Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Page 7

of a restless spirit. The nearest
estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and
twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say,
some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.
My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac
and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a
darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.
My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever
heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my
master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know

nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. 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 any
thing 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.
Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation
of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may
or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to

my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that
slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of
slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers;
and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and
make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as
pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases
not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and
father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves
invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with,
than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom
do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she
sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of
showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his
black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his
slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as
the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to
human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do
so; for, unless he does this, he must not only