered, was Peter Still, and that made all the difference. He would
restore his family’s hopes himself. That was what people with proud names did.

Enslaved blacks usually bore the names of the people who owned them, trading one label,
one brand, for another. Depriving people of lasting names made it easier to see them
as things, as impersonal as plates or spoons. In the beginning, runaway slave advertisements
identified fugitive slaves by tribes: they were Congo people, Mandingo people, Ashantis,
members of the Poulard nation, Ibos. But after a time, most were known simply as Cuffy
or Hercules, Peter or Celia, Tom or Sal, sometimes followed by a last name and sometimes
not.

Africans became jigs and jigaboos, darkies and negars, niggers and Negroes. They became
Black Sambos and coloreds, maroons and Melungeons, creoles, Geechees and Gullahs.
They were Red-bones and high yellows, high-browns and shines, coons and spooks, bucks
and boys. They were spades and mammies, Griffs and Moors, mulattos and quadroons,
octoroons and Carmel Indians. They were the Ethiopians in the woodpile, the Abyssinians
in the chimney, the pickaninnies in the watermelon patch, tragic mulattos or black
as the ace of spades. But they were invisible men and invisible women, people whose
names, according to writer James Baldwin, nobody knew.

But Peter Still had a name that it had taken him forty years to find, a name that
suggested slow-moving streams and calm spirits. It showed up in countless stories
about men and women who ran for freedom, who sheltered runaways, who healed the sick
with sassafras and snakeroot, who thrilled crowds with their words and music. The
name didn’t really come from Africa, but the people who wore it claimed an African
prince had handed them the garment centuries ago. He wanted them to wrap it around
them so they’d remember to walk like kings and queens in their new home.

According to family legends and some records, the Stills trace their roots back to
the early seventeenth century, when a prince from Guinea, West Africa, and his clan
came up the Delaware River to Cooper’s Landing in South Jersey. At that time, Guinea
referred to the area extending from modern Ghana to Nigeria. Between 1670 and 1700
large numbers of slaves came to America from this region, which was torn by infighting
and religious revolts. The prince, according to the story, was an indentured servant,
which meant he would be freed after working off the price of his passage for a certain
number of years. He came ashore near where Gloucester City now stands in a section
of Camden County known as Guineatown. Freed slaves of the Hugg family had established
it on land provided by their former masters. The Guinea prince and his clan worked
off their indebtedness and mixed and intermarried with the Lenape Indians in South
Jersey and the surrounding areas. In the late eighteenth century, the clan became
slaves. “After the Revolutionary War, that’s when they made us slaves,” says Clarence
Still Jr., the family historian.

The Guinea prince’s descendants were scattered, some taken to Maryland, some kept
in the New Jersey area near the Delaware River. But the prince supposedly gave his
people something no one could strip away, a sense of shared history and a last name
that sounded like Steel but, according to some sources, later became Still. No one
knows why he chose that name, but the story and its power endured. Over the years,
it would be murmured, spoken, shouted, embraced, celebrated thousands of times and
engraved on just as many granite headstones.

Because of that name and the history attached to it, Peter’s father, Levin Still,
found it impossible to hold back his feelings the day his owner, Saunders Griffin,
asked if he were happy.

“I will die before I submit to the yoke,” Levin allegedly answered.

Griffin agreed to let his high-stepping slave go free for “a small sum” of money rather
than possibly spread rebellion among the other slaves. By working on Sundays, holidays
and rest periods, Levin gradually saved several hundred dollars. In 1804, New Jersey
governor Joseph Bloomfield signed an act making every child born of a slave free,
but such a child must remain a servant of the mother’s master until age twenty-five
for boys or twenty-one for girls. Levin and his wife, Sidney, vowed to go there after
hearing this news through the slave rumor mill. However, after buying his way out
of freedom, Levin had no money left to free his wife and children. But Sidney loved
him too much to let him leave without her. She had been born and raised by her mother
on a plantation near the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. As a young
girl she’d watched her drunken slave master shoot her father through the head. Right
then, she’d known that, no matter what it took, she would not die a slave either.
And now, as Levin’s wife, she, too, had a name coated with power, a name that meant
something.

The first time Sidney ran away to join her husband, she took all of her children with
her, dragging, pushing, shushing and coaxing them through forests and swamps, foraging
for berries, heading for South Jersey. However, within a month after a family in Greenwich
took the family to Levin, slave catchers snatched her and her young ones from their
cabin one night while Levin was away. After that, her owner put Sidney under careful
watch, locking her in a garret, where she sewed. Sidney sang her way out of her cage.
She filled the small room with her rich, thick, come-to-Jesus contralto, singing loud
enough to storm heaven. She sang one praise-God Methodist song after another until
her owner finally became convinced she’d gotten over the urge to follow Levin. Once
her master unlocked her prison, Sidney sent word along the Underground Railroad that
she was ready to run again. This time, she left her sons behind, believing her husband
could arrange to steal them later.

Her boys, Peter and Levin, were just six and eight years old, respectively, on that
day in 1804 when Sidney bent over their bed for one final nighttime kiss, a kiss they
couldn’t feel and wouldn’t remember unless it somehow floated into their dreams. She
left them in the care of her mother, also a slave. She took her daughters with her,
fearing what might happen to girls left alone on a plantation. Her husband, Levin,
had sent her a message with instructions telling her where to join him in South Jersey.

During the day, Sidney and her children hid in high grass or in grain fields, living
on whatever they could pluck or scoop up. At last they reached an Underground Railroad
station near Smyrna, Delaware. In the dark of night, they most likely boarded a boat
that carried a blue light above a yellow light as identification. In the middle of
the Delaware Bay they probably were transferred to a New Jersey boat lit in the same
way. They made the turbulent thirty-mile trip across the wide waters of the Delaware
Bay to the shore town of Greenwich, an old Quaker village of twisted and snarled button-wood
trees and docks bordering the Cohansey River. From there, they traveled to a black
settlement called Springtown, where men clutching rifles patrolled many entrances
to the town. From Springtown, Sidney and her daughter Mahala made it to the Pine Barrens
of Burlington County, New Jersey, Levin going back to pick up the ailing Kitturah,
who had been left with a family along the way. Sidney changed her name to Charity,
and the couple spent the rest of their lives among the swamps, sand and scraggly pines
of the Barrens.

But the two boys Sidney had left sleeping in their beds in Maryland awakened to a
nightmare. Not understanding slavery or slave escapes, they couldn’t figure out why
their mother had disappeared. Nor could they understand why, on a hot afternoon in
1804, they were flung into a flatboat traveling to Lexington, Kentucky, a city that
revolved around tobacco, horses, hemp, whiskey, lumber and slaves. They were certain
they had been kidnapped and for years that was the story they told. Actually, their
owner, angry at the boys’ runaway mother, had sold them to a slave trader named Kincaid.
On the boat, Peter’s grandmother took Peter in her arms and told him to tell people
at the plantation to which he was traveling that he had been stolen from a free place
near the Delaware River.

Peter held on to the old woman’s words, and they became his life, his truth. For a
long time, he believed he really had been stolen. For a long time, he longed for a
home he had never seen but thought he remembered, Philadelphia, near the Delaware
Bay.

Kincaid sold the boys to John Fisher, the owner of a brickyard in Lexington, Kentucky.
They worked in pairs, carting off three thousand bricks a day. In 1818, Peter and
Levin left Kentucky and became the property of Levi Gist of Bainbridge, Alabama. They
were part of Gist’s inheritance, along with a bowl and pitcher, ten sacks of coffee,
a barrel of sperm oil and a cherry bedspread. As the boys traveled to the Deep South,
they saw unprecedented poverty, including white people living in shanties. In spite
of his harsh life, Peter decided to discipline himself, abstaining from liquor, tobacco
and profanity. And, like his father, he saved every penny he managed to earn on the
side.

His brother, Levin, died at age thirty-four, but Peter survived a whole series of
owners, some kindly, some brutal. He worked mostly as a hired-out slave, paying his
master a fee and putting aside a little money. He was hired by a pastor to take care
of a church; hired as a cook at a Whig convention in Nashville; hired to a bookseller
in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1846, who allowed him to keep some of his earnings; hired
to a land merchant. He whitewashed, cooked, dug graves, took care of stores, cleaned,
built fires, waited tables, ran errands, all the time looking for someone he could
trust with the plan he’d conceived for his freedom.

When he was twenty-five, he married fifteen-year-old Lavinia, known as Vina, whose
wedding dress was a white frock covered with black patches. She had been enslaved
in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, and now worked for Bernard McKiernan of Florence,
Alabama, near the Gist plantation; he was one of the wealthier planters in Florence,
where slaves produced cotton, corn, wheat, rye, oats and wool. Vina had been beaten
by her mistress for leaving a silver ladle in the kitchen overnight. She repeatedly
fought off sexual advances from McKiernan, who had brought his family to Alabama when
the country was inhabited by Indians and opened a cotton plantation. Vina also tussled
with another would-be lover, the overseer, Bill Simms, who supervised the slaves’
work. Angered by her refusals, Simms beat her in the head with a bullwhip, causing
an inflammation of the brain. She would bear eleven children and watch eight of them
die. And like the other slave women, she would pick cotton while leaving a baby in
her cabin with bread or a little mush on a rag on its finger.

As the years passed, Peter kept looking for an opportunity to purchase his freedom.
It was a chancy enterprise. In 1834, Alabama had passed a law saying that a person
who wanted to free a slave was supposed to announce his intentions in a newspaper
and then apply to a local court for permission. A person freeing a slave also risked
being hounded out of Alabama and branded an abolitionist.

In 1847, Peter found the man he believed would help him pull off his plan to buy himself.
He had been hired out to work for Joseph Friedman in Tuscumbia. Friedman had a store
and a younger brother named Isaac. Peter was drawn to Joseph Friedman after hearing
him making some chance remark that suggested he sympathized with suffering people.
Peter asked the Friedman brothers to help him buy himself, and they agreed, urging
Peter to proceed slowly. Peter, then almost fifty, began pretending that he was broken
down and ailing, his juice gone. Whenever his owner was around, he would slump, coughing
and walking with a stoop. Finally, his owner agreed to sell him to Joseph Friedman
for five hundred dollars. By 1848, Peter had saved up two hundred and ten dollars.
Between January 26, 1849, and April 16, 1850, Peter gave Joseph Friedman five hundred
dollars in five installments. On April 16, 1850, Friedman gave Peter a bill of sale
and his freedom. Peter promised his wife and children that he would buy their freedom,
too. Meanwhile, one Friedman brother would care for the Alabama store while the other
one traveled to Ohio, bringing along Peter, who would receive his free papers at a
Cincinnati courthouse.