E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Melissa Er-Raqabi,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Transcriber's Note: This work was transcribed from a contemporary printing, not from the 1842 edition. Certain spellings may have been modernized and typographic and printer's errors changed from the original.

 

NARRATIVE

OF

LUNSFORD LANE.

[ORIGINAL.]
The Slave Mother's Address
TO HER
INFANT CHILD.
I cannot tell how much I love
To look on thee, my child;
Nor how that looking rocks my soul
As on a tempest wild;
For I have borne thee to the world,
And bid thee breathe its air,
But soon to see around thee drawn
The curtains of despair.
Now thou art happy, child, I know,
As little babe can be;
Thou dost not fancy in thy dreams
But thou art all as free
As birds upon the mountain winds,
(If thou hast thought of bird,)
Or anything thou thinkest of,
Or thy young ear has heard.
What are thy little thoughts about?
I cannot certain know,
Only there's not a wing of them
Upon a breath of woe,
For not a shadow's on thy face,
Nor billow heaves thy breast,—
All clear as any summer's lake
With not a zephyr press'd.

THE

NARRATIVE

OF

LUNSFORD LANE,

FORMERLY OF

RALEIGH, N.C.



Embracing an account of his early life, the redemption by purchase
of himself and family from slavery,
And his banishment from the place of his birth for the crime
of wearing a colored skin.

PUBLISHED BY HIMSELF.


BOSTON:
PRINTED FOR THE PUBLISHER:
J.G. TORREY, Printer.

1842.

Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1842, by
LUNSFORD LANE,
In the clerk's office of the District Court of Massachusetts.

TO THE READER.

I have been solicited by very many friends, to give my narrative to thepublic. Whatever my own judgment might be, I should yield to theirs. Incompliance, therefore, with this general request, and in the hope thatthese pages may produce an impression favorable to my countrymen inbondage; also that I may realize something from the sale of my worktowards the support of a numerous family, I have committed thispublication to press. It might have been made two or three, or even sixtimes larger, without diminishing from the interest of any one of itspages—indeed with an increased interest—but the want of the pecuniarymeans, and other considerations, have induced me to present it as hereseen. Should another edition be called for, and

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