Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/114

 little favour by the slave-holders, and had few friends. Free coloured people were forbidden by law to associate with slaves, and white people would not keep their company. There were always those who were ready to wrong them; there were rarely any to take their part. So when the trustee in whose hands Mrs. Jackson placed the property that fell to Jennie's mother appropriated it to his own use, she found no redress. He even attempted to get possession of her "free papers," that he might destroy them and re-enslave her and her family. But she buried them secretly in her garden, and no promises, nor coaxings, nor threats could bring them from their hiding-place, so long as there was danger that harm might come to them.

With so little in the old home to make it seem like home to them, when Jennie was three years old, her mother removed with her four young children from Kingston, Tennessee, to Nashville. In their poverty and friendlessness, it was necessary for the children to help in earning their own living whenever work could be found for them. While but a child herself, Jennie went out to service as a nurse girl. When fourteen or fifteen she came home to help her mother, who was working as a laundress.

As yet she had never had a chance to go to school at all. It was while spending the forenoons over the wash-tub, and her afternoons in a freedmen's school, that she learned her letters. By and by she entered the Fisk school. But her mother's health gave way, and the family earnings were not large enough to allow her to study at all steadily. When