Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass

 “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant–before I knew her as my mother.  It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.

I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.  She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home.  She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to the contrary — a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master.  I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day.  She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us.  Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master’s farms, near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger”

This passage was the one that spoke the strongest to me, because I can only imagine the negative impacts of this separation on the mental health of these slave kids and their parents. This passage helps our understanding of slavery in America, as we see that slavery was not only physical brutality but also mental. These slave owners started by destroying the mental health of their slaves from a very young age, and this is one of the reasons why descendants of slavery still suffer mentally from it. We all understand the importance of the bond between a mother and her child especially at a young age. These slave owners did everything in their power to make sure that there was no form of unity between slaves, perhaps due to the fear they had that these slaves could retaliate if they formed any sort of bond. Throughout this narrative, Frederick Douglass uses very simple and understandable language to explain slavery and how unnecessarily evil it was. He does not use any fancy language because he wants us to really understand what he is trying to tell us.

This passage also reveals the strength and determination of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass rarely had the love and affection of his mother, but he later became one of the most outspoken advocates of abolition and women’s rights in the 19^th century. He believed that “Right is of no sex, truth is of no color,” He advocated an immediate end to slavery, and helped Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other women rights leaders in their women’s suffrage movement. He made sure that women also got the rights they deserved. Reading this passage, a lot of questions were raised, I began to imagine what was going on in the minds of these slave owners. Were they really human? Or if they were human, did they think their slaves were not human? As if it was not okay that these people were taken away from their homes countries, the small family they were able to create was also taken away from them.