The Suit of Elizabeth Freeman
Begins standing
In service
All ears, as if she
Had none
Waiting the well-
Set table
The colonel proclaiming
Mankind in a state
Of nature are equal,
free, and independent
And why not me
Standing here
As if I have no
Ideas, no
Wit, no friends
Among men
Who can make
Out word
From fact. Am I
Not equal?
Am I not able
To catch
These gists?
When all
The drafts
Of freedom
Are setting
The colonies
Aflame.
Who says I can’t
Walk up
To the lawyer
And say
It seems to me
That this
Applies
To me.
Note: In 1781 Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman sought out an attorney and successfully sued for her freedom under the Massachusetts state constitution in what would be called a freedom suit, helping set a precedent for many other such suits.
Med and the Question of Mother Love
—A Freedom Suit
Summer 1836 up from New Orleans Mary Slater
with her slave girl Med. 6-years-old. What can this
child do for you, Mary? What can she mean? Do I
see Med the way I see a girl today sharp enough
to follow orders and after that? Needing food and
repair, a bath at the end of two days? More cared
for than keeper? What do I know about slavery
like that? Slavery’s long suffocating arm. Slavery
so awful. I can’t. Name how mother lode. See.
It. And Mary Slater (Slaver)—in this poem
writing itself—up from New Orleans (I almost
wrote Up From Slavery) to escape the stifling
heat of summer (I almost keyed slavery) to visit
her father Thomas Aves in Boston. Here Mary
leaves Med in his care. Custody. Under his super
-vision for a trip to Roxbury. Now is when a group
of ladies swoops in. The integrated Boston Female
Anti-Slavery Society in what is to be a splendid
rescue. Except this is muddled. The law involved.
A suit is filed against Aves for holding little Med
against her will. Of course all hell breaks loose.
This is a poem about slavery. And the law.
Commonwealth v. Aves. is all over the local papers,
its fine points weighed: the distinction between voluntary
and involuntary mobility, what happens to a slave
who travels to a free jurisdiction with a master’s
consent. Yea, at a master’s request (the master
having not thought that far ahead, and things
through, from a jurisprudential perspective).
Had travel on free soil emancipated our little Med?
Here’s the kicker. While Med had a mistress
(it is hard to write owner) she also had a mother
in New Orleans. Her own damn mother. So what
was Med gonna do? Never mind she is 6 years old.
Because all of this is crazy. Because slavery is crazy
Med is freed and taken from the Aves home, from
her mistress and placed in the care of the Samaritan
Asylum for Indigent Children in Boston where she
dies two years later never again seeing her mother
but making the books carving these words
with the ink of her skin: an owner of a slave
in another state where slavery is warranted by law,
voluntarily bringing such slave into this state, has no
authority to detain him against his will, or to carry
him out of the state against his consent, for the purpose
of being held in slavery.
