When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.
For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.
Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.
Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.
The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.
The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.
Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.
But I now entered on my fifteenth year – a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.
The war of my life had begun; and though one of God’s most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.
Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.
When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.
When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.
I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.
DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint’s family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.
There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.