On April 1, 1862, just before the Battle of Fort Pulaski, fourteen-year-old Susie joined her uncle and his family. King Taylor’s book, A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs published in 1902, she continually circles back to her advantages of having such a grandmother and living in a city. Living in a larger city made this much more possible than had the family lived on one of the large cotton plantations in the South Sea Islands, and in Ms. Susie’s forward-thinking grandmother made sure that her grandchildren got all the education available to them. They entered singly, hoping that the neighbors of her teacher would think they were there to learn trades, which was legal. Little Susie and her peers had to walk about half a mile every day, their books wrapped in paper to keep the police or nosy white people from seeing them. It was illegal for them to be taught to read or write, so any schooling had to be conducted in secrecy. She was literate from a very early age, having been taught to read and write by a free woman of color living in Savannah, but even such a simple thing as attending school was difficult for enslaved people. So begin the memoirs of Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor, a most unusual woman in many ways. “I was born under the slave law in Georgia, in 1848, and was brought up by my grandmother in Savannah.”
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