Welcome, welcome, and thank you for taking time out for my creative writing session today.

The context for this Poetry Time subject, titled Freetime Wife (In the Vernacular), is in consideration of the “voice” of the wives of men who had reared families with other women during slavery times.

Specifically, I have recently been looking at some family trees who have (who I know to be) the second wife and, therefore, stepmother of about three children in a particular family listed as mother. In not one of the thirty family trees that I have viewed is the biological mother, the “slavery time” wife named. The absence of this bio-mother’s name also extends to vital records such as marriage and death records.

I wondered how the woman I know to be the mother, who weathered extraordinary attempts to better her and her children’s lives, became utterly extinct in legacy.

Then I imagined the plight of the record-acknowledged mother, the “free time” wife who nurtured and raised this set of children she came to see as her own. Maybe she lost her biological children during the horrors of slavery. Perhaps she’s jealous of the love memory that her husband bears for her predecessor, who has flown away in death.

This poem is her voice, rightly or wrongly, as her (an untold many) situational plight is creatively considered here in…

The Genealogy Situation Room