bettinafairchild: Something like 50% of all slaves were sold off. Usually they were sold with no warning, so their owner wouldn’t have to deal with any emotions or violence. You’d just go to work, and when you came home, your loved one or friend was no longer there. And you probably never saw them again. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass said in the area where he grew up (Maryland), slave owners preferred to separate mothers and babies, because mothers would spend too much time taking care of their own children–more time than a caretaker who was not their mother would. That’s why Douglass had no memories of his own mother, though he did know his grandmother.
If anyone says to you that slavery wasn’t that bad, you can tell them they must not care very much about their family, if they think it’s so “not bad” to be permanently separated from your children, grandchildren, spouse, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, etc. There are pages upon pages of advertisements in newspapers from after the Civil War, of former slaves searching for their family members they were forcibly parted from.
Mark Twain also wrote a short story recounting a coincidental reunion between a mother and one of her seven children who had been sold away from her. It’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.”
rank_subjugation: Makes you wonder how a family heirloom could end up at a flea market. Could not imagine that pain of having your child taken and sold off.
kegfullofshit: Interesting to note: This piece was purchased for $20 at a flea market in Nashville in the early 2000s.
[Ashley’s Sack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley%27s_Sack)
whythiskink: i can’t believe how we humans treat each other, this actually made me cry.
Whaddaya Say?