The author explores the origin and power of black women writers' voices using the personal narratives of 19th-century Americans who were slaves or indentured servants. Displaying aspects of the oral traditions of Yoruba culture in West Africa, these voices took on a subversive tone, a form of expression that Stover describes as the “mother tongue” and argues is completely different from literary forms employed by white men or women or black men. .Stover maintains that the mother tongue--a system of linguistic and physical techniques--developed in response to black women's struggles to find outlets for expression in a white male dominated society. The African American mother tongue is not a result of biology but grew out of the need of black women to resist oppression. It is a combination of words, rhythms, sounds, and silences that black women encoded with veiled meanings Stover proposes that the linguistic practices are a balance of African, European, and African American communicative techniques and include secrets, silences, hesitations, whispers, feigned misunderstanding, lying, masking, mumbling, sass, invective, impudence, and dissembling.. .Stover focuses on four texts that employ the mother tongue and engage sociopolitical issues of the 19th century--Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, and Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. .