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This find also demonstrates just how little we still know about our ancestors. While the discovery of the massive grave is a great find for our historical record, it demonstrates just how deep the suffering was for black people who were considered free. Disheveled bones from brutalized bodies are all that are left to tell the stories of racism and white supremacy. Oftentimes skeletal remains will wash up after flooding occurs on the Mississippi river which is a constant reminder that unheard narratives of suffering and brutalization are waiting to be excavated.Įstes states Theres the devils punchbowl that has so many people that no one knows how they got killed or when. Its going to be difficult to get further physical data from the site considering the bluffs are dangerous to navigate. Turn me loose and Ill go home back to the plantation! Anywhere but there Joanna Thompson Isom, born just before the Civil War on a Mississippi plantation, told this story: "I hav' been midwife, an' nuss, an' washerwoman when I wuz little my granny taught me some ole, ole slave songs dat she sed had been used to sing babies to sleep ever since she wuz a chile.∽isease broke out among em, smallpox being the main one. The black an'the bay, the sorrel an'the grey, Cromartie's, version of this lullaby promises the sleepy baby the enjoyment of material goods, rather than the safety pledged in Annie Little's song: 'Cause when you wake, you'll git some cake,Īnd flew so high till he put out his eye, We'll stop up de cracks and sew up de seams,ĭat boat rock slow, she'll rock you to sleep,Ĭhorus: O, go to sleepy, sleepy, li'l baby. Here are three versions of this song, which appears in the white folk music tradition as "All the Pretty Little Horses."Īnnie Little, who was born into slavery in Missouri in 1856 and raised on a Mississippi plantation, had 10 children and sang them all to sleep with this haunting song of comfort and abandonment: (Repeat refrain)Ĭase you was hatched from a bussard's egg, "A Slave Mammy's Lullaby" (title supplied by interviewer)Ī snow white stork flew down from the sky, No tune has been found for this poignant lyric.
![black baby used as alligator bait black baby used as alligator bait](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/ac/3a/60/ac3a608b49319d27081257e8634bd5bb--bait-alligators.jpg)
The song grew out of a legend that the plantation's white women told the slave children, that a white stork brought white babies, but slave babies were hatched from the eggs of buzzards, or vultures, a bird laden with significance in African American folklore.
![black baby used as alligator bait black baby used as alligator bait](https://www.first-school.ws/imagestn/crafts/bag-alligator-600w.png)
My mammy was good to me but she had to spend so much time at humoring the white babies and taking care of them that she hardly ever got to even sing her own babies to sleep." The song that Katie Sutton remembered tells a simply drawn yet resonant story of life in the master's house compared to life in the slave's cabin. "When I was a little gal," Katie Sutton recalled, "I lived with my mother in an old log cabin.
![black baby used as alligator bait black baby used as alligator bait](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oAUIjEmPkT0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Katie Sutton, of Evansville, Indiana, described her mother's experience of motherhood as one of tension between public and private duties. What a big alligator Coming to catch this one boy! Mom Louisa Brown of Waverly Hills, S.C., remembered that everyone would make up songs to help the children on the plantation fall asleep, and everyone had their own song that they sang. Go To Sleepy/All the Pretty Little Horses