The good priest in charge of the Mission—Father Gasperin—he seemed to know sunthin’ about her; he had a brother who wuz a priest in South Carolina. He got her employment as a nurse after her health improved a little.
She bought a little cottage and lived greatly respected by all classes, black and white, and nursed ’em both to the best of her abilities—some for nuthin’ and some at about a dollar a day.
But her earnest sympathies, her heart-felt affection wuz with the black race. She worked for their good and advancement in every way with a zeal that looked almost as if she wuz tryin’ to atone for some awful mistake in the past—as if she wuz tryin’ to earn forgiveness for forsakin’ her mother’s race for the white people, who wuz always faithless to her race, only when selfishness guided them—who would take the service of their whole life and strength, as if it belonged to ’em; who would take them up as a plaything to divert an hour’s leisure, and then throw the worthless thing down agin.
Her whole heart wuz bent upon the good of her mother’s people. She worked constantly for their advancement and regeneration. She bore their intolerable burdens for ’em, she agonized under their unexampled wrongs. She exhorted ’em to become Christians, to study, to learn to guide themselves aright; she besought ’em to elevate themselves by all means in their power.
She became a very earnest Christian; she went about doin’ good; she studied her Bible much. The Book that in her bright days of happiness she had slighted became to her now the lamp of her life.
Most of all did this heart-broken soul, who had bid good-bye to all earthly happiness, love the weird prophecies of St. John the Evangelist.
She loved to read of the Belovéd City, and the sights that he saw, to her become realities. She said she saw visions in the night as she looked up from dyin’ faces into the high heavens—she foretold events. Her prophetic sayin’s became almost as inspired revelations to them about her.
She said she heard voices talkin’ to her out of the skies and the darkness, and I don’t know but she did—I don’t feel like disputin’ it either way; besides, I wuzn’t there.
But as I wuz a sayin’, from what I wuz told, the little girl, Genieve, inheritin’ as she did her mother’s imaginative nature and her father’s bright mind and wit, and contemplatin’ her mother’s daily life of duty and self-sacrifice, and bein’ brought up as she wuz under the very eaves of the New Jerusalem her mother wuz always readin’ about, it is no wonder that she grew up like a posy—that while its roots are in the earth its tall flowers open and wave in the air of Eden.
The other world, the land unseen but near, became more of a reality to her than this. “The voices” her mother said she heard was to her real and true as the voice of good Father Gasperin, who preached in the little chapel every month.