I love memoirs of intrepid women crossing boundaries and borders. Englishwoman Amelia Edwards on the Nile in the mid-1870s. Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet in 1923. Australian Winifred Stegar in Mecca in 1927. Briton Freya Stark in what is now Yemen in 1934. Jamaican Mary Seacole in Crimea in the 1850s.
And Susie King Taylor, who journeyed from slavery to freedom, from three-fifths of a population statistic to U.S. citizen.
In Reminiscences of My Life, Taylor, who was born in the United States in 1848, writes of her childhood before the Civil War. As a girl in coastal Savannah, Georgia she wrapped books in paper to hide them from policemen and other white people and she tried not to be noticed as she slipped into the home of a free Black woman for lessons. Slaves caught daring to aspire to literacy could be whipped. It was despite, not because of slavery, that Taylor developed a valuable skill that she would later apply for the benefit of her community.
During the war, Taylor fled with her family to territory near Savannah held by federal forces. There, she taught Black Union soldiers and other former slaves, “all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.”
Later she celebrated the achievements of war veterans who had been her students.
"I have received letters from some of the comrades since we parted in 1866 with expressions of gratitude and thanks to me for teaching them their first letters. One of them, Peter Waggall, is a minister in Jacksonville, Florida. Another is in the government service at Washington, DC. Others are in Darien and Savannah, Ga., and all are doing well."
Taylor married a Black soldier and spent the war on or near military camps teaching, nursing the wounded and cooking and cleaning for Black and white troops. She met Clara Barton -- an encounter that seems to have gone better than Seacole's with Florence Nightingale.
"I know what they went through, especially those Black men, for the Confederates had no mercy on them; neither did they show any toward the white Union soldiers," Taylor wrote. "I have seen the terrors of that war. I was the wife of one of those men who did not get a penny for eighteen months for their services, only their rations and their clothing."
After the war Taylor ran her own schools in Savannah and in rural Georgia before eventually settling in Boston.
The post-war sections of Taylor's book include her description of a country that had abolished slavery, but not its legacy of violence and racism. In one passage, she traveled to Louisiana after learning that her son, an actor, had fallen gravely ill while performing there. She wanted to bring him back to Boston, but could not get places in a sleeper car for a Black family. Her son was too ill to sit for the journey.
"It seemed very hard, when his father fought to protect the Union and our flag, and yet this boy was denied, under this same flag, a berth to carry him home to die, because he was a Negro," she wrote.
Taylor also wrote of the United Daughters of the Confederacy lobbying against performances of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" because they feared its depictions of slavery "would have a very bad effect on the children who might see the drama."
In her book first published in 1902, Taylor posed a rhetorical question that resonates in our century: "Do these Confederate Daughters ever send petitions to prohibit the atrocious lynchings and wholesale murdering and torturing of the Negro? Do you ever hear of them fearing this would have a bad effect on the children?"
The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected statues to rebel generals, developed and distributed lesson plans and placed books in schools and libraries across the South that glorified the Confederacy and played down the horrors of slavery. That helped cement lies that to this day confound race relations in America.
The journey from myth to truth is one our country still needs to make.