In "The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage", Whittier gives slaves some of their humanity back by speaking as a slave woman being separated from her family. White owners worked hard to dehumanize slaves, giving themselves the idea that slavery was the natural state for Africans and that they enjoyed it. Yet in this poem we can see just how human the slaves really were.
The speaker describes the South as a place “where the slave whip ceaseless swings, where the noisome insect stings, where the fever demon strews poison with the falling dews, where the sickly sunbeams glare through the hot misty air”. Just as no white person who has to work outside all day would want to live in a hot, humid, insect ridden place where there is the constant threat of disease and beating, neither would a black person. It is not human nature to want to live in such a place.
The speaker also speaks of the maternal comforts that her children will not be able to receive from their mother. In the second stanza, Whittier describes how she will never be able to watch over or listen to or comfort her children; which is essential to the development of children. Especially for children that will be going through such hardships as slave children go through, to not have a mothers arms to go to at the end of the day is devastating. By showing that this mother recognizes the importance of love and comfort towards her children should alert any reader that slaves are indeed human. Hopefully this poem would have touched the hearts of slave owners, helping them to understand just what they are doing when they tore apart these human families.
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