Poem Elf

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The Slave Auction

by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

The sale began—young girls were there,

Defenseless in their wretchedness,

Whose stifled sobs of deep despair

Revealed their anguish and distress.

And mothers stood, with streaming eyes,

And saw their dearest children sold;

Unheeded rose their bitter cries,

While tyrants bartered them for gold.

And woman, with her love and truth—

For these in sable forms may dwell—

Gazed on the husband of her youth,

With anguish none may paint or tell.

And men, whose sole crime was their hue,

The impress of their Maker’s hand,

And frail and shrinking children too,

Were gathered in that mournful band.

Ye who have laid your loved to rest,

And wept above their lifeless clay,

Know not the anguish of that breast,

Whose loved are rudely torn away.

Ye may not know how desolate

Are bosoms rudely forced to part,

And how a dull and heavy weight

Will press the life-drops from the heart.

The third time I read this poem I started to think about all the things mothers do to keep their children safe—and wonder how far they’d go to keep them from danger. The latter brought to mind Toni Morrison’s Beloved; the former, at the extreme opposite end, present-day baby equipment. Such things as video monitors, special mattresses that keep baby’s air cool, edge protectors, bath spout covers, and knee pads for crawlers are marketed to new mothers in the name of safety. Offer “peace of mind” and you can sell a lot more product.

Over the years “peace of mind” dies a slow death, perhaps with the first toddler accident and surely by the teen years. Control over another life is a pipe dream, an illusion—and one that the mothers in “Slave Auction” never have a single second to enjoy.

Harper invites us to imagine the complete and utter powerlessness of people on the slave block, particularly of mothers. Defenseless, unheeded, bitter, frail, shrinking, mournful, desolate. The adjectives heap misery on misery. The mothers’ wretchedness is of the worst magnitude, Harper says, worse even than the physical death of a child—

Ye who have laid your loved to rest,

   And wept above their lifeless clay,

Know not the anguish of that breast,

   Whose loved are rudely torn away.

It’s almost disorienting to read about the moral chaos of a slave auction in such formal language, those neat four-line stanzas with their reliable rhyme scheme providing order to a profoundly disordered world. A wordless scream of rage and agony seems more fitting, and Harper seems to acknowledge that, as she describes the women looking over at their soon-to-be-sold husbands—

With anguish none may paint or tell.

Even more jarring to me is that Harper felt it necessary to explicitly say that enslaved Black people were capable of the same feelings as white people—

And woman, with her love and truth—

   For these in sable forms may dwell—

*

Frances Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and speaker. Her life is nothing short of amazing.

Born in Baltimore to free Black parents, Harper was orphaned at three and raised by an aunt and uncle. Her uncle was a minister who had established a school. There she was educated until she was 13. She took work as a seamstress and nursemaid to a Quaker family who owned a bookstore where she was able to take advantage of her access to books. She began writing and published first book of poetry at age twenty-one.

She left Maryland to become the first woman to teach at Union Seminary in Ohio (later Wilberforce University), where she taught sewing. A year or two later she took a job in Pennsylvania. She lived with the family of William Still, considered the founder of the Underground Railroad.

Moved by the fate of a free Black man captured and sold into slavery who subsequently died (courtesy of the Maryland Fugitive Slave Act), she decided to devote her life to the abolition cause. She worked on the Underground Railroad alongside Harriet Tubman and got gigs as a travelling anti-slavery speaker, drawing large crowds.

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Meanwhile Harper was constantly publishing. One of her short stories was the first short story published by any American woman of any race. Her first three novels were serialized, her poetry was extremely popular, and she worked as a journalist.

She published over eleven books.

In her mid-thirties she married a widow with three children. Together they had a daughter, and Harper stopped travelling as a speaker to raise her. When her husband died four years after they married, she supported the family with her lectures. What this woman couldn’t do!

Harper was active in the temperance movement, and fought for universal education and suffrage. She cofounded the National Association of Colored Women with Harriet Tubman. She died at age 86.

There’s so much more to say about this woman. Her tombstone should be etched Always Ahead of Her Time—

• Almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks made headlines, Harper refused to sit in the “colored” section of the trolley car and got in trouble with the conductor.

• She was intersectional in her outreach before the term was coined. She fought against slavery and for women’s suffrage and temperance and Black suffrage and anti-lynching legislation. All her activism was connected.

• She had a line on the Karens before Karens were Karens: in fighting to include the right of Black men to vote in the cause of women’s suffrage, she told an assembly at the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention, “ I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”

• She called out white privilege before woke culture did: “I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, “ she said, “who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”

I could quote her endlessly. Here’s just a few more:

• “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party.”

• “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”

• “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.”

• Last stanza of her most famous poem “Bury Me in a Free Land”:

I ask no monument, proud and high,

To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;

All that my yearning spirit craves,

Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

To my knowledge Harper does not have a permanent monument. Despite her wishes, she needs one.

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