Women - Middle Passage con't

Theorizing the African Mother's Relationship
with her American-born Progeny

As the dehumanizing experiences of bondage persisted, Africans who had acclimated to plantation life in the South exhibited a keen resentment of their removal from their native land. This displacement created for the African parent a tenuous position with the offspring born on American soil, which they believed could never replace Africa, even as they faced the reality of never returning. One might argue that this sense of rootlessness was reinforced by the legacy of slavery, which, by regarding women as the means of the production of slave labor, denied black female forebears the respectable status of motherhood and by corollary, any intimate connection to the land upon which their progeny were born.

The following account, taken from interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration, illuminates the relationship between an African mother's insensitivity and the atrocity of slavery. In one such interview, Susan Snow, a former slave born in Alabama in 1850, remembered that her "ma was a black African, an' she show was wild an' mean. She was so mean to me, I couldn't believe she was my mammy." But Snow was not only person who respected and feared this woman; apparently, the larger slave community expressed similar sentiments, for "dey used to say my ma was a cunjer an' dey was all scared of 'er. But my ma was scared o' cunjers, too!" (Gomez 198).

Snow goes on to observe her mother's disdain for the Western life-style: "Every nigger had a house of his own, but my ma never would have a board floor. Only a dirt, cause she was an African." Most significantly, despite Snow's mother fierce independence, she remained plagued by a need for migration, such that she "was de first to leave de plantation after de surrender. All de other niggers had a contrack to stay, but she didn't, an' she went to Newton County and hired out. She never wanted to stay in one place, nohow" (Gomez 198).

One can only speculate upon the nature of Snow's relationship with her African mother as a reflection, at least in part, of the institution's disregard for her humanity and her intimate connection with her progeny. Nonetheless, it raises a crucial issue about the implications of the female slave as the means of increasing the slave labor during the early years of American slavery. That is to say, slaveowners grew to investigated black women on the basis of their fertility, or lack thereof, thereby serving as a means to people the domestic slave population. Davis makes an apt analogy, by comparing them to "'breeders' - animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers." In some cases, in fact, female slaves had no legal claims whatever on their children.

According to this ruling, children could thereby be sold away from their mothers at any age because "the young of slaves…stand on the same footing as other animals" (Wertheimer 109). Developments in the institution of slavery, as well as an increasing African-born constituent, would of course influence the dynamics of kinship relationships and especially that between mother and child.


Theorizing the African Mother's Relationship with her American-born Progeny As the dehumanizing experiences of bondage persisted, Africans who had acclimated to plantation life in the South exhibited a keen resentment of their removal from their native land. This displacement created for the African parent a tenuous position with the offspring born on American soil, which they believed could never replace Africa, even as they faced the reality of never returning. One might argue that this sense of rootlessness was reinforced by the legacy of slavery, which, by regarding women as the means of the production of slave labor, denied black female forebears the respectable status of motherhood and by corollary, any intimate connection to the land upon which their progeny were born. The following account, taken from interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration, illuminates the relationship between an African mother's insensitivity and the atrocity of slavery. In one such interview, Susan Snow, a former slave born in Alabama in 1850, remembered that her "ma was a black African, an' she show was wild an' mean. She was so mean to me, I couldn't believe she was my mammy." But Snow was not only person who respected and feared this woman; apparently, the larger slave community expressed similar sentiments, for "dey used to say my ma was a cunjer an' dey was all scared of 'er. But my ma was scared o' cunjers, too!" (Gomez 198).
Snow goes on to observe her mother's disdain for the Western life-style: "Every nigger had a house of his own, but my ma never would have a board floor. Only a dirt, cause she was an African." Most significantly, despite Snow's mother fierce independence, she remained plagued by a need for migration, such that she "was de first to leave de plantation after de surrender. All de other niggers had a contrack to stay, but she didn't, an' she went to Newton County and hired out. She never wanted to stay in one place, nohow" (Gomez 198). One can only speculate upon the nature of Snow's relationship with her African mother as a reflection, at least in part, of the institution's disregard for her humanity and her intimate connection with her progeny. Nonetheless, it raises a crucial issue about the implications of the female slave as the means of increasing the slave labor during the early years of American slavery. That is to say, slaveowners grew to investigated black women on the basis of their fertility, or lack thereof, thereby serving as a means to people the domestic slave population. Davis makes an apt analogy, by comparing them to "'breeders' - animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers." In some cases, in fact, female slaves had no legal claims whatever on their children.
According to this ruling, children could thereby be sold away from their mothers at any age because "the young of slaves…stand on the same footing as other animals" (Wertheimer 109). Developments in the institution of slavery, as well as an increasing African-born constituent, would of course influence the dynamics of kinship relationships and especially that between mother and child.