EDITORS MESSAGE
I thought it was important to share this awesome story and history of a great lady
“This is my great-grandma, Christina Levant Platt at age 100, weeding her garden. She was born into slavery.
Her “owner” was a wife that taught my great grandma to read and write secretly, which was illegal and quite dangerous at that time for both of them. She learned to read the Bible.
She had 11 children, she lost two, one son was one of the first black attorneys in US. She sent the 4 boys to college in Boston. Exceptional in those days.
She passed 5yrs before I was born but I love her as if I knew her. Family tells me she would say “ I put prayers on my children’s children’s heads”.
This apparently worked❤️
Around April 12, 1861, Christina was at the 1st battle of the CIVIL WAR, in Fort Sumter at Charleston Bay, South Carolina, working in the cotton fields.
She said “the sky was black as night” from cannonball fire. She saw a man decapitated by a cannonball.
She was the water girl for the other slaves as a young girl and “ the lookout” for the slaves in the fields for the approaching overseer on horseback as they secretly knelt and prayed for their freedom.
She would watch for the switching tail of the approaching horse and would alert the slaves to rise up and return to picking cotton before he saw them.
She eventually married a Native American from the Santee Tribe. John C, Platt.
After freedom, Christina insisted upon taking her children north as she knew they would not get a good education in the south, and that’s all she cared about.
She died at age 101 in 1944, where she and her husband had built a home in Medfield, Massachusetts, the first black family to move there.
With great respect, I honor my great grandmother.
Photo credits: Shani Himaya
So much more I could say about this miraculous woman. She gave me much strength in my hard times.
Whenever I thought I was having a hard day, I would think of her and shrug it off.
Thank you for reading one story of millions.❤️
-Brenda Russell
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