ff first, and one by one, while my mother, paralyzed by grief, held me by the hand. Her turn came, and she was bought by Isaac Riley of Montgomery County. Then I was offered to the assembled purchasers” (Henson 36). Henson’s mother wept profusely and begged the man who purchased her to buy him as well, but he simply disregarded her and kicked her out of the way. This is a fine metaphor for the way that slaves and African-Americans were treated in the early 1800’s. Finally, slavery was a cruel institution, and the slaves were treated cruelly. The slaves were treated inhumanely. Perhaps Henson sums it up best with his reaction to the treatment of his mother at the slave trade: “This was one of my earliest observations of men; an experience which I only shared with thousands of my race, the bitterness of which to any individual who suffers it cannot be diminished by the frequency of its recurrence, while it is dark enough to overshadow the whole after-life with something blacker than a funeral pall” (36)....
