Chattel slavery kept mothers and babies in bondage for centuries, so it’s important to explore how it still impacts our community today. Frederick Douglass was an iconic African American abolitionist, writer, speaker, and statesman. Born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland around 1818, he escaped in 1838 and became one of the leading voices in the fight against slavery and injustice. In his book, ‘Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass, An American Slave.’ he speaks on enslaved mothers.
‘My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant, before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom in the part of Maryland to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.’
Enslaved mothers were also forbidden to breastfeed their own children in order to wet nurse the enslavers children. This plantation pattern may contribute to the research which shows black women in the UK and the US breastfeed less than other groups today. These early broken attachments along with the constant threat of being abused, sold or killed during enslavement kept both parents and their children traumatised and therefore unable to form healthy attachments.
Without support, the attachment wounds will continue to play out intergenerationally until someone in the family steps up to do the inner work to end the cycle of attachment pain in their own relationships and parenting. Are you ready to do the deeper inner work?