My Bondage and My Freedom
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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summoned away to her account with the impassable gulf of slavery between us during her entire illness. My mother died without leaving me. A single intimation of who? My father Waas. There was a whisper that my master was my father. Yet it was only a whisper and I cannot say that I ever gave it credence. Indeed, I now have reason to think he was not. Nevertheless, the fact remains in all its glaring, odious nous that by the laws of slavery, Children in all cases are reduced to the condition of their mothers. This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends and gives to the pleasure of sin the additional attraction of profit. Ah, whole volume might be written on this single feature of slavery. As I have observed it, one might imagine that the Children of such connections would fare better in the hands of their masters and other slaves. The rule is quite the other way, and a very little reflection will satisfy the reader that such is the case. A man who will enslave his own blood may not be safely relied on for magnanimity men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless they have a mind to repent. And the mulatto child's faces a standing accusation against him. Who? His master and father to the child. What is still worse, Perhaps such a child is a constant offenses to the wife. She hates its very presence. And when a slave holding woman hates, she wants not means to give that hate telling effect. Women, white women. I mean our idols at the South, not wives for the slave women are preferred in many instances. And if these idols but not or lift a finger woes of the poor victim kicks, cuffs and stripes are sure to follow, masters are frequently compelled to sell this class of their slaves out of deference to the feelings of their white wives and shocking and scandalous as it may seem for a man to sell his own blood to the traffickers in human flesh, it is often an active humanity toward the slave child to be thus removed from his merciless tormentors. It is not within the scope of the design of my simple story to comment upon every phase of slavery, not within my experience as a slave, but I may remark that if the lineal descendants of ham are only to be enslaved according to the Scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become a non scriptural institution. For thousands are ushered into the world annually who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers and most frequently to their masters and masters Sons. The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master, the thoughtful know the rest. After what I have now said of the circumstances of my mother and my relations to her, the reader will not be surprised nor be disposed to censure me when I tell. But the simple truth, Viz, that I received the tidings of her death with no strong emotions of sorrow for her and with very little regret for myself. On account of her loss, I had to learn the value of my mother long after her death and by witnessing the devotion of other mothers to their Children. There is not beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection, so destructive a slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me. It converted the mother that bore me into a myth. It shrouded my father in mystery and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world. My mother died when I could not have bean more than eight or nine years old on one of old masters farms in Tuckahoe, in the neighborhood of Hillsborough. Her grave is as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked and without stone or steak.