I had to learn the value of my mother long after her death, and by witnessing the devotion of other mothers to their children.
There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery.

It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.
My mother died when I could not have been more than eight or nine years old, on one of old master's farms in Tuckahoe, in the neighborhood of Hillsborough.

Her grave is, as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake..