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For Black History Month, the politics book club decided to read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I had read this back in college as part of a survey course of early American literature, and while “enjoyed” seems maybe not quite the right word for the experience of reading a slavery narrative, I did think it was very good and–well, frankly, I did enjoy reading it, because it was a tense and dramatic story, and things that make good reading are different from things that I approve of.
Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.
Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.
Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.
After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.
Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.
Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.
Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.
Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.
Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.
Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.
After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.
Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.
Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.
Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.