page_title: Jennie Carter
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Jennie Carter / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Fugitive slave 1850
context_page_description: Jennie Carter was an American journalist and essayist who wrote for the California African-American newspaper The Elevator from her home in Nevada County, California during the Reconstruction Era. She used the pen name Anna J. Trask and later Semper Fidelis. Her work covered diverse topics, including slavery, racism, women's suffrage, temperance, politics, and immigration, and was widely circulated in late 19th century black communities throughout the American West and to some extent, nationwide. In the 21st century, with the republication of her essays, her work began to receive wider attention.
context_section_description: Census records differ on whether Carter was born in New York City or New Orleans.  She was born a free person of color either in 1830 or 1831 and is believed to have spent her early life in New Orleans and New York and her young adulthood in Kentucky and Wisconsin.  Her mother died young, and she was raised by her grandmother. In her essays in The Elevator, she describes a middle-class childhood in which she loved to read and was "passionately fond of music", not assuming "a young lady's position in society until I was somewhat prepared by years." In one incident, she tells of hiding away in the attic and playing alone with her dolls at the age of fourteen when a potential suitor came to see her.  Carter had a younger sister, who died  of a spinal disease at ten. Carter later wrote in The Elevator of how bad she had felt because she had hit her sister three weeks before she died,  using the incident to advise her younger readers to refrain from anger.
  "In my childhood an old man told me if I would observe three things I would enjoy good health. I will say they proved useful to me, and may to others who read your paper. First, keep the head cool and calm. Second, keep the feet dry and warm. Third, keep the heart free from anger", she wrote.
  Carter writes  of several incidents in her childhood and young adulthood when she was confronted with the reality of slavery. As a child, she watched while a young friend was taken by slave masters away from his mother.  While Carter was living with her baby near Hazel Green, Wisconsin in 1850, a young woman followed her from a speaking engagement in Missouri to arrive at her home with her own baby, fleeing from slavery.  Carter hid the woman in her cellar, then drove her by buggy to a Quaker "safe house" a few miles away, and the woman was able to escape to freedom.  In another incident, a man who escaped slavery showed up on her doorstep and Carter was able to help raise funds in the local community for  him to continue his journey to freedom.
  Before writing for The Elevator, Carter worked as a teacher and a governess.
caption: Carter helped fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad
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