November 7th, 1849. Savannah, Georgia. The city’s heart beat with commerce, its veins pulsing with the traffic of cotton, rice, and tobacco, but that morning, the center of the public market was reserved for a different kind of transaction. Dinina stood on the auction block, her wrists raw from rope, her body heavy with the child she carried, and her spirit battered by the knowledge that she was about to be sold for 19 cents—less than the price of a pound of coffee, less than the cost of a loaf of bread. She was 22, five months pregnant, and the crowd gathered before her was a mixture of buyers, sellers, and the curious, all accustomed to the spectacle of human lives traded for coin.

Cyrus Feldman, the auctioneer, held the bill of sale in his hand, his voice echoing across the market with the cold efficiency of a man who had sold thousands before her. Yet even the seasoned traders shifted uneasily as Feldman read aloud: “Female, named Diner, approximately 22 years of age, currently with child, minimum bid 19 cents.” The price was a message, a warning, a deliberate act of humiliation from her previous owner, Elias Cartwright. In the world of slavery, price signaled value, and Dinina was being marked as less than nothing.

But Dinina was not nothing. She was the daughter of Patience, born on a rice plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina. She had survived the death of her mother at eleven, the sale to Elias Cartwright, and the years of labor in his household. She had endured the predatory gaze of Elias, which became violence when she turned fourteen, and the systematic rape that followed—her body denied autonomy, her existence reduced to property. Constance, Elias’s wife, saw only seduction and blamed Dinina for the destruction of her household’s sanctity, never acknowledging her husband’s crimes.

Dinina gave birth to Ruth at sixteen, a child whose features betrayed her parentage, but Elias refused to claim her. Ruth was registered as “offspring of servant Diner, father unknown,” and when the whispers grew, Elias sold Ruth away at four years old, tearing her from Dinina’s arms without warning or mercy. The grief nearly killed Dinina, but she survived, because survival was all she had ever known.

When Dinina became pregnant again in 1849, Constance’s tolerance snapped. Elias, desperate to preserve his reputation, arranged for Dinina’s sale to William Hadley in Savannah, forgiving Hadley’s debt in exchange for taking Dinina far from Charleston. But Elias set the price at 19 cents, ensuring her humiliation and signaling to buyers that she was “damaged goods”—a cruel calculation meant to attract only the worst kind of master.

Hadley brought Dinina to Savannah’s auction house, where Feldman’s practiced eye saw the bill of sale and understood the warning. The crowd murmured, speculated, retreated—except for three men: Hadley himself, local plantation owner Thornton Graves, and a stranger in a wide-brimmed hat. Graves was infamous among the enslaved for his brutality, his plantation a place where people were worked to death, and Dinina sensed that her fate might be even darker than she imagined.

The bidding began at 19 cents, but quickly escalated as Graves and the stranger—Jacob Marsh—locked horns. Graves pushed the price to $100, then $300, $400, $500, and finally $1,200, but Marsh never flinched. When Graves finally yielded, humiliated, Marsh paid the sum in gold, signed the deed, and led Dinina away, leaving Graves seething with rage.

As Marsh guided Dinina through Savannah’s busy streets, past the cathedral and out toward the forests, he finally spoke. “I am not going to hurt you. I am not going to sell you. And I am not going to force myself on you. You need to listen carefully, because your life and your child’s life depend on what happens next.” Marsh explained that Elias had sent Dinina to die, setting her price to attract men like Graves, who purchased pregnant women only to work them to death or worse. Marsh handed Dinina a letter, unsigned but marked with a bird in flight—the symbol her mother had taught her, a sign of family, of connection, of hope.

The letter was from Bethy, an elderly cook in Elias’s household, who had watched over Dinina for years and had reached out to the Underground Railroad. Marsh was part of that network, risking his life to help her escape. But Graves was not just a cruel master; he was a slave catcher, with connections throughout Georgia and South Carolina. Marsh’s public defiance had made both him and Dinina targets.

They traveled deeper into the forest, through animal trails and underbrush, until they reached a cabin in a clearing. Sarah, a woman in her fifties, and her daughter Hannah welcomed Dinina inside. The cabin had sheltered dozens of fugitives over the years, and now it was Dinina’s turn to rest and prepare for the next stage of her journey.

Sarah revealed the truth about Graves: he had a pattern of purchasing pregnant women at auction, keeping them isolated, and then they would disappear—reported as dying in childbirth or running away, but never seen again. Abigail’s journal, kept by a woman who had died of consumption, documented the screams from the tobacco barn, the disappearances, the rumors of murdered women and vanished infants. Dinina realized she had been targeted for something even worse than slavery itself.

Jacob Marsh, whose real name was Jacob Brennan, returned after three days. He had been working with the Underground Railroad for years, operating under false identities, guiding people north. Graves had begun investigating, and Brennan knew he could no longer travel with Dinina. Instead, he arranged for her to meet Thomas Garrett, a conductor in Wilmington, Delaware, who had guided hundreds to freedom. The plan was to hide Dinina in the cargo hold of a merchant vessel bound for Philadelphia, trusting the sympathetic captain to keep her safe.

The night before her departure, Dinina lay awake, thinking of Ruth, of her mother, of the women Graves had murdered, and of the people risking everything to help her. She understood that her survival was not just a victory for herself, but an act of resistance against the system that had tried to erase her humanity.

The journey to the docks was tense, but Brennan and the captain, Samuel Porter, managed to get Dinina aboard and hidden behind crates in the cargo hold. The voyage began smoothly, but on the third day, a violent storm struck. Porter was killed, and Dinina was left without food or water for two days until Michael, a young sailor, found her. Porter had told Michael about her before dying, and Michael, himself the son of an Irish immigrant who knew what it meant to be disposable, took up the responsibility of keeping Dinina alive.

When the ship reached Wilmington, Thomas Garrett was waiting. Dinina was weak, barely able to walk, but Garrett and Michael carried her to a wagon and drove her to a safe house. Garrett promised to guide her north, through Pennsylvania and New York to Canada, using the network of conductors and safe houses that had helped so many before her.

In Rochester, New York, Dinina stayed with Frederick Douglass, who urged her to document her story, to bear witness so that future generations would understand the reality of slavery. “Your survival is an act of resistance,” Douglass told her. “Every day you live free is a defeat for those who profited from your bondage.”

By late January 1850, Dinina reached the Canadian border, eight months pregnant, exhausted but alive. Crossing into Ontario, she collapsed in tears, overwhelmed by the realization that she was finally free. Garrett led her to Dawn, a settlement of formerly enslaved people, where she was welcomed and cared for.

Three weeks later, Dinina gave birth to a son. She named him Jacob, after the man who had saved her life. She worked as a seamstress, helped other fugitives, and wrote her story, determined to honor the sacrifices of those who had risked everything for her freedom.

But Dinina never forgot Ruth. She spent years searching, writing letters to abolitionists, and in 1856, learned that Ruth was alive, working on a farm outside Charleston. With the help of two conductors, Dinina returned to the South, risking everything to rescue her daughter. The reunion was fraught with danger, but they made it back to Canada, where Ruth was finally safe.

The years that followed were not easy. Freedom did not erase trauma, but Dinina built a life defined by choice, raising her children with the understanding that their freedom had been purchased with courage and sacrifice. She continued working with the Underground Railroad, helping others escape, and documenting the stories that needed to be told.

In 1863, Union soldiers discovered the truth about Thornton Graves. In the cellar beneath the tobacco barn, they found the bodies of eight women and their infants—victims of systematic murder enabled by a legal system that treated them as property. The evidence was filed away, forgotten in the chaos of Reconstruction, and Graves escaped justice, dying in Mississippi under an assumed name.

Decades later, in 1931, a graduate student discovered the report in military archives, but was prevented from publishing by threats from the Graves family. She sealed her research, instructing it to be opened fifty years after her death. In 2024, the evidence was donated to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, finally acknowledging the crimes that had been buried for generations.

Dinina lived until 1891, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, continuing to tell her story and insisting that the nation confront its history honestly. In her journal, she wrote, “I was sold for 19 cents because the man who owned me wanted me to understand that I was worthless in his eyes, but I was never worthless. No human being is worthless, no matter what the law says, no matter how they are treated.”

Jacob Brennan survived the war, Sarah and Hannah relocated to Pennsylvania, Elias Cartwright died bankrupt and alone, and the land that had witnessed so much suffering was eventually purchased by a black farming cooperative, who discovered the remains and reburied them with a simple marker: “Victims of slavery died 1843 to 1862. May they rest in peace.”

Dinina’s story is just one among millions. Four million people were enslaved in 1860, their lives recorded only in property ledgers and auction receipts, their humanity deliberately erased. But some stories survive, preserved by those who refused to let the past stay buried. These stories matter—not because their subjects were special, but because they were not. They were ordinary people, enduring extraordinary suffering, resisting in ways large and small, and asserting their humanity against a system designed to deny it.

We tell these stories because truth matters, because remembering is itself an act of resistance, because honoring the courage of those who risked everything demands that we confront the reality of our nation’s history. Dinina was sold for 19 cents, but her survival, her escape, her rescue of Ruth, and her insistence on documenting her story prove that she was invaluable—not as property, but as a human being. Her life had worth that no auction could diminish, no law could erase, and no cruelty could destroy.

And so we remember.