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The African Tradition of providing the right name for a couple's baby had an almost mystical importance. The slaves applying this practice to their babies symbolized a refusal to be defenselessly incorporated into the White man's slave society immediately at birth. Instead, this form of "selfhood armor" meant the child would enter the evil system of slavery protected by some sense of self and history.
This state would continue as long as slave parents could manage. However, the law had given the slave master absolute power -- meaning dependency on him, not just about looking over the developing child, but also about fashioning the conditions which caused the slave to remain a perpetual child. Because of the focus on teaching slave children they were inferior and worthless, the resultant qualities of irresponsibility, silliness, playfulness, laziness, and tendencies to lie and steal were readily acceptable -- the "Sambo" (Elkins, Slavery, p. 130).
Thus slave children were expected to be shiftless and stupid; lacking in honesty or veracity; incapable intellectually and temperamentally of doing any but the most menial of work or of absorbing learning or culture; and presenting an animal-like docility. In other words, slave children were taught to be mindless, thoughtless creatures completely subject to the will of their master or White overseer in every aspect of life -- the Ideal Slave (Holland, Black Opportunity, p. 11).
Since slave woman's main task was to be a breeder, for which they were rewarded if they won "the contest" (Hull, But Some of Us Are Brace, p. 74), children were perhaps more welcomed to slave mothers -- if welcomed at all -- than to free Negro mothers. The reason was that pregnancy and motherhood often brought a somewhat lightening of work, at least for a brief period (Simkins, History of the South, p. 143). Slave women, while employed in tobacco fields, could still rear her children. Yet, slave children started work earlier than free Negro children. There was no need to keep them from work for purposes of education because there was no education.
The slaveholder decided at what age children should go into the fields to pick cotton -- but usually by age 5 or 6. Field nor house slave children had childhoods. The latter cared for members of the mistress' family â€" including White children and adults with mental or physical disabilities. Because this was a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week job, slave children slept on the floor beside the beds of Whites under their care and reported to the master if their charges were having any difficulty (Comer, Raising Black Children, p. 7).
Social intimacy between Black and White children often became quite close; the Whites using the slave child to test objects of curiosity or to go first into strange places. When White children came to visit, slave children were at their command and attended to their every minor need. Within limits, Black and White kids played in the woods, kitchen, and slave quarters. Together they listened to folklore in the slave quarters and to Bible and fairy tales in the "Big House." At mealtime, slave boys and girls waited on the table. White and Black babies were often carried at the same time by a slave woman and she might breast feed both.
In the process of the intermingling, White children were trained in the methods of tyranny while slave children were taught how to live with and be among Whites while "staying in their place." Fed irregularly or improperly, slave children suffered from a variety of ills and died in droves. Yet, White doctors worsened them problems. Otherwise, slave parents, in spite of their own sufferings, lavished love on their children. Fathers often regaled their children with fascinating stories and songs and won their affection with little gifts (Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 181).
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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