On November 7, 1849, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved woman, five months pregnant, was brought onto an auction platform in Savannah, Georgia. Her hands were bound with rope that had already worn the skin from her wrists. The auctioneer, Cyrus Feldman, read the bill of sale: a female named Diner, approximately twenty-two, experienced in domestic service, minimum bid nineteen cents. The crowd stirred.
Nineteen cents was less than the cost of a pound of coffee, and everyone understood that in the economy of slavery, price signaled quality. A woman offered at such a price must be damaged, dangerous, or diseased. What the crowd did not know was that the price was deliberate, set by the man who had owned her for years, a respectable Charleston tobacco merchant named Elias Cartwright, whose intention was to ensure she ended up with a buyer who would destroy her. Dinina, as she would later call herself, had been born in 1827 on a rice plantation outside Charleston.
Her mother, Patience, worked in the fields until she died when Dinina was eleven. Sold to Elias Cartwright, she became domestic help in a household that included his wife Constance and four children. Cartwright was a deacon at the First Presbyterian Church and a member of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce. Publicly, he was a man of Christian values.
Privately, he raped Dinina repeatedly over a period of years, beginning when she was fourteen. Constance knew, but blamed the sixteen-year-old girl for seducing her husband rather than confronting him. When Dinina gave birth to a light-skinned daughter named Ruth in 1843, Cartwright registered the child in his property ledger as the offspring of his servant, father unknown. In 1847, Cartwright sold four-year-old Ruth to a slave trader for four hundred dollars.
Dinina heard her daughter screaming from the front of the house, but by the time she ran outside, the child was gone. For three days she did not speak or eat. Two years later, she became pregnant again by Cartwright, and Constance issued an ultimatum: sell the woman or face public ruin. Cartwright contacted a Savannah merchant named William Hadley, who owed him roughly eight hundred dollars.
The debt would be forgiven in exchange for Hadley acquiring Dinina and taking her far from Charleston. Cartwright set her minimum price at nineteen cents, a calculated humiliation meant to signal to any buyer that she was worthless, damaged goods. He also knew that the kind of man who purchased such property would treat her with corresponding cruelty. Two days before the auction, Dinina was informed she was being sold.
She was transported to Savannah with her hands bound, arriving on November 6. The following morning, she stood on the platform as Feldman called for bids. Hadley, who needed to fulfill his arrangement with Cartwright, opened at nineteen cents. A Savannah plantation owner named Thornton Graves then entered the bidding.
Graves was known among enslaved people as one of the cruelest masters in Chatham County, running a plantation where workers were deliberately worked to death because he calculated it was more profitable to extract maximum labor over a short period. He had acquired at least seven pregnant women at auction over the past decade, kept them isolated, and within months they disappeared, reported as dying in childbirth or running away. Their bodies, and the bodies of their infants, had been buried in a concealed cellar beneath his tobacco barn. What began as a nineteen-cent sale escalated into a bidding war.
Graves was determined to acquire Dinina, but a stranger in the crowd, a man who gave his name as Jacob Marsh, bid against him relentlessly. The price climbed from nineteen cents to five dollars, to twenty, to three hundred, to eight hundred. By the time the bidding reached one thousand dollars, Hadley had quietly left the auction house. At twelve hundred dollars, Graves stopped, understanding that Marsh would not stop until he bankrupted him.
Marsh paid in gold and took Dinina away. Graves warned him that he had made a poor investment, then left, his fury barely contained. Once they were beyond the city, Marsh revealed that his real name was Jacob Brennan, a Pennsylvania abolitionist who worked with the Underground Railroad. He had come to Savannah because a woman named Bethy, an elderly cook in the Cartwright household connected to the network, had sent word that Elias was arranging for Dinina to be sold to someone like Thornton Graves, who would murder her.
Brennan took her to a cabin outside Savannah where two women, Sarah and Hannah, had sheltered fugitives for years. There, Dinina read a journal kept by a deceased woman named Abigail, documenting the pattern of Graves purchasing pregnant women, isolating them, and making them disappear. Seven women over ten years. Seven infants who had simply vanished.
The plan was for Dinina to escape by sea. A ship captain named Samuel Porter agreed to hide her in his cargo hold and transport her to Wilmington, Delaware, where conductor Thomas Garrett would take her the rest of the way to Canada. Dinina spent three days in the cabin before Brennan returned with word that Graves suspected him. The escape was moved up.
On the night of departure, Brennan drove her to the waterfront and delivered her to Porter, giving her fifty dollars for her new life. The hiding space was five feet by three feet, barely large enough to lie down, and she remained there in darkness as the ship departed at dawn. On the third day at sea, a violent storm struck. The ship pitched and heaved through the night, and Dinina pressed herself into the corner of her hiding space, arms wrapped around her stomach.
When the storm broke, Porter did not come. Days passed without food or water. On the third day, a red-haired sailor named Michael found her. Porter had fallen during the storm and broken his neck.
Before dying, he had told Michael about the woman hidden in the hold and asked him to keep her alive. Michael brought water and food and concealed her once more. The ship reached Wilmington, and Thomas Garrett was waiting. For the next seven weeks, Dinina moved north through Pennsylvania and New York, passed from one conductor to another, hiding in barns and cellars, traveling only at night.
In Rochester, she stayed three days with Frederick Douglass, who spoke to her about the importance of telling her story once she reached safety. In late January 1850, eight months pregnant, she crossed into Ontario. She fell to her knees on Canadian soil and wept. She had escaped.
She settled in a community called Dawn, a settlement of roughly two hundred formerly enslaved people near the border. On February 19, 1850, she gave birth to a son and named him Jacob, after the man who had saved her life. For three years she worked as a seamstress, learned to read, and began documenting her story. In 1853, she married Samuel Richards, a blacksmith who had escaped from Maryland, and they had two daughters together.
But she never stopped searching for Ruth. In 1856, she received word that her daughter was alive, enslaved on a farm outside Charleston. Dinina returned south with two experienced conductors, rescued thirteen-year-old Ruth from the farm on a moonless night, and brought her back to Canada. When they crossed the border together, Dinina felt whole for the first time since before Elias Cartwright had first claimed her.
Dinina lived until 1891, dying at Dawn surrounded by her children and grandchildren. In her final years she continued to tell her story, documenting the evil of slavery and insisting the nation confront its history honestly. Among her papers was a journal kept for over forty years, ending with a message to future readers: she had been sold for nineteen cents because her owner wanted her to understand she was worthless, but no human being is worthless, no matter what the law says. She survived because people who understood that truth were willing to risk everything to help her.
Thornton Graves was never prosecuted. He fled Savannah ahead of Union forces during the war and died in 1867 in Mississippi under an assumed name. In 1863, Union soldiers occupying his plantation had discovered the concealed cellar beneath the tobacco barn. Inside were the remains of eight women wrapped in canvas, their skulls showing evidence of violence, and beside them the remains of infants, some newborns, some a few months old.
The discovery was documented by a captain named Henry Clark and the testimony of formerly enslaved people recorded, but the report was filed away and forgotten during Reconstruction. In 1931, a graduate student named Patricia Whitmore found the report and attempted to publish her findings. A lawyer representing the Graves family threatened legal action, and she withdrew the article, but preserved her research with instructions that it not be opened until fifty years after her death. She died in 1974, and in 2024 the envelope was opened and donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The report confirmed that Graves had purchased at least eight pregnant women between 1843 and 1862 and that all of them had disappeared while in his possession. Their names were never known. In 1968, members of a Black farming cooperative that had purchased the old Graves plantation discovered more bones while plowing, remains missed during the 1863 excavation. They were reburied in a Savannah cemetery with a simple marker reading: Victims of slavery, died 1843 to 1862.
May they rest in peace.