“In the houses of Southern planters, the house slaves were better treated. In a real sense, they had to be, for they were entrusted with caring for children, preparing meals, running the house, caring for guests. In many households, slaves were treated almost as members of the family and, working as maids, cooks, nurses, and laundresses, the house slaves were predominantly women. In the house, these women learned the ways and manners of Southern gentlefolk—how to set a table properly, how to arrange flowers, how to keep silver gleamingly polished, how to treat good furniture (and how to distinguish it from bad), and otherwise how to run a manor house. Because, in many wealthy Southern families, the children were taught by tutors, with the children’s nurses in charge of seeing to it that they did their lessons, many of these women became self-educated—learned, at least, to read and write, which their fellow slaves in the fields had no real opportunity to do. These women learned to behave and talk, and also to think, like members of the Southern white aristocracy.
There were, of course, throughout the long years of slavery, many liaisons between the female house slaves and the male plantation owners or their sons. The lighter-skinned offspring of these unions were frequently acknowledged by their fathers, especially the girls, and especially the “pretty” little girls. The boys were needed for work in the fields, and were usually dispatched there as soon as they were old enough, but the pampered little girls were frequently sent to the North, or even to Europe, to be educated. The descendants of these light-skinned, well-educated little girls are the grandes dames of black society today.
After slavery was abolished, the same sort of situation prevailed. If there was education in a Southern black family, it was usually on the mother’s side. In the next generation, if there was sufficient money to educate children, it was the daughters who benefited from it. This was a matter of sheer practicality, at first; the boys were needed at home, to work on the little farms. Later, it became almost a tradition that, if anyone in the family were to be highly educated, it should be the women. Of course, when these women returned home from their schools and colleges, they often found only less well educated, and in many cases darker-skinned, black men to marry. It is one reason for the dominance of the mother’s role in black family life.”