The Smith household in Mississippi was a plantation household in the full sense: a productive agricultural enterprise built on enslaved labor, managed by a white family whose prosperity was directly generated by the people they owned. Robert Mays Smith and his wife Rebecca Dorn Smith were not an unusually cruel family by the standards of the slave system; the records do not preserve accounts of exceptional violence. But the absence of exceptional cruelty does not constitute the presence of humane treatment. The ordinary conditions of enslavement in Mississippi in the 1830s and 1840s included legal nonexistence, perpetual liability to sale and family separation, corporal punishment as a management tool, denial of literacy, and a social order enforced by law, custom, and violence that told an enslaved person every day that she was property rather than a person.
The skills Biddy Mason acquired in this environment were acquired under coercion, but they were real skills and they belonged to her in the most intimate sense: they were encoded in her body and her mind, not in documents that could be taken away. Midwifery was perhaps the most significant of these. The practice of midwifery in enslaved communities was both a form of care — enslaved women helping each other through the vulnerable and life-threatening experience of childbirth — and a service rendered to the enslaver’s household and to the wider community of white neighbors who might call on an enslaved midwife with a reputation. Biddy Mason’s midwifery training happened in this context: she learned from other enslaved women, she practiced under conditions of compulsion, and she built competence that would eventually become the foundation of her economic independence.