The Brutal Biological Theft Found in the WPA Narratives

In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) dispatched interviewers across the American South to record the testimonies of the last surviving generation of individuals who had endured legal captivity. Among the thousands of pages of transcribed testimonies lies a stark, deeply buried archive of biological and maternal exploitation: the lived reality of captive Black women who were forced to wet-nurse the children of their white captors.

These testimonies dismantle the romanticized, post-emancipation myth of the happy, voluntary plantation "Mammy." Instead, the raw accounts of these women reveal a systematic practice of biological theft. Captive mothers were legally forced to strip their own human infants of breast milk—and often physical proximity—to ensure the survival and comfort of white children. This forced labor formed an agonizing intersection of economic exploitation, physical violation, and maternal trauma.

[Forced Birth under Captivity] ──► Immediate Removal of the Black Infant
                                               │
                                               ▼
[Biological Theft of Nutrition]  ──► Forced Wet-Nursing of the White Captor's Child
                                               │
                                               ▼
[Generational Trauma]           ──► Malnutrition/Death of the Captive Mother's Child

The Voices of the Archives

The WPA narratives contain explicit, harrowing descriptions of how white captors viewed the breast milk of captive Black women as property to be extracted, managed, and commodified.

The Account of Fountain Hughes: Though interviewed as an elderly man in Baltimore, Maryland, Hughes vividly recalled the structural dynamics of the plantation where his mother was held captive. He detailed how captive women who had recently given birth were immediately separated from their own infants during the day. Their milk was reserved entirely for the white children in the main house, while their own human babies were left in the care of young children or elderly captives, often nourished on nothing more than "pot liquor" (the nutrient-deficient leftover water from boiled greens) or cornmeal mush.
The Testimony of Henrietta King: Interviewed in West Virginia, King recalled the sheer physical and emotional violence tied to domestic labor. She described how captive mothers were treated as biological machinery. If a white infant required milk, the Black mother was summoned immediately, regardless of whether her own child had been fed. King noted that any resistance to this arrangement, or any attempt to prioritize her own human child, was met with immediate and severe physical retaliation from the captor.
The Record of Lou Smith: In her narrative, Smith described the exhausting dual burden placed on caretaking women. They were expected to perform heavy agricultural or domestic labor while simultaneously serving as the primary source of nutrition for white infants. Smith recounted how the natural bonds of motherhood were violently disrupted, as captive women were forced to watch white children thrive on their milk while their own biological children suffered from severe malnutrition, wasting diseases, and high mortality rates due to the lack of proper sustenance.

The Economic Architecture of Maternal Theft

This extraction of maternal resources was not a casual arrangement; it was a fundamental pillar of the antebellum domestic economy. By forcing a captive Black woman to wet-nurse a white infant, the white family achieved two economic goals simultaneously:

Preserving White Maternal Health: It insulated white women from the physical toll and sleep deprivation of infant care, allowing them to maintain their social status and quickly return to childbearing, which in turn secured the lineage of the white property-holding class.
The Devaluation of Black Infancy: Because the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem dictated that the child of a captive woman was also born into captivity, the state already owned the Black infant. However, in the immediate economic calculation of the plantation, the survival of the white heir was paramount. The captive infant's nutrition was treated as entirely disposable. If a Black infant died of malnutrition because its mother's milk was stolen, the loss was logged merely as a minor property deficit, easily replaced by forcing the woman into another pregnancy.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              THE ANTEBELLUM EXTRACTIVE CYCLE                    │
├────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┤
│ Target: The Captive Mother     │ Result: The White Household    │
├────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Milk legally commodified     │ • White infants nourished      │
│ • Forced physical separation   │ • White maternal health spared │
│ • Compulsory domestic custody  │ • Total labor output secured   │
└────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┘

The Distortion of Memory

The trauma detailed in the WPA narratives provides a vital counter-narrative to the cultural propaganda that emerged after emancipation. When white-dominated institutions popularized the submissive "Mammy" caricature in advertising, literature, and early cinema, they deliberately erased the violence of forced wet-nursing. They replaced a history of state-sanctioned maternal theft with a fiction of voluntary devotion.

The actual testimonies of the women who survived captivity tell a radically different story. They expose an archive of grief, where the most intimate, biological functions of motherhood were legally weaponized against Black women to sustain the comfort and wealth of their white captors.