"As the months passed on, my boy improved in health. When he was a year old, they called him beautiful. The little wine was taking deep root in my existence, though its clinging fondness excited a mixture of love and pain. when I was most sorely oppressed I found solace in his smiles. I loved to watch his infant slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very ill. The bright eyes grew dull, and the little feet and hands were so icy cold that I thought death had already touched them."
This is a portion from Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl. By Harriet Ann Jacobs
It is wonderful to read such classic books as this as we learn to understand our humanness and how much the people before us suffered. If we fail in anything, we fail in understanding how much of a struggle it was for some people to survive such wrath of humanity on American Soil. As a wife and mother I can relate to the mother's plea but her desire to see life in her child. Our world is scary and I am thankful yet still saddened that I have suffered miscarriages even a second trimester where I saw the hands, arms and body of my still-born child. Those miscarriages show that those children will never have to face the advent of terrorism that is striking our world. They will never have to loose arms and legs due to a nasty bombing situation. They will never have to be lured in by "friends" who actually want to go for a drunken driving escapade only to find that one friend dies in an accident. They will never have to understand that greed drives the nature of most people in our society and abortion is normal.
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