I [Topsy] ’spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.

The line is spoken by Topsy, an enslaved Black child in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* (1852). Topsy is introduced in the St. Clare household as a “heathen” child who has been neglected, abused, and denied stable family ties or moral instruction. In a conversation about her origins and upbringing, she explains—half defensively, half matter-of-factly—that she doesn’t believe anyone “made” her, as if she simply “grow’d.” Stowe uses Topsy’s dialect and startling self-description to dramatize the dehumanizing effects of slavery on children: the severing of kinship, education, and a sense of being intentionally cared for or created.

Topsy’s remark compresses the psychological violence of slavery into a child’s blunt logic. Saying she “grow’d” and that “nobody never made” her suggests a life without acknowledged parentage, nurture, or even the basic assurance of being wanted. The line also works as social indictment: a society that treats children as property produces children who cannot locate themselves within ordinary narratives of family, responsibility, or moral formation. In the novel’s moral framework, Topsy’s later responsiveness to affection and religious teaching underscores Stowe’s argument that what appears as innate “badness” is often the result of systematic neglect and cruelty—and that recognition of shared humanity can restore personhood.