HER PLACE OF BURIAL.

If the reader will now be kind enough to allow me time to grow bigger,
and afford me an opportunity for my experience to become greater, I will
tell him something, by-and-by, of slave life, as I saw, felt, and heard
it, on Col. Edward Lloyd's plantation, and at the house of old master,
where I had now, despite of myself, most suddenly, but not unexpectedly,
been dropped. Meanwhile, I will redeem my promise to say something more
of my dear mother.

I say nothing of _father_, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never
been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away
with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and
its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements
of the plantation. When they _do_ exist, they are not the outgrowths of
slavery, but are antagonistic to that system. The order of civilization
is reversed here. The name of the child is not expected to be that of
its father, and his condition does not necessarily affect that of the
child. He may be the slave of Mr. Tilgman; and his child, when born, may
be the slave of Mr. Gross. He may be a _freeman;_ and yet his child
may be a _chattel_. He may be white, glorying in the purity of his
Anglo-Saxon{40} blood; and his child may be ranked with the blackest
slaves. Indeed, he _may_ be, and often _is_, master and father to the
same child. He can be father without being a husband, and may sell his
child without incurring reproach, if the child be by a woman in whose
veins courses one thirty-second part of African blood. My father was a
white man, or nearly white. It was sometimes whispered that my master
was my father.

But to return, or rather, to begin. My knowledge of my mother is very
scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing
are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely
proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features,
and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners. There
is in _Prichard's Natural History of Man_, the head of a figure--on page
157--the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I
often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others
experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.

Yet I cannot say that I was very deeply attached to my mother; certainly
not so deeply as I should have been had our relations in childhood been
differen