I bade farewell to my mother, forever, on this earth. Oh! the pangs of
that moment. Even after thirty years have elapsed the scene comes
vividly to my memory as I write. A gloomy, dark cloud seemed to pass
before my vision, and the very air seemed to still with awfulness. I
felt bereaved, forlorn, forsaken, lost. Put yourself in my place; feel
what I have felt, and then say, God is just; he will protect the
helpless and right the wronged, and you will have some idea of my
feelings and the hope that sustained me through long and weary years of
servitude. My mother, my poor mother! what must she have suffered. Never
will I forget her last words; never will I forget the earnest prayers of
that mother begging for her child, and refusing to be comforted. She had
fallen to the lot of Mrs. Anderson, and she pleaded with burning tears
streaming down her cheeks, "He is my only son, my baby child, my
youngest and the only son I have; please let me have him to go with me!"

Anderson spoke roughly to her and told her to hold her peace; but with
her arms around me she clung to me and cried the louder, "Let me have my
child; if you will let me have my baby you may have all the rest!"

Mothers can realize this situation only, who have parted with children
whom they never expected to see again. Imagine parting with your dearest
child, never to see it again; to be thrown into life-servitude in one
part of the country and your dear child in the same condition six
hundred miles away. Although my mother was black, she had a soul; she
had a heart to feel just as you have, and I, her child, was being
ruthlessly torn from her by inexorable "law." What would you have done
if you had been in her place? _She_ prayed to God for help.

My kind old father consoled and encouraged my mother all he could, and