ABSTRACT
In the following letter, written in 1852, Maria Perkins is worried about keeping her family together, and she writes to her husband about her fears. Few enslaved women learned to read and write partly because owners were concerned that literacy might lead to rebellion. This is a rare example of writing by a slave woman. It reveals some of the concerns that many women of her day had to face. African-American women had their own particular burdens to bear. In addition to having more children than white women and having them earlier in life, they also faced the prospect of having their children taken away from them and sold. This letter is all that is known of Maria Perkins and her family.
