1 My mother was named Harriet Bailey.
2 I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day.
3 My mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her.
4 My mother was of a darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.
5 The allowance of the slave children was given to their mothers, or the old women having the care of them.
6 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.
7 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.
8 She took a chair by me, washed the blood from my face, and, with a mother's tenderness, bound up my head, covering the wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef.
9 I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's release.
10 I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the same house with me; but the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories.
11 We were all now tied; and just as we were to leave for Easton jail, Betsy Freeland, mother of William Freeland, came to the door with her hands full of biscuits, and divided them between Henry and John.
12 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.
13 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.