Creative Writing for U.S. History to 1876

Creative Writing for U.S. History to 1876

My dear daughter! This is the story of my life and my survival as an enslaved woman in South Carolina. During that time, women slaves faced unique challenges and hardships in their capacity as mothers. Because masters routinely denied slave women the most basic maternal prerogatives, the opportunity to spend adequate time nurturing their children, or the security of knowing that they would not be forcibly separated from them; slave women experienced motherhood as deeply fraught and painful (Schwartz, 2006). Yet it was through mothering that slave women resisted such degradation and affirmed their own humanity. Throughout slavery, I struggled a lot to preserve my family relations. The threats of maternal separation drove me to extreme measures.

My distressing life journey started when the slave ships holding human chattel traveled across the Atlantic to America; the journey through the Middle Passage carried me together with a number of other men and women saves one as detainees. This was the indication of the hardships that we would follow. Since both male and female slaves were required for physical labor, the female slaves served a further purpose as designated breeders. The children of a slave woman would add to her master's property, and the more children she had, the more money her owner stood to make by selling them. The expectant mothers were denied food and exercise while in their cramped compartments. Some went into labor with great risk to their health as they had no assistance and were exposed to extreme weather conditions; the newborns did not always survive. One incident involved an infant being flogged for refusing its feed, then dipped into boiling water, and finally, dropped to its death. The mother was ordered to throw the body overboard and her refusal resulted in beatings until she succumbed. Incidents like this informed me that I would now be under the harshest physical and mental conditions.

I belonged to the community of enslaved women living in South Carolina. I and many other slave women used to work the same as much as the slave men of that time that is cutting trees, clearing land, digging ditches, and harvesting and planting crops. In addition, we were encouraged or coerced to have many children in order to increase the slave labor population. Some slave owners allowed families to remain together if many children were produced. Thus, we wanted to keep our family united and remain rooted to a particular plantation with friends and family and for this reason motherhood became the primary method for our survival and well-being.

When I gave birth to your elder sister, I had to immediately return to work in the field, since from the outset, white settlers viewed slave women and their reproductive capacities in racialized terms. They used to believe that slave women as giving birth without suffering and nursing babies even as they performed heavy agricultural labor. These cultural assumptions regarding our physical capacities proved fateful in ...