The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
It was not Christina Rossetti but Elizabeth Barrett Browning who wrote the abolitionist poem I was thinking of: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.”
Like other nineteenth-century abolitionist texts, it makes the case for abolition by insisting that emotions such as love and sorrow are universal points of sympathy between free and slave. Sympathy is argument enough to insist upon the humanity of black women and men; add to it the facts that slavery is cruel and causes slaves to act even more inhumanly than they have been treated, and, well, abolition becomes the only moral response. The runaway slave in question had been in love, and her lover was torn from her. She was raped by her master, and she gave birth to a child. But the child was white, and in mad distress, she suffocated him. Even for a woman driven mad by slavery infanticide is horrible. As she buried the babe, however, his whiteness disappeared, and she grieved:
Afterwards, she is captured by the slave hunters and lynched. She entertains cursing them by cursing their wives with slain children. However, her epiphany was real; hanged, she sees Christ’s wounds, and though she claims she is not like him, she nevertheless understands something about how hypocrisy pervades her keepers. She cannot be Christ, but her death as well as her son’s can be symbolic:
In that pun “curse-free,” she both refuses to curse the slave hunters and asserts that their own freedom is its own curse. She dies, rather, to be with her son, who, though dead, is nevertheless her own and in greater sympathy with her plight than anyone at Pilgrim’s Point.
