mong the Dyoor"
and Ratzel adds:

"Agreeable to the natural relation the mother stands first among the
chief influences affecting the children. From the Zulus to the Waganda,
we find the mother the most influential counsellor at the court of
ferocious sovereigns, like Chaka or Mtesa; sometimes sisters take her
place. Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds of
blood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavily
burdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes is
clear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from the
participation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negro
peoples."

As I remember through memories of others, backward among my own family,
it is the mother I ever recall,--the little, far-off mother of my
grandmothers, who sobbed her life away in song, longing for her lost
palm-trees and scented waters; the tall and bronzen grandmother, with
beaked nose and shrewish eyes, who loved and scolded her black and
laughing husband as he smoked lazily in his high oak chair; above all,
my own mother, with all her soft brownness,--the brown velvet of her
skin, the sorrowful black-brown of her eyes, and the tiny brown-capped
waves of her midnight hair as it lay new parted on her forehead. All the
way back in these dim distances it is mothers and mothers of mothers who
seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.

Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and American
slavery struck like doom. In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in men
and in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of social
equilibrium swung from a time, in 1800,--when America had but eight or
less black women to every ten black men,--all too swiftly to a day, in
1870,--when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negro
population. This was but the outward numerical fact of social
dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral
degradation. They fought against all this desperately, did these black
slaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; they
set up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophe
founded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal ties
and beneath it was the mother-idea.

The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there was
no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children. To
be sure, custom and r