“Among the slave children were three little orphans, whose mothers, at their death, committed them to the care of my mother. One of them was a babe. She took them and treated them as her own. The master took no care about them. She always took a share of the cloth she had provided for her own children, to cover these little friendless ones.”
The extended family was, first and foremost, a survival technique. The family was critical to the survival of enslaved persons. Even adult enslaved people who did not have families or was sold to a plantation without family often “lived in common with others.” The mutual aid grounded the slave community and in a society that set blacks, in general, and enslaved people, in particular, outside of the “human” family, enslaved people had each other.