Rape was one of the most prevalent means white male slave masters and overseers wielded control over enslaved people—particularly Black women. It was a method of reinforcing both the profitability of their chattel (slave masters were often not averse to selling off children who resulted from their assaults of enslaved women) and of ensuring the durability of the white patriarchal hierarchy on which plantation life was built.

Nelson’s poem opens with the scene of her great-great-grandmother being raped—a horrific crime which eventually resulted in her own birth. Thus, Nelson potentially complicates the reader’s feelings about the births of children who resulted from rape in the antebellum South and, inevitably, feelings about how the African American community at large resulted.