Page:My bondage and my freedom 1857.djvu/64

 58 LIFE AS A SLAVE.

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 whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt.

Summoned away to her account, with the impassa- ble gulf of slavery between us during her entire illness, my mother died without leaving me a single intima- tion of who my father was. There was a whisper, that my master was my father; yet it was only a whis- per, and I cannot say that I ever gave it credence. Indeed, I now have reason to think he was not; nev- ertheless, the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that, by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers. This ar- rangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, rela- tions and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit. A whole volume might