Schweinfurth declares of one tribe:  “A bond between mother and child which lasts for life is the measure of affection shown among the Dyoor” and Ratzel adds: 

“Agreeable to the natural relation the mother stands first among the chief influences affecting the children.  From the Zulus to the Waganda, we find the mother the most influential counsellor at the court of ferocious sovereigns, like Chaka or Mtesa; sometimes sisters take her place.  Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds of blood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavily burdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes is clear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from the participation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negro peoples.”

As I remember through memories of others, backward among my own family, it is the mother I ever recall,—­the little, far-off mother of my grandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost palm-trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, with beaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black and laughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all, my own mother, with all her soft brownness,—­the brown velvet of her skin, the sorrowful black-brown of her eyes, and the tiny brown-capped waves of her midnight hair as it lay new parted on her forehead.  All the way back in these dim distances it is mothers and mothers of mothers who seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.

Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and American slavery struck like doom.  In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in men and in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of social equilibrium swung from a time, in 1800,—­when America had but eight or less black women to every ten black men,—­all too swiftly to a day, in 1870,—­when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negro population.  This was but the outward numerical fact of social dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral degradation.  They fought against all this desperately, did these black slaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; they set up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophe founded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal ties and beneath it was the mother-idea.

The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women.  Under it there was no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children.  To be sure, custom and religion replaced here and there what the law denied, yet one has but to read advertisements like the following to see the hell beneath the system: 

     “One hundred dollars reward will be given for my two fellows, Abram
     and Frank.  Abram has a wife at Colonel Stewart’s, in Liberty
     County, and a mother at Thunderbolt, and a sister in Savannah.