ken ill and died. The heartless and
ghastly form of _slavery_ rises between mother and child, even at the
bed of death. The mother, at the verge of the grave, may not gather her
children, to impart to them her holy admonitions, and invoke for them
her dying benediction. The bond-woman lives as a slave, and is left to
die as a beast; often with fewer attentions than are paid to a favorite
horse. Scenes of sacred tenderness, around the death-bed, never
forgotten, and which often arrest the vicious and confirm the virtuous
during life, must be looked for among the free, though they sometimes
occur among the slaves. It has been a life-long, standing grief to me,
that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated
from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The
side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in
life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no
striking words of her's treasured up.

I learned, after my mother's death, that she could read, and that she
was the _only_ one of all the slaves and colored people in Tuckahoe who
enjoyed that advantage. How she acquired this knowledge, I know not, for
Tuckahoe is the last place in the world where she would be apt to find
facilities for learning. I can, therefore, fondly and proudly ascribe
to her an earnest love of knowledge. That a "field hand" should learn
to read, in any slave state, is remarkable; but the achievement of my
mother, considering the place, was very extraordinary; and, in view of
that fact, I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of
letters I possess, and for which I have got--despite of prejudices only
too much credit, _not_ to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the
native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated _mother_--a
woman, who belonged to a race{45 PENALTY FOR HAVING A WHITE FATHER}
whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in
disparagement and contempt.

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 was. 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 odiousness, that,
by the laws of slavery, children,