escribes a scene in which his father is being hunted because he attacked the overseer who was trying to molest his mother. “The fact of the sacrilegious act of lifting a hand against the sacred temple of a white man's body...this was all it was necessary to establish. And the penalty followed: one hundred lashes on the bare back, and to have the right ear nailed to the whipping- post, and then severed from the body” (Henson 32). They eventually captured his father and inflicted this penalty. His father was shipped off and for a while his family lived in relative peace, until the owner of the plantation died, and they were forced to leave. Henson laments that: Our term of happy union as one family was now, alas! at an end. Mournful as was the Doctor's death to his friends it was a far greater calamity to us. The estate and the slaves must be sold and the proceeds divided among the heirs. We were but property- - not a mother, and the children God had given her” (Henson 35). Henson further describes the slave trade experience with amazing detail, saying: Common as are slave- auctions in the southern states, and naturally as a slave may look forward to the time when he will be put upon the block, still the full misery of the event- - of the scenes which precede and succeed it- - is never understood till the actual experience comes. The first sad announcement that the sale is to be; the knowledge that all ties of the past are to be sundered; the frantic terror at the idea of being "sent south;" the almost certainty that one member of a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of purchasers' faces; the agony at parting, often forever, with husband, wife, child- - these must be seen and felt to be fully understood (35). In an accurate depiction of what an incredible burden slavery was on families and how cruel it was, Henson remembers how the rest of his family was sold. “My brothers and sisters were bid o...
