His mother had given him her own precious hymnal, filled with beautiful and inspiring songs. Late at night, during the few hours allowed to him for sleeping, he would stay up late, his eyes burned by the smoke from the firelight, and teach himself to read. After he had learned the alphabet only by listening to the other children, he found a worn-out old spelling book. George took every opportunity he got to study by himself.

George’s mother would have loved to have taught her son to read, but she herself had never been allowed to learn. When he was only seven or eight years old and already carrying heavy loads on his master’s property, he would try to stop and listen whenever he heard the white children learning their ABC’s. They certainly did not believe that a young African American slave could become a poet who wrote beautiful lines that moved people’s hearts.īut that is exactly what George Moses Horton did. Slaves could be sold or traded away, like we today would sell or trade a car or a toy or a computer game.įew white people in those days believed that an African American slave was capable of learning to read and write well. In those days, slaves were considered the property of whomever owned them. But because he was a slave in North Carolina in the early 1800s, no one cared if he learned to read or write. George Moses Horton loved words, ever since he was a little boy.

When i grow up song warehouse 13