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Primary source: Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States . . . ," slave narrative, 1837.
Caption: Charles Ball was a slave in western Maryland. In the following excerpt, he describes a slave funeral.
I assisted her and her husband to inter the infant. . . and its father buried with it, a small bow and several arrows; a little bag of parched meal; a miniature canoe, about a foot long, and a little paddle, (with which he said it would cross the ocean to his own country) a small stick, with an iron nail, sharpened and fastened into one end of it; and a piece of white muslin, with several curious and strange figures painted on it in blue and red, by which, he said, his relations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son, and would receive it accordingly, on its arrival amongst them. . .
He cut a lock of hair from his head, threw it upon the dead infant, and closed the grave with his own hands. He then told us the God of his country was looking at him, and was pleased with what he had done.
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Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland,
South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave . . . (1837; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 265.
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