The following is taken from Taylor’s memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers, which was written in 1902 and can be found here.
Born August 6, 1848, to Raymond and Hagar Baker at the Grest Farm in Liberty County, Georgia, 35 miles south of Savannah. “I was born under the slave law of Georgia.” Her mother was a domestic servant for the Grest Family. About 1854 Susie and her brother were permitted by Mr. Grest, their “owner” to come to Savannah to live with her grandmother Dolly Reed, who appears to have been freed by Mr. Grest, who became her guardian. The Grests appear to have virtually freed Susie and her brother without going through the complexities of Georgia law.
She and her brother “were sent to a friend of my grandmother, Mrs. Woodhouse, a widow to learn to read and write. She was a free woman and lived on Bay Lane, between Habersham and Price Streets, about half a mile from my house. “We went every day about9 o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them. We went in, one at a time, through the gate, into the yard to the L Kitchen, which was the schoolroom. She had 25 to30 children whom she taught, assisted by her daughter, Mary Jane.
“The neighbors would seeus going in sometimes, but they supposed we were learning trades, as it was the custom to give children a trade of some kind.” Susie and her brother remained with Mrs. Woodhouse’s school for two years. Then, Susie was sent to “a Mrs. Mary Beasley until May 1860, when she told my grandmother she had taught me all she knew, and grandmother had better get someone else who could teach me more, so I stopped my studies for awhile.”
“I had a white playmate…named Katie O’Connor, who live on the next corner of the street from my house, and who attended a convent. One day she told me if I would promise not to tell her father, she would give me some lessons. On my promise not to do so, and getting her mother’s consent, she me lessons about four months, every evening. At the end of this period she was put into the convent permanently, and I have never seen her since.”
“A month after this, James Blouis, our landlord’s [white] son, was attending the High School, and was very fond of grandmother, so she asked him to give me a few lessons,which he did until the middle of 1861, when the Savannah Volunteer Guards, to which he and his brother belonged, were ordered to the front under General Barton. In the first battle of Manassas, his brother Eugene was killed, and James deserted over to the Union side, and at the close of the war went to Washington, D.C. where he has since resided.”
“On April 1, 1862, about the time the Union soldiers were firing on Fort Pulaski, I was sent out into the country to my mother. I remember what a roar the guns made. They jarred the earth for miles. The fort was at last taken by them. Two days after the taking of Fort Pulaski, my uncle took his family of seven and myself to St. Catherine Island. We landed under the protection of the Union fleet, and remained there two weeks, when about thirty of us were taken aboard the gunboat P_______, to be transferred to St. Simon’s Island, and at last, to my unbounded joy, I saw the ‘Yankee.’”
“After we were all settled aboard and I started on our journey, Capt. Whitmore, commanding the boat,asked me where I was from. I told him Savannah, Georgia. He asked if I could read: I said, “Yes.” Can you write? he next asked. “Yes, I can do that also,” I replied, and as if he had some doubts of my answers he handed me a book and a pencil and told me to write my name and where I was from. I did this; when he wanted to know if I could sew. On hearing I could, he asked me to hem some napkins for him. He was surprised at my accomplishments (for they were such in those days), for he said he did not know there were any Negroes in the South able to read or write. He said, “You seem to be so different from the other colored people who come from the same place you did .” “No,” I replied, “the only difference is, they were reared in the country and I in the city, as was a man from Darien, Georgia named Edward King.” That seemed to satisfy him, and we had no further conversation that day on the subject.”
On April 5, 1862, Commodore Goldsborough asks Susie to take charge of a school for children on St. Simon’s Island. She agrees to do so and requests books and testaments (Bibles). In a week or two she receives two large boxes of books and testaments from the North.
In her little school at Gaston Bluff, Susie has about 40 children to teach, besides a number of adults whom she taught at nights “all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else. Chaplain French, of Boston, would come to the school sometimes, and lecture to the schools, sometimes, and lecture to the pupils on Boston and the North.”
Black Women have a rich history of military service. For more information, read: Brief History of Black Women in the Military.
