Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/118

 *tion of her pupils. In connection with her work, she organised and conducted a Sunday-school. When she joined the Jubilee Singers, in 1872, she was engaged in preparing for the graduating exercises of the normal course.

grandmother, on her mother's side, was a white woman of Scotch-Irish ancestry, who married her own slave. Or rather they lived together in fidelity as man and wife, the statutes of the State forbidding the intermarriage of whites and blacks according to the forms of law. They had a large family of children, who, following by slave law the condition of the mother, were free-born.

Georgia's mother inherited much of the traditional Scotch-Irish capacity and sturdiness of character. Beginning by cutting and making dresses for her dolls, she became, even while a girl, a self-taught but capable seamstress and dressmaker. She grew up without school advantages; but at church one day, the text, which was the first verse of the gospel of St. John, specially attracted her interest, and she committed it to memory. On reaching home she took the Bible and got some one who could read to find this verse for her. Picking out the words one by one, she learned them all by sight. Then she searched the Bible for words like them. Little by little she got the clue to new words. And so, unaided, and unknown to any one else, she learned to read.

Marrying a slave, she was able by her trade as a dressmaker, not only to earn a living for her family