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CHAPTER III _Parentage_, page 34 / 347 MY FATHER SHROUDED IN MYSTERY--MY MOTHER--HER PERSONAL APPEARANCE--INTERFERENCE OF SLAVERY WITH THE NATURAL AFFECTIONS OF MOTHER AND CHILDREN--SITUATION OF MY MOTHER--HER NIGHTLY VISITS TO HER BOY--STRIKING INCIDENT--HER DEATH--HER PLACE OF BURIAL. If the reader will now be kind enough to allow me time to grow bigger, and afford me an opportunity for my experience to become greater, I will tell him something, by-and-by, of slave life, as I saw, felt, and heard it, on Col. Edward Lloyd's plantation, and at the house of old master, where I had now, despite of myself, most suddenly, but not unexpectedly, been dropped. Meanwhile, I will redeem my promise to say something more of my dear mother. I say nothing of _father_, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation. When they _do_ exist, they are not the outgrowths of slavery, but are antagonistic to that system. The order of civilization is reversed here. The name of the child is not expected to be that of its father, and his condition does not necessarily affect that of the child. He may be the slave of Mr. Tilgman; and his child, when born, may be the slave of Mr. Gross. He may be a _freeman;_ and yet his child may be a _chattel_. He may be white, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-[40]Saxon blood; and his child may be ranked with the blackest slaves. Indeed, he _may_ be, and often _is_, master and father to the same child. He can be father without being a husband, and may sell his child without incurring reproach, if the child be by a woman in whose veins courses one thirty-second part of African blood. My father was a white man, or nearly white. It was sometimes whispered that my master was my father. But to return, or rather, to begin. My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall,
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