Motherhood
While still at David Kibler's, Bethany became a mother with her first child, Charlotte, and immediately began to worry about being separated from her. She writes:
My dear white lady, in your pleasant home made joyous by the tender love of husband and children all your own, you can never understand the slave mother's emotions as she clasps her new-born child, and knows that a master's word can at any moment take it from her embrace; and when, as was mine, that child is a girl, and from her own experience she sees its almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slave-owner, and feels that the law holds over her no protecting arm, it is not strange that, rude and uncultured as I was, I felt all this, and would have been glad if we could have died together there and then.
She tried to find a new location away from Master Kibler. She explored her options through Miss Lucy and found someone to buy her – a local man named John Prince (Printz).
Read more about this topic: Bethany Veney
Famous quotes containing the word motherhood:
“The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“Let’s just call what happened in the eighties the reclamation of motherhood . . . by women I knew and loved, hard-driving women with major careers who were after not just babies per se or motherhood per se, but after a reconciliation with their memories of their own mothers. So having a baby wasn’t just having a baby. It became a major healing.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)