Death is better than slavery.
Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.
There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.
But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.
The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.
When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.
The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.
DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.
If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.
Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
