Frances Harper's Poetry

I thought that Frances Harper’s “The Slave Mother,” was one of the most powerful statements about the condition of slavery that we have read so far. Throughout the many authors that we’ve already read, the experience of the auction and the separation of families has been a recurring image. We’ve seen this experience expressed in both fictional and non fictional accounts, but I think that is in Harper’s poetic form that is has had the most resonance. Harper describes the pain of a mother not being able to control the fate of her own son when she says, “He is not hers, although she bore/ For him a mother’s pains;/ He is not hers, although her blood/ Is coursing through his vains!” For me, these lines were powerful in the way that they contrasted the physical bonds between mother and son with ownership and property values of slavery. This contrast highlighted the injustices of the system in terms that I had not considered when reading other accounts of slavery. Although I was aware that familial ties were broken under the chattel slavery system, Harper expressed this using imagery that was both evocative and sincere. In doing this, Harper’s poem expresses the injustices of slavery in ways that cannot be done through other literary forms.