On his 124th birthday, the residents of his small town in Covington County, Mississippi, gathered to celebrate the milestone and the governor of the state named the day in honor of him. The President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, even sent him a birthday card. He garnered so much press that he even appeared on The Mike Douglas Show and articles written about him appeared in Jet and Time magazine, among other publications.

In the last few years of his life, Sylvester Magee became a minor celebrity. Yet, there has never been a book written about him or a major motion picture devoted to his life. With a stock of white hair and goatee, and a wad of chewing tobacco planted firmly in his cheek, it would be easy to imagine a frail Morgan Freeman playing him in a movie. At a minimum, one would think his picture might appear in a history book or two, or that his name might receive more than a blank stare from 99.999 percent of the population. It might be that his life seemed so farfetched that it is hard to believe.

Sylvester Magee claimed he was 130 years old when he died. Yes, you read that right. He claimed to have made 130 trips around the sun. To put this in perspective, the oldest living documented person, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to be 122.5. If everything Sylvester Magee claimed is to be believed, he lived eleven more years than fellow American Sarah Knauss. He outlived cigar-smoking milkman Christian Mortensen and postman Jiroemon Kimura, who retired at 65 and out of boredom took up farming until the age of 90, by a little over fourteen years. In other words, Sylvester Magee might have been the oldest human being to have ever graced this planet.

While it is impossible to verify Sylvester’s exact age, as no certificate of his birth for him can be found, court records in Covington County, Mississippi listed him, along with his father, on a bill of sale in 1859. He died in 1971.

So, even if he was off by two or three or even a decade, he was extremely old when a stroke finally took him in a Columbia, Mississippi hospital. It is clear that health and longevity ran in his family. He had several family members who also lived well past the century mark. When asked about his longevity, he would simply say, “It’s the good Lord above… he’s smiling down on me.”

Even into the last few years of his life, he could be found along the banks of nearby rivers and streams enjoying his favorite pastime, trout fishing. He made national news, five years before his death, when he filed to divorce his 55-year-old wife, Marie, who had been living in Poughkeepsie, New York with one of her sons from a previous marriage since 1953. The former sawmill operator was a 70-year-old when his last wife was born. She would have been almost 40 when they got married in 1949. Maybe most shockingly, he fathered a girl, also named Marie, with her when he was 109. Yes, again, you read that right, 109. Fourteen of her half-siblings, Sylvester’s children from a previous marriage, were already dead of extreme old age when she came into the world.

Sylvester claimed that he still loved his spouse and needed her to care of him, but knew she was never going to come back. Hence, why he felt the need to file for a divorce.

He had been extremely ill when he met the widow and mother of then twelve children in Liberty, Mississippi. She cooked for and took care of him during that time, and finally agreed to marry him when he bounced back to health. She knew he was old, but had no clue he was well past the century mark. He was still gardening and doing odd jobs for neighbors around town to provide the money for what little he needed. She was amazed about how active he was and met three of his much younger siblings, who had since passed. When asked why she left him, his wife firmly stated, “When folks get old, sometimes they get too crabby. They get too hard to please. So I left him.” She saw no reason for a divorce as neither of them were ever going to get married again, even though there was no way she was going to return to his bed and board. Sylvester might have had other ideas.

What made Sylvester Magee important is that he was probably the last living former American slave. He did not have a birth certificate because when he was born he was considered property, not a full human being. He spent the first nineteen years of his life on the J.J. Shanks plantation in North Carolina. A century later, even as the white southern historians interviewing him often tried to change the subject, he dwelled on the brutality and beatings he endured. His gentle, almost whisper of a voice rose in anger and humiliation as he remembered the violence done to him that stayed with him all those years later. He never learned to read or write, and related that, “[A]ll I had ever known was plowing, scraping and picking cotton, sawing logs and doing other things on a farm.”

A year before he was twenty, he was sold at a slave market in Enterprise, Mississippi, just prior to the Civil War, to the Lone Star Plantation owned by Hugh Magee. With the outbreak of hostilities, his new owner, who was made an officer in the Confederate Army, took Sylvester with him into combat as his personal arms-bearer, which made the slave a de facto Confederate soldier. Ironically, this involuntary servitude forced the Mississippi Veterans Hospital to accept him as a patient when he came down with pneumonia five years prior to his death.

There is video of white southerners, who are clearly using him to make money, giving an extremely old Sylvester an ill-fitting hat with the stars and bars on it and a Confederate flag to wave as he sits under a tree in a wheelchair. They clearly want him to be as proud of his service in the southern cause as they are. He gently plays to them, doffing the hat and waving the flag, and then in an act of resistance that he had probably learned over a lifetime of humiliation, when he believed they were no longer paying attention, he lets the flag dangle onto the dirt. Getting up, he kindly asks for assistance. As they help him across the yard, back to the building, he uses the stick the Confederate colors had been placed on as a cane, dragging the Southern standard across the yard next to him. The entire time the whites around him are oblivious to what he is doing and communicating.

Sylvester’s tenure in the Southern army did not last long. At some point, during the next year, he was sold again to Victory Steen in nearby Florence, Mississippi. From there he made his escape to the north and enlisted in the Union Army. He was part of the assault on Vicksburg. He recalled, “But 382 blacks and 500 whites were given long-barrel rifles, many of them in the same boat as me. One poor white boy cried most of the time. I tried to comfort him, telling him he hadn’t done anything to anybody and the good Lord just wouldn’t let nothing happen to him. But he cried right on.”

Before the war ended, he would be wounded at both Vicksburg and Champion Hill. He recalled with pride how President Abraham Lincoln ordered him released from the Northern army and made him a free man. After that, he drifted to Chicago for a few years, before returning to his family in Mississippi, where he worked at a sawmill in Columbia for $10 a week.

February is black history month. Sometimes history seems as dry as dust. Sylvester Magee died in 1971. It was the year that the American people turned their backs on Vietnam. Richard Nixon was the President of the United States. Patton won the Oscar for Best Picture. All In The Family dominated the television airwaves. Disney World opened. Americans turned on their radios to hear National Public Radio for the first time. Tupac was born. Jim Morrison died. Charlie Manson received the death penalty. The Pentagon Papers were released. It is not that long ago.

Slavery and racism are our nation’s original sins. There is a reason we are the only industrialized nation that took up arms to rid ourselves of that “peculiar institution.” A person cannot understand our current politics without factoring in racism and its legacy.

There are times when one looks at the news that it can be so depressing. We are still grappling with what giving someone else his or her full humanity means. Baby steps are so hard when there is so much injustice around. We seemingly take two steps forward and one step back. Still, I know one thing. Hope is tenacious, almost as tenacious as the life of Sylvester Magee.

Trevor Soderstrum is a Story City native who has been writing columns for about 10 years or so. He’s been all over the world, and attended the summer session of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He loves to share his stories.