![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() My first experience of life, as I now remember it, and I remember it but hazily, began in the family of my grandmother and grandfather, Betsey and Isaac Bailey. From certain events, however, the dates of which I have since learned, I suppose myself to have been born in February, 1817. Such questions were regarded by the masters as evidence of an impudent curiosity. Masters allowed no questions concerning their ages to be put to them by slaves. They measured the ages of their children by spring-time, winter-time, harvest-time, planting-time, and the like. Few at that time knew anything of the months of the year or of the days of the month. I never met with a slave in that part of the country who could tell me with any certainty how old he was. A person of some consequence in civilized society, sometimes designated as father, was literally unknown to Genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves. The reader must not expect me to say much of my family. It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district or neighborhood, bordered by the Choptank river, among the laziest and muddiest of streams, surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves who, in point of ignorance and indolence, were fully in accord with their surroundings, that I, without any fault of my own, was born, and spent the first years of my childhood. IN Talbot County, Eastern Shore, State of Maryland, near Easton, the county town, there is a small district of country, thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing that I know of more than for the worn-out, sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil, the general dilapidation of its farms and fences, the indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants, and the prevalence of ague and fever. AUTHOR'S BIRTH.Īuthor's place of birth-Description of country-Its inhabitants-Genealogical trees-Method of counting time in slave districts-Date of author's birth-Names of grandparents-Their cabin-Home with them-Slave practice of separating mothers from their children-Author's recollections of his mother-Who was his father? ![]()
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