Forbidden Fruit (11 page)

Peter dedicated the book to Levin, the brother who didn’t survive their years in exile
and confusion, and to “all the brave-hearted men and women, who like him have fallen…and
who now lie in nameless, unknown graves.”

His dedication was a potent reminder that for every Charity, Levin and Peter Still
who managed to snatch freedom, there were many more who failed. The Stills never succeeded
in ransoming Peter’s grandson, Peter, although a June 1855 letter noted that the once
sickly baby had survived its illness and that he was “a perfect picture of [his grandfather,
Peter].”

The Still story, a tale of extraordinary togetherness and achievement, continues.
Today the family claims more than three thousand members, including athletes and inventors,
artists and politicians. Though not all family members are professionals, they have
racked up many achievements that would have made the Guinea prince proud.

Ephraim J. Still was a mayor of Lawnside, New Jersey, a one-square-mile black-owned
and black-governed borough. At various times, it was known as Snow Hill and Free Haven,
a refuge for newly freed blacks and runaways set up on land owned by a Quaker abolitionist
and sold to blacks on long terms. It was about a mile from Guineatown, where the land
was too sandy for farming; people would walk to Snow Hill or Free Haven to plant and
farm. Nowadays, Lawnside, the name it gained in 1928, is a place where older people
remember turning sweet potato vines over with little sticks so the sun could reach
both sides and that of the forty-seven men who volunteered to fight in the Civil War,
forty-seven came back.

One of Peter Still’s brothers, Dr. James Still, wooed his first wife by learning a
handful of songs and singing them whenever he went courting. He was a self-taught
doctor who had only six months of schooling and was nineteen before he learned addition.
Yet people, black and white, came from miles away to see the herb-using doctor in
Medford, New Jersey, once he became famous for curing hip disease, cancer and other
ailments. Many of his medicines were herbal cures using sassafras root, horehound,
catnip, bloodroot, skunk cabbage, saffron, Virginia snakeroot and pleurisy root, most
far gentler than the cure-or-kill remedies of his time. He had begun practicing to
be a doctor while still a child, using slivers of pine bark for lancets and spittle
for viruses. At the time, the family was so poor that James once snatched a piece
of meat from a cat’s mouth and ate it, determined not to let the cat steal his dinner.
However, when he died he was the third largest landowner in Medford and had two sons
who became doctors.

William Still, born in 1821 near Medford in Burlington County, became a famous Underground
Railroad conductor in Philadelphia, sheltering thousands of fugitives in his home.
His wife, Letitia, mended and cooked for the fugitives. His miraculous reunion with
his brother, Peter, who died in 1868, inspired him to write a book called
The Underground Rail Road,
which contained stories and sketches of hundreds of fugitives who had passed through
Still’s home. He hoped it would help other people find their relatives. Still also
became a successful businessman, investing in coal mining and opening a store handling
new and used stoves. By 1867, his business was flourishing, enabling him to send his
daughter Caroline to private schools and Oberlin College. At the time of his death
on July 14, 1902, his estate was worth between $75,000 and $100,000, according to
the
Afro-American
newspaper.

Dr. Caroline Still Wiley Anderson was among the first black Philadelphians to become
a physician and one of the first female physicians in Pennsylvania. William and Letitia
Still’s daughter Frances became one of Philadelphia’s first kindergarten teachers.
Their son William W. became a public accountant and lawyer, while another son, Robert,
became a journalist and print shop owner.

Some twentieth-century Stills became stars, too. Art Still, a Camden High School graduate,
became an all-pro defensive end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Valerie Still was a female
basketball star who played in Europe and held an all-time career scoring record at
the University of Kentucky. Cecil Still, author, herbalist and retired professor of
biochemistry at Rutgers University, developed a natural pesticide; Winifred Still
Davis became an opera soprano. Noted classical composer William Grant Still was a
distant relative. Lewis Still was a flight instructor for the 99th Pursuit Squadron,
one of the groups that made up the famed black World War II pilots known as the Tuskegee
Airmen.

It was Dr. James Still who began the tradition of holding annual Still family reunions:
he invited all of his brothers and sisters to his house. Such gatherings became all-important
in the post–Civil War years when people began holding reunions and homecomings to
preserve the history of families shredded, scattered and renamed during slavery. From
1861 through 1870, former slaves even placed information-wanted ads in the AME
Christian Recorder
newspaper. They sought their kin, but didn’t describe them, knowing their appearance
had changed. They talked about places, owners’ names, incidents. The ads were supposed
to be read in AME churches throughout the country. Some explicitly stated that their
families had been torn because some members escaped before the Civil War.

James Still didn’t call for his first reunion until 1870. “The Civil War was over
in 1865, but the hostility was not over,” says Clarence Still Jr. “In 1870, it was
felt it was safe enough to have a reunion, call the family together.”

Stills continue annually to share their stories and triumphs and celebrate the power
of family traditions and names. They hold two or three reunions every year. Some of
them say the experiences of their ancestors help them keep their lives in perspective,
realizing their hardships don’t compare with the hardships that earlier generations
faced. Others say being a Still means maintaining close family bonds. “The primary
effect our family history and my parents’ teachings have had on me is to understand
and appreciate that family is all-important,” said Alfred C. Fisher, whose paternal
grandmother was Susan Still (Fisher) of Sadlertown, New Jersey, and, later, Lawnside.

I
t was just “nigger nonsense,” young schoolteacher Henry Hobart huffed when he learned
that four “darkies” planned to put on a show in the copper-mining town of Clifton,
Michigan. “A person must keep silence in my position, but it is hard to do it sometimes,”
Hobart wrote in his journal in July 1863. “There is a nigger show at the hall this
evening & William Pemberthy [one of Hobart’s students] who is black as one and acts
like one is delighted.”

Hobart, who came from Vermont, liked teaching in the Lake Superior–bordering mining
village of Clifton, but all sorts of things, large and small, chipped away at his
joy and shattered his peace. His hate list included the Confederate army, drinkers,
show-offs, “poor, snarling, sore-eyed…traitors,” slavery, late mail, late newspapers,
meatless meals, old molasses, filthy butter, breakfasts of dry wheat bread and water,
cooks who served duck feet and duck heads and, of course, minstrel shows. It is not
known how many Clifton residents plunked down their quarters to see the show that
steamed up the scholarly teacher; yet many were probably only too happy to soak up
a few hours of black prancing and dancing.

By the early 1860s, black entertainers, saloonkeepers, plasterers, cooks, servants,
sailors, hatmakers, barbers, plasterers and miners—some, most likely, runaway slave
couples—had carved out a small but definite place for themselves in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula, a place where even the fog sometimes freezes.

History books paint vivid pictures of runaway slaves scurrying from slave catchers,
tussling with dogs, hiding among sacks of potatoes, pretending to be pallbearers in
phony funerals, busting out of jails, hiding in false-bottomed wagons or behind fake
walls, sleeping in bushes and logs and walking for weeks and months to reach American
and Canadian havens. Books and articles also describe the lives of runaway slaves
who lived in swamps and hills, surviving on whatever they could catch, trade for or
steal from plantations. In Michigan, stories about the Underground Railroad, the sometimes
loose, sometimes spontaneous and sometimes organized network that aided fugitive slaves,
highlight well-known stops on the road, including Vandalia, Schoolcraft, Battle Creek,
Marshall, Niles, Adrian and Detroit.

Almost nobody talks about the blacks who became pioneers in the Northern Michigan
wilderness of iron ore and copper mines, cascading rivers, deep valleys, gushing waterfalls,
pine-capped mountains and brutal, nonstop winters. In fact, it is tough to find more
than a few pages of census data about the black pioneers, some runaway slaves and
some free people, who wrapped themselves in buffalo coats, tromped around on snowshoes
and drove teams of blue- and brown-eyed huskies through Michigan’s snow country.

Yet they were there, and some came with their families.

“There is strong evidence that fugitive slaves from the South migrated to the Upper
Peninsula between 1850 and 1860, possibly feeling that the area’s isolation and thinly
populated land and snow-bound winters would protect them from slave catchers,” according
to Dr. Russell Magnaghi, director of Northern Michigan University’s Center for Upper
Peninsula Studies. Magnaghi believes that the blacks from the slave states “could
have either been freedmen who had migrated northward or as was most probably the case,
fugitive slaves who had made their way north via the Underground Railroad.” Because
roads were poor and trains had not yet penetrated the Upper Peninsula, blacks who
traveled there before the Civil War most likely arrived on steamboats, the same lifeline
that brought food to Upper Peninsula villages. At the same time, a small trading vessel
manned by an all-black crew operated in the waters of Lake Michigan and might also
have dropped off Underground Railroad passengers.

Whatever their starting point, these people faced long and dangerous trips to Upper
Peninsula towns. It was 550 miles from Detroit to Houghton, 590 miles from Detroit
to Gogebic County, 410 miles from Chicago to Mackinac County, 520 miles from Cleveland
to Baraga County, 470 miles from Indianapolis to Chippewa County.

“For blacks in the 1850s and 1860s,” wrote Magnaghi,

But how did black settlers who show up in the 1860 census of the Upper Peninsula hear
about places as distant as Marquette and Ontonagon?

Did thirty-five-year-old John Anderson, of Alabama, know what awaited him in Houghton?
If not freedom, what else might have motivated Charles Baker, fifty, a Houghton barber,
to journey to the far North from Mississippi or Ellen Dickens, forty-five, to leave
Kentucky to become a house servant in Ontonagon County? Why was Clayburn Harris, thirty-six,
a carpenter and joiner from Canada, in Marquette, along with Lavenia Harris, thirty-six,
and William J. Harris, a carpenter’s apprentice?

Surrounded on three sides by Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the heavily
wooded, lake-studded Upper Peninsula of Michigan remains, for the most part, wild
country, an area where deer outnumber people in some counties and where hemlock trees
never touched by axes stand guard in others. It is a place where people can step out
of their doors and walk straight into nature’s arms, stirred by the roar of waterfalls,
the smell of pines, the sight of volcanic rocks or the majesty of Lake Superior, which,
at 31,700 square miles, is the largest expanse of freshwater in the world. The area,
however, is also a testing ground for the soul.

It has been in Michigan since the nineteenth century, part of a land swap that gave
Toledo to Ohio and the Upper Peninsula to Michigan. The size of Delaware, Connecticut,
Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined, it is a region of extremes. From the middle
of May to mid-June, blackflies zip up your pant legs and burrow deep into the skin,
hornets buzz and mosquitoes flit. It is better known, though, for winters that stretch
on and on, and skies that seldom smile. Except for some isolated spots in northern
New England, it receives among the largest annual snowfalls east of the Rocky Mountains.
Houghton County, on average, piles up 204 inches annually and dips below zero on twenty-three
days. In Marquette County, the average annual snowfall is 151 inches, and the number
of days below zero is forty. In Iron County, it plunges below zero on an average of
forty-one days. This does not compare to places like Antarctica or Siberia, areas
that set the standards for what cold means and own the right to brag about it. Yet
it is a place where the relationship between people and weather is crucial. A storm
on Lake Superior with gale-speed winds and mile-high waves can sink the sturdiest
ship. All the same, in the middle of February, while long-legged jack pines shiver
in the wind, people drive snowmobiles to restaurants for Friday-night fish fries and
roar into Marquette for dogsled races in which as many as thirty-seven teams compete
on snow-packed paths.

There was a time, though, when the Upper Peninsula was more than a hunting and fishing
paradise or a place where people could be at home with nature in forests full of tall,
straight white pines, trees with soft light wood used for construction and easy-to-cut
fancy designs. There was a time when it was the site of a string of mining towns packed
with immigrant workers speaking Gaelic, Yiddish, Finnish and scores of other languages.
Those were the days when a lumber town called Seney was known as Helltown U.S.A. because
so many bars lined its street, sandwiched between houses of prostitution at each end.
This also was the time when the Upper Peninsula provided a little-known refuge for
runaway slaves and pioneering African-Americans, including a family for whom part
of Marquette is named.

Until the copper- and iron-mining boom of the mid-1800s brought more jobs and people
to the Upper Peninsula, the number of black residents remained almost too small to
count. In 1830 there were only five, and ten years later there were six. By 1850,
though, fifty-two blacks lived throughout the region. There were thirty-seven in Mackinac
County, eight at Sault Ste. Marie, six in Ontonagon County, which had a mile of sandy
beach and great masses of copper, and one at Eagle Harbor, home of both eagles and
the Eagle Harbor Mining Company. Sixty lived in the northern iron-rich frontier of
Marquette, including a black sailor and his wife. Six were day laborers, and twelve
men and women were cooks and servants.

All could tell stories about the strength they gained from working together.

Some came with freedom already in their pockets, drawn by the smell of opportunity
in communities within walking distance of the mines. The first large deposits of ore
were discovered in the Upper Peninsula in the 1840s. Copper, first used for ship sheathing
and frying pans and later for electrical wiring and plumbing, was plentiful, in some
cases brought to the surface by ancient volcanic eruptions. Around 1849, the family
of Asa Jeffrey became among the few blacks to settle on the Ontonagon frontier at
the extreme western end of the Upper Peninsula. Unable to find employment in lumbering
and mining, male members of this family became barbers.

At night, the Jeffrey brothers worked as musicians and performers in the local hotel.
Eventually, they opened the Jeffrey Brothers Saloon, a small one-room log cabin. According
to census records, Asa Jeffrey came to the Upper Peninsula from Canada, and other
sources say members of his family worked as barbers or owned barbershops in New York
in the 1840s, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1850s and Minnesota, North Dakota
and Iowa from the 1850s to the 1900s. By 1860, Asa Jeffrey had become a barber in
the Lake Superior town of Houghton, a mining center built on a steep slope and surrounded
by green hills. Later, members of the Jeffrey clan sold their claims and headed for
Minnesota Territory, where they bought and sold land.

A rocky patch of land jutting into Marquette’s harbor bears the name of another pioneering
black family, the Gaines clan. Though they left Marquette long ago, members of this
family are interwoven into Marquette’s history. Virginia-born William Washington Gaines
and his wife arrived in Marquette in 1855. Born a slave and freed by his natural father,
Pitt Gaines, an aristocratic Virginia shipbuilder, William was sent on one of his
father’s ships to Houghton to work in the copper mines. He brought the woman he loved
with him, an emancipated woman named Mary whom he had married after buying her freedom
from Pitt Gaines. Falling ore injured him in the Houghton mines; it was only one of
the hazards miners faced, including crushing cave-ins, choking dynamite smoke and
ore dust and rats that stole their lunches. After William’s injury, he and his wife
moved to Marquette to work as coachman and groundskeeper for a white family. For years
they lived on what became known as Gaines Rock, an odd outcropping of granite jutting
into the Lake Superior shoreline and sitting between a brook and sandy beaches.

William Gaines’s son, Charles, became a barber, porter and drayman and in 1914 unsuccessfully
ran for a seat on the city commission. After Charles Gaines’s death in 1917, his widow
and her ten children left the city. The Marquette City Directory for 1912 shows the
last entry for the family: Charles O. Gaines, Cassie E. and William E. all lived at
721 South Lake. In 1959, forty-two years after the Gaineses left Marquette, four of
William Gaines’s children returned for a visit. One owned a convalescent home and
another owned several apartment buildings in Brooklyn. All remembered how their grandfather,
William, kept a sack of candy in one pocket and a handful of pennies in another, delighting
any children he met. They also remembered Gaines Rock, which sheltered so many different
kinds of people over the years, including hoboes and tramps in the Depression-socked
1930s and runaway teens in the 1960s. Most of all, they remembered how black self-help
groups such as the Prince Hall Masons and the black, Prince Hall–affiliated Eastern
Stars nurtured members of their family and helped them maintain “personal pride” despite
the racism of the times.

Other early black pioneers came to the Upper Peninsula seeking a wilderness in which
to hide. In 1860, Richard and Sarah Kenny and their two teenage children, Rebecca,
seventeen, and William L. Davis, fifteen, were the only black family in the Lake Superior
town of Munising. Richard Kenny is believed to have been a runaway slave, making him
and his family part of the saga of family-loving freedom seekers who journeyed long
distances to reach Michigan. They lived some twenty miles from the area’s famed Pictured
Rocks, those fifty-to two-hundred-foot-high sandstone/limestone walls that waves,
wind and glaciers have shaped into caves and arches. Surrounded by bluffs stained
by mineral-rich seepage, waterfalls, beaches, dunes and forests, the Kennys prospered.
In 1860, they owned more land and had more cash than anyone around them: Richard owned
fifteen hundred dollars in real estate and held a personal estate of one thousand
dollars, while his wife also had fifteen hundred dollars in property and two hundred
in her personal savings. Richard Kenny was originally from Virginia, and other members
of the family had been born in Ohio. At some point, Sarah Kenny either divorced or
buried her first husband, a Mr. Davis, and married Kenny, a plasterer. His stepson,
William, was his apprentice.