Michelle Obama Read Online Free Page A

century, the house had another distinctive decoration for which it's still known today: hand-painted scenic wallpaper from France. All the house's owners were proud of it. Created by a prestigious firm, the wallpaper showed the important monuments of Paris, such as Notre Dame Cathedral and the Luxembourg Palace. (The Eiffel Tower was a few decades in the future.) The paper was eight-and-a-half feet tall and forty-eight feet from end to end. Two hundred and fifty artists worked on it. From a modern perspective, it may seem like an unusual way to display wealth and good taste, but it was the height of style when Friendfield was built. Some of the most notable houses of that period were decorated with similar designs. A set of the same scene from another home of Friendfield's era is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The best examples are found in another famous home from that period, also built by slaves: the White House.
    One more detail about Friendfield is worth mentioning. The slaves who dug canals in the rice fields then did the same near the big house. In the late 1700s or early 1800s the plantation owners decided they wanted a large water garden, with canals that snaked around small islands planted with flowers and exotic trees. The slaves made it large enough, and dug the canals deep enough, so that a flat-bottomed boat could be paddled around the islands.
MEET THE ROBINSONS
    It's not known how Michelle's great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson came to Friendfield. He might have been born there, or he might have come as a child. But he did live at Friendfield as a slave, and, after the Civil War, as a free man.
    His last name, which he eventually passed on to Michelle, isn't much help. It's difficult to trace because "Robinson" was the name of several slave owners. There's a slave cemetery at Friendfield, but the few markers show only the slaves' first names. (Two more unmarked slave cemeteries are up the coast in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the family cemetery of Fairfield's original owners is located.) Also, some government records spell his name differently.
    In 1860, just before the Civil War began, there were 273 slaves at Friendfield. Many stayed in the area after the Union's victory freed them. Some continued to work on the plantation. The family history passed down through the years isn't certain, but it seems that Jim Robinson was one of those workers. In government records from 1880, he's listed as a farmer. He might have been hired help, or he might have farmed a section of the plantation and paid for the land by giving the owner a share of the crop.
    Michelle is descended from Jim Robinson's third son. Like her own father, he was named Fraser. He was born in 1884, almost twenty years after freedom came to the slaves of South Carolina.
    In common with most children of the time, Fraser was illiterate. South Carolina no longer had laws that prevented slaves from learning to read or write, but the state's African American children were still expected to work rather than go to school. There were exceptions, of course: Claflin University, Benedict College, and Allen University had already been founded. Historian Charles Joyner quotes a former slave, Ben Horry, who understood the power of early literacy for each new generation of African Americans: "You had the learning in your head. Give me that pencil to catch up!" However, for a child like Fraser, education wasn't assumed. Then when he was ten years old something happened to change his life.
    He was in the brush near his home, collecting firewood, when a tree fell the wrong way and broke his arm. According to family history, his stepmother didn't think the wound was serious, and didn't treat it properly. The wound then became badly infected. (This version may have been influenced by ten-year-old Fraser's feelings about his stepmother. They didn't get along. Maybe the wound became infected simply because Fraser was a