Great-Grandma Smith

My name is Rosalie Smith and as long as I could remember I was a slave.
My parents were slaves on a little Farm in Louisiana, but my mother died a few days after my birth in the year 1833, because our master didn’t give her any time to recuperate. So my father was responsible for my education. Miss Allistor, the wife of our master, was a teacher and cater for my schooling, which was absolute unusual. Since I was six, I work the day in the crops and in the evening, I learned with Miss Allistor, so a grow up to a smart girl. I was 13 when the old Miss Allistor died, since this day on her sons were in charge of the farm. They were very strict and so we had to work nearly 16 hours a day. One time I was cooking some food and I burnt the chicken soup, the masters started to hit me, until my father interfered. He was always there for me and I cared for him as good as I could, when my father contracted tuberculosis.  In the age of 59, my father was very weak and died.
In 1861 was a war between the north and the south. The north tried to help the slaves to get free, but it wasn’t so easy, because the south was absolutely against this plans. When I was 30 and the war already lasted 2 years, I gor really sick and thought I had to die, but the Allistors didn’t care. Then came the night I will never forget. When I lay in my bed, thinking about what’s after life, Jim, another slave of the Allistors, came into my room and shouted that we were free, finally. I saw a twinkle in his eyes that has been there never before, that was the day I fell in love with him. This relief was my saving, because I could search for a doctor to get medicine. Jim and I moved to Chicago, where we married, because I got pregnant. Although we were free, we have no rights. I swore myself that I would never work on a crop again, but this was a promise I couldn’t keep. Based on the missing rights, we had only the chance to work as  sharecroppers to get by. Due to the schooling of Miss Allistor, I could give my son Abraham some wisdom’s on the way . We had to give half of our harvest to the white landowner Luigi,  so the harvest was barely sufficient to survive on.  We don’t have a lot of money, but we are free and that’s what matters.