\u201cThis is my great-grandma, Christina Levant Platt at age 100, weeding her garden. She was born into slavery. Her \u201cowner\u201d 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.
\nShe 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.
\nShe passed 5yrs before I was born but I love her as if I knew her. Family tells me she would say \u201c I put prayers on my children\u2019s children\u2019s heads\u201d.
\nThis apparently worked\u2764\ufe0f
\nAround 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.
\nShe said \u201cthe sky was black as night\u201d from cannonball fire. She saw a man decapitated by a cannonball.
\nShe was the water girl for the other slaves as a young girl and \u201c the lookout\u201d for the slaves in the fields for the approaching overseer on horseback as they secretly knelt and prayed for their freedom.
\nShe 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.
\nShe eventually married a Native American from the Santee Tribe. John C, Platt.
\nAfter freedom, Christina insisted upon taking her children north as she knew they would not get a good education in the south, and that\u2019s 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.
\nWith great respect, I honor my great grandmother.
\nSo much more I could say about this miraculous woman. She gave me much strength in my hard times.
\nWhenever I thought I was having a hard day, I would think of her and shrug it off.
\nThank you for reading one story of millions.\u2764\ufe0f<\/p>\n
-Brenda Russell<\/p>\n
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