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Wise Black Prairie Woman, part 1

© Mary Trotter Kion

Wise Black Prairie Woman's life on the prairie wasn't much different than that of her white counterpart. It was her own history, as well as that of her people, that made her life a little different.

Like other prairie women, Black Prairie Woman had a husband and children. For her family she put good food on the table, sewed their cloths and washed and mended them. She raised a garden and helped her husband put in and harvest the crops. With him she prayed that the things they had planted would not be destroyed by hail, grasshoppers or fire. Some seasons they were, and some seasons the crops were abundant. She gave birth to children, sometimes alone in their sod house. Other times her husband was there when she gave birth. Sometimes a baby didn't make it through a cold harsh winter, and was sadly buried, but with in a year or two a new little one grew and thrived in the homemade cradle where all of its older siblings had spent their earliest days.

As with other prairie women one season came, then changed to the next and then the next one, bringing with it a new, or renewed, course of tasks. But Wise Black Prairie Woman was no stranger to hard work.

From the day she was big enough to fetch and carry she had worked. And with each year the tasks had becoming harder and harder. Black Prairie Woman had grownup as a slave. Her mother had been a slave, and her mother before her as were all the women in her ancestry. Her family line was a long sorrowful tale of slaving for one master or another. The line went back, at least in the United States, to about 1619 when 20 Africans were brought to the English colony of Virginia. True, these ancestors weren't slaves, but indentured servants. But they were bound to a master, supposedly for a limited number of years. But as it happened with her ancestors, and many other Black indentured servants, the least infraction of rules set down by the master gave cause for that master to haul the servant into court. The outcome, more times than not, was that more years were added on to the indenture's servitude as punishment. And on it went until an indentured Black was held in bondage for life.

A slave woman's children were also considered slaves even if she happened to be married to a free Black. And the children could be sold away from their mother at a master's whim. This was the situation with Wise Black Prairie Woman.