ABSTRACT
The cultural trauma of being at the center of slavery, as a mothering slave, was impactful from its onset. In the world of the slave mother, there was little room for compassion, because there was no room for weakness. The continued invisibility of historical narratives about mothering slaves and the narrating of their stories speaks to the overall pattern of carelessness with which Africanist women were treated from the beginning of slavery when they were first brought to the Americas by the Portuguese. The intersection of race and sex produced a unique experience for the Africanist woman when she became the lynchpin for fueling economic success for centuries for whites in a racially exploitive system without benefiting from this system's success. The intergenerational orphan becomes every Africanist child because of the African Holocaust. An orphan is a child who has been deserted or given away by his or her birth mother and/or father.
