Magee was said to be born in North Carolina in 1841 to two enslaved people named Ephraim and Jeanette, who were held and worked on the J.J. Shanks plantation.
He said that he was purchased at the age of 19, just before the American Civil War, by plantation owner Hugh Magee at a slave market in Enterprise, Mississippi.
[5] On Magee's purported 124th birthday, the citizens of Collins, Mississippi held a party at a country grocery store, complete with a five-layer cake and 124 candles.
[7] Jet wrote that, according to historians, "it would have been impossible for a person who neither reads nor writes to have related the stories of the Civil War in such detail as Magee without having served in the conflict".
Jet quoted a historian who stated that Magee talked with "rare intelligence and seldom rambled" in telling of his participation in the Civil War.
History professor Max Grivno, who has studied Magee's life, characterized the claimed age as "possible ... but extremely unlikely", noting that there was "only one documented case of a person living into their 120s.