The Slave Father and A Mother's Anguish

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The Slave Father and A Mother’s Anguish

In last week’s post, I shared a story and a poem from the abolitionist newspapers I discovered while doing research for my book. When I began writing, I knew I wanted to explore the connection between the family separations done today by the family policing system and those that occurred during the era of chattel slavery. But I didn’t realize how deep this connection was and how prominently it would feature in the book until I came across many of these early writings.

In this week’s post, I’d like to share two additional pieces of writing from those papers that I didn’t include in my book, not because they aren’t powerful but because I had already included many others. These pieces are difficult to read because of the trauma depicted in them. Today, they require a trigger warning, whereas, in the days of slavery, it was a trigger that was hoped for. The role of pain and trauma depicted in these stories was to move an apathetic white public to act, to move them to understand the horrors of family separation and somehow connect to this pain as a mother or father in ways that other horrors of slavery were not connecting.

The first is a poem written from a father’s perspective. It is the only story or poem I found in these papers told from a father’s perspective. It is simply titled “The Slave Father.”

In many ways, it is understandable why most of the stories of family separations are told from the mother’s point of view. But this depiction of a father’s grief after learning his son had been sold away from him is deeply moving, particularly near the end of the poem where you read this father experienced this pain five more times. Although he is now free, he has no hope he will ever see any of his children again.

Many accounts have been written of the efforts parents and children made to find their separated family members after abolition. I highly recommend reading these moving accounts, particularly Help Me to Find My People by Heather Andrea Williams. Additionally, the website Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery is a collection of ads placed by separated family members after emancipation in hopes of locating lost families.

This next piece tells a different tale about family separation that is even more difficult to read. I didn’t include this in my book because I thought it would be too triggering. But I wanted to share it here with enough warning. It tells a story similar to what was depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

As I was writing this week's post, I thought a lot about trigger warnings and why we use them today to prevent people from experiencing unwanted trauma by reading something or watching something on the news. These warnings are necessary because of the racial trauma so many people are exposed to every day.

However, these abolitionist papers were written for a very specific purpose and audience. These stories were written, and these papers were disseminated with the precise goal of sparking an emotional trigger among a population of white northerners who needed to join the abolition movement if it were to have any hope of success. Depicting the pain and trauma of slavery, and particularly the pain and trauma of family separations, was the main tool abolitionists used during this time to try to reach this audience - to hope that some understanding would be reached that slavery was not only a horrific, violent institution but also fundamentally immoral and inhuman. These depictions of the pain of having a child separated from their parent ultimately led to this understanding and fueled the abolition movement. These writings, and in particular Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, were so powerful they ultimately led to a civil war. There is tremendous power in the written word, which we continue to use today to influence others to join the cause of abolition.

When I began my abolitionist journey, Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? fundamentally changed the way I thought about not only prisons but also society itself. I'm sure many of you were profoundly changed by this work, and others as the list of essential abolitionist writings only continues to grow. And I am incredibly proud to have one small entry into this body of work. 

I'm excited to continue to share my book with you! I hope you'll join us this week on Zoom. Join usThursday, September 28, at 6:00 PM Eastern and bring your questions!

Register here: