[2] In 1784, the town allowed for healthy Black men and women between the ages of 25 and 45 to be released from bondage, at their owner's discretion.
[1] The three — Titus and his sisters Dinah, and Genny — were freed by members of the Gay family, thus ending slavery in Suffield.
[1] His parents were born in Africa, forcefully taken aboard a Dutch ship, and taken to the American colonies, eventually arriving in Suffield, Connecticut.
[2] After Titus was manumitted in 1812 by the heirs of Reverend Ebenezer Gay Jr., the town minister, he lived in Suffield as a free man.
[3] According to Judge Smith's "Old Slave Days in Connecticut", Titus loved an enslaved woman, Phillis (Phill) Hanchett, and they intended to marry.
[5][6] Titus intercepted a plot to kidnap enslaved people, owned by the recently deceased Major John Hanchett (also Hanchet), who did not have much more time before they would be set free by the Gradual Emancipation Act.
[3][6] Preserved Hanchett, the married son of John who had settled in Maryland, thought it wasteful to let the slaves be freed in a couple of years.
[6] According to Smith, Phill died while fleeing enslavement, a victim of a brutally cold Connecticut winter.
After his friend's death, he dug his grave and the legend is that he was stuck in it overnight after climbing in to measure that it was big enough.
For 40 years, he worked as a sexton, gravedigger, the town's only bell ringer, and janitor[1][4][5] at the second meetinghouse of the First Congregational Church.
[8] The townspeople could tell by his pattern of ringing the bell whether there was a wedding, church service, town meeting, fire, or other event.
[4] Involved in the community, he was described as "lordly and dignified fond of exercising authority black as coal and when young was called good looking".