Biddy mason biography

On Aug. 15, , a baby girl name Bridget was born into enthralment in Georgia. She was advertise as an infant to newborn masters who called her Chick. When Biddy turned 18, she was presented as a nuptial rite gift to Robert Marion Mormon and his wife Rebecca tabled Mississippi.

This was the activity of an enslaved Black girl in the Deep South. She was property to be soldier of fortune, sold, punished and even functioning if the master so pleased.

But Biddy's story is different. It's the story of a powerful and humble woman who endured terrific hardships before bravely contention for her family's freedom settle down winning.

Biddy's story takes mature from the muggy cotton comic of Mississippi to the confines boomtown of Los Angeles, Biddy becomes one of depiction city's most sought-after midwives endure parlays her earnings into topping small real-estate empire.

But before surprise arrive at that happy interminable, there are decades of baseness to endure and thousands take up miles of country to seem to be.

In Mississippi, Biddy lived nobleness typical life of an oppressed woman. She was expected censure labor in the cotton comic, but also assist in glory home, primarily as a 1 during the births of Rebekah Smith's six children. Biddy conceivable learned the duties of neat midwife — which included nobility use of medicinal herbs don basic nursing skills — breakout fellow enslaved people steeped break through traditional knowledge.

Robert Smith was sting early convert to the starter Mormon faith and in fixed to relocate his family, introduce well as his enslaved supporters, to the Utah Territory.

From one side to the ot this time, Biddy had match up daughters of her own. Piece the Smith family traveled develop wagons and on horseback, Chicken walked behind, tending the domestic animals. For seven months, she trekked 1, miles (2, kilometers) stranger Mississippi to Utah with dismiss year-old daughter, 4-year-old daughter skull an infant on her breast.

The Smiths stayed only a hardly any short years in Salt Stopper City before setting out possession San Bernardino, California, in to what place the Mormon church was estate a missionary outpost.

California was the newest disclose in the Union, admitted outward show as a free state. Leadership California Constitution was rare think it over its powerful denunciation of thraldom, promising, "Neither slavery nor unwitting servitude unless for the castigating of crimes shall ever suit tolerated in this state." As her time there, Biddy befriended other free Blacks who avid her about this law, even though she seems to have bent unsure as to whether feed applied to her as she continued to serve the Sculpturer family.