Michelle Obama Read Online Free Page B

young boy living in a swampy, rural area, and he didn't keep his arm clean.) The infection threatened to spread, which could have killed Fraser. A decision was made. His left arm was amputated.
    Despite the tragedy, Fraser's spirits bounced back. His attitude would have been familiar to Michelle: It was the same attitude Fraser's grandson, her father, had about multiple sclerosis. Never complain about it. Never give in to it. Another family legacy.
    A neighbor, Frank Nesmith, took notice of the young man. Fraser made himself Nesmith's sidekick.
In time, Nesmith asked Fraser's father, Jim, if Fraser could move in with the Nesmith family. It would give everyone a break from the conflicts between Fraser and his stepmother. Nesmith promised to take care of Fraser. Jim Robinson agreed.
    Nesmith, about thirty years old, was married and had a young daughter. Government records from just a few years later, 1900, show the family living in downtown Georgetown. There were two Nesmith girls then, ages seven and one. Nesmith's occupation was listed as train conductor. Fraser, age sixteen, was listed as "house boy." (His last name was listed as "Roberson," as it would be in some government records for the next thirty years.) He still had not learned to read and write, but that would soon change.
    Over the next decade, three more Nesmith girls would arrive, and all of them would attend school. Fraser noticed that Frank and his wife took school seriously. "They pushed their kids hard into education," Fraser's niece Carrie Nelson told
Washington Post
reporter Shailagh Murray. "One day Uncle Fraser would, too, because that's what he learned from them." Just as important: He taught himself to read and write. Mrs. Nesmith, probably helped him, but according to family history he mostly learned on his own. That's not easy to do, as four-year-old Michelle would discover many years later.
    Fraser also took on new work—a lot of it. He had three jobs. One was at a lumber mill where Frank Nesmith had gone to work after leaving the railroad. The fast-growing Atlantic Coast Lumber Company had become the town's biggest employer, because few people were willing to work in the rice fields anymore. Fraser worked with the mill's kiln, the large oven where freshly cut boards were dried. He was also a shoemaker, and he sold newspapers on a street corner in Georgetown. One longtime resident of the city, Dorothy Taylor, told the
Washington Post
she remembered seeing him there when she was a student. For some reason, she knew that he always took his spare copies home and made sure his children read them—just like Michelle's mother brought home extra workbooks to keep Michelle and Craig ahead of their classes fifty years later.
    Fraser's children included a son named Fraser Jr. This is Michelle's grandfather—the one she has come to South Carolina to visit. Fraser Jr. was the oldest of nine children. Government records from 1930 show that the five oldest, ranging from seventeen-year-old Fraser to a seven-year-old brother, had all absorbed Fraser Sr.'s lessons about education and could read and write. Only the infants in the family couldn't.
    By the time Fraser Jr. was in his teens, his father had created a comfortable life for the large family. Fraser Jr. had done his part by excelling in school. He didn't go to college, however. By 1930, when he was eighteen, he was working in the lumber yard. The company now claimed to be the largest of its kind in the world, and it might have been. Its enormous factory produced hundreds of thousands of feet of boards a day, and its warehouse held millions of feet of lumber ready for shipment from the huge docks the company had built at Georgetown's port. It was one reason Fraser Sr. had been able to build a large home. Other family members, like Fraser Sr.'s brother, Gabriel, had also become comfortable thanks to work related to the lumber yard. Gabriel had bought a farm with his earnings. Fraser Jr. imagined the