September is National Underground Railroad Month
A few years back I read bell hook’s All About Love. Reading it made me realize how little I, like most people, actually knew about love. The way my being is set up, I fully immerse myself in whatever I’m doing. Love occupied my mind. It was front of mind and front of heart. On my mat I sat breathing in and out. After a while my mantra, “I am love” permeated my cells and then my consciousness. I was transformed. Love Jones. My affair with love showed how much people are love adverse intentionally and unintentionally. It also illuminated a love story that had laid dormant in my mind for a decade. It had been there all along.
I revisited All About Love to ensure my internal compass was still pointed north towards love in this sea of hate. Bell hooks defined love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility. It clicked. Peter Still, the freedom seeking brother of William Still, was the embodiment of love. He had been all along.
Peter Still and his brother Levin, were children when they were kidnapped from New Jersey and sold into slavery in Kentucky and then Alabama. For forty years Peter toiled before he was able to restore his stolen freedom. Levin unfortunately never knew freedom again.
Peter was chattel per the dictates of American slavery. The human who was not a human, the man who was not a man, the husband who was not a husband, and the father who was not a father, was the pinnacle of everything society said he was not. He possessed high moral character and integrity. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity. Peter’s “soul was intent upon a great purpose. He could not be withheld; he could not be turned aside. His perseverance, his patience, his exactness, his tact, everywhere attracted attention and commanded respect.”
The way I meditated on love, Peter mediated on Vina. She, Lavinia, was a young girl. Only 15 and alone having recently sold away from her family. She was consumed with grief of being separated from her dear mother. Peter was all she had. Vina’s enslaver had no intention of providing for her. She was “destitute.” She lacked adequate food, shelter, and clothing. After a while , enslaved preacher and neighbor Old Cato Hodge performed their “marriage” rites. The bride was beautiful in her “grotesque” hand-me down dress.
Peter did everything in his power to mitigate his wife’s poverty. He gave her his coat. After she patched it the coat was two toned. Half of Peter’s original black fabric and half white fabric belonging to Vina. Half of Peter and half Vina. Like the marriage, the two joined and become one. Peter learned to make shoes for them. Others he made and sold. He parted with his own possessions to buy “decent clothes” for his wife.
Peter walked fourteen miles roundtrip to see Vina on days off. He built her a cabin. He chopped and hauled wood to build her cabin. If he needed help, he hired it. From sunup to beyond sundown he worked. The moon rose high shining its light on Peter. When the cabin was done he furnished it. Peter bestowed upon Vina as much comfort and luxury as slavery would allow.
A flour barrel brought conflict with his enslaver Mr. Gist who “took the liberty to appropriate it to his own use.” Peter did not back down telling Gist it was his, he bought it, and he was taking it to his wife. Having been well versed in the slavery system he knew that act of impudence would cost him. Twenty five strips across his bare back was the price he paid. For Vina, there was no price that he would not pay.
As their love grew, so did their family. Vina’s enslaver McKiernan was a known “tyrant.” Many children and babies died including the Still’s. Even though he lived apart from his family, Peter was an involved and protective husband and father. For one year, the family lived together while Peter was hired out to McKiernan.
Peter worked a variety of jobs throughout town making and saving money. He previously contemplated escape during a Nashville trip but the opportune time never presented. When hired by Jewish brothers Peter and Issac Friedman, Peter expressed his desire to be free. Because they “regarded him as a man,” he trusted them. Peter concocted a plan. They followed his lead. Through the brothers he brokered his own sale, they were “not used to dealing in slaves.” Through the arrangement Peter eventually purchased himself.
Peter was a self possessed man with a “new dignity even in the eyes of his children.” His bill of sale belonged to him. The good news was kept secret. As he “relocated” with the Friedman’s, townspeople lamented the misfortune they believed had befallen their favorite bondsman. The poor unfortunate soul was in the hands of unscrupulous Jews who would “sell their own children.” Invoking the contented slave trope he’d only reply, “Mass’r Joe and Mass’r Issac always have been good to me.” And “anyhow, I belong to them, and they can do what they like.” Negative stereotypes about blacks and Jews ironically, helped.
Peter bid his family adieu and embarked on his journey as a free person. He promised that he would return. The family trusted his word implicitly. Peter could have moved on with his new life and never looked back. But his love as defined by hooks; commitment, respect, care, trust, and sense of responsibility compelled him to stop at nothing to liberate his family. After capture, his family’s stint in jail, the death an agent of liberation, a speaking tour, three years and $5000 later, Peter’s family was freed.
That is the power of love.
Peter says goodbye to Vina….
Preserve Black Alabama 
Leave a comment