REMINISCENCES OF MY LIFE IN CAMP...EXCERPT

REMINISCENCES OF MY LIFE IN CAMP: AN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN'S CIVIL WAR MEMOIR, by Susie King Taylor, introduction by Catherine Clinton (U. of Georgia Press, Athens: 1902, 2006), PP. 2-3 “My grandmother went every three months to see my mother. She would hire a wagon to carry bacon, tobacco, flour, molasses, and sugar. These she would trade with people in neighboring places, for eggs, chickens, or cash, if they had it. These, in turn, she carried back to the city market, where she had a customer who sold them for her. “The hardest blow to her was the failure of the Freedmen's Saving Bank in Savannah, for in that bank she had placed her savings, about three thousand dollars, the result of her hard labor and self-denial before the war, and which by dint of shrewdness and care, she kept together all through the war. She felt it more keenly, coming as it did in her old age, when her life was too far spent to begin anew; but she took a practical view of the matter, for she said, 'I will leave it all in God's hand. If the Yankees did take all our money, they freed my race; God will take care of us.'”