Page:The Black woman of the South.djvu/3

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"She was a 'hewer of wood and a drawer of water.' She had to keep her place in the gang from morn till eve, under the burden of a heavy task, or under the stimulus or the fear of a cruel lash. She was a picker of cotton. She labored at the sugar mill and in the tobacco factory. When, through weariness or sickness, she had fallen behind her allotted task, then came, as punishment, the fearful stripes upon her shrinking, lacerated flesh.

"Her home life was of the most degrading nature. She lived in the rudest huts, and partook of the coarsest food, and dressed in the scantiest garb, and slept, in multitudinous cabins, upon the hardest boards!

"There was no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of these things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead, thereof, a gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from, generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling virtue lingered amid the rude cabins, that so much womanly worth and sweetness remained, as slaveholders themselves have borne witness to.

"Freed, legally, she has been; but the act of emancipation had no talismanic influence to reach to and alter and transform her degrading social life. The truth is, 'Emancipation Day' found her a prostrate and degraded being; and, although it has brought numerous advantages to her sons, it has produced but the simplest changes in her social and domestic condition. She is still the crude, rude, ignorant mother. Remote from cities, the dweller still in the old plantation hut, neighboring to the sulky, disaffected master-class, who still think her freedom was a personal robbery of themselves, none of the 'fair humanities' have visited her humble home. The light of knowledge has not fallen upon her eyes. The fine domesticities which give the charm to family life, and which, by the refinement and delicacy of womanhood, preserve the civilization of nations, have not come to her. She has still the rude, coarse labor of men. With her rude husband, she still shares the hard service of a field-hand. Her house, which shelters, perhaps, some six or eight children, embraces but two rooms. Her furniture is of the rudest kind. The clothing of the household is scant and of the coarsest material; has oft-times the garniture of rags, and for herself and offspring is marked, not seldom, by the absenseabsence [sic]