Essay On Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was determined to fight to the death for her freedom. Harriet Ann Jacobs was an astonishing slave woman whom over came many great obstacles in life. Harriet wrote an autobiography about her life called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, under the pseudo name of Linda Brent. Her story talks about her struggles and achievements as a slave. Harriet used different names in the story to hind the identity of her fellow slaves and her masters.Yet while Douglass could show “how a slave became a man” in a physical fight with an overseer, Jacobs’s gender determined a different course. Pregnant with the child of a white lover of her own choosing, fifteen year old Jacobs reasoned (erroneously) that her condition would

spur her licentious master to sell her and her child. Once she was a mother, with “ties to life,” as she called them, her concern for her children had to take precedence over her own self-interest. Thus throughout her narrative, Jacobs is looking not only for freedom but also for a secure home for her children. She might also long for a husband, but her shameful early liaison, resulting in two children born “out of wedlock,” meant, as she notes with perhaps a dose of sarcasm, that her story ends “not, in the usual way, with marriage,” but “with freedom.” In this finale, she still mourns (even though her children were now grown) that she does not have “a home of my own.” Douglass’s 1845 narrative, conversely, ends with his standing as a speaker before an eager audience and feeling an exhilarating “degree of freedom.” While Douglass’s and Jacobs’s lives might seem to have moved in different directions, it is nevertheless important not to miss the common will that their narratives proclaim. They never lost their determination to gain not only freedom from enslavement but also respect for their individual humanity and that of other bondsmen and women.
This is the story of a young woman who perseveres in order to achieve freedom for herself and her children, although she endures prolonged psychological and physical suffering that continues long after her escape from slavery. In some important ways –particularly Jacobs’ story of seven and a half years in hiding.
This is a deeply conflicted and troubled text over issues of sexuality.

If on the one hand there is the pursuit and coercion of a female slave and her public regret of a loss of “purity,” there are also elements of the seduction novel and her use of sexuality to make a severely limited choice of partners and so frustrate her master. Yet the question remains obvious: is Harriet Jacobs’ choice a real choice, or is it self-defense? Jacobs turns a situation of duress to the best advantage possible. While she recognizes the Victorian code of domestic propriety, she recognizes too that this is a code meant for white women rather than black women. But Jacobs refuses to be consigned to the role of a kept woman; she demands equality.
As the narrative continues, Incidents speaks to many readers due to its portrait of resilient motherhood under extreme duress. Jacobs is a woman caught in a dilemma between self-preservation and the emotional call and responsibilities of motherhood. She becomes a mother due to lack of free choice, but is a devoted mother nonetheless. In the end hiding is insufficient: a labor system that places capital value on each enslaved family member causes her separation from her children and the family’s

fragmentation.
Most slave narratives emphasize the physical brutality and deprivation that slaves were forced to endure, presenting gory descriptions of beatings and lynchings to shock the reader. Jacobs does not ignore such issues, but her focus on slaves’ mental and spiritual anguish makes an important contribution to the genre. As a slave with a relatively “easy” life, Linda does not have to endure constant beatings and hard physical labor. However, she and many of the other slaves around her suffer greatly from being denied basic human rights and legal protection. Men and women are not permitted to marry whomever they choose-they often are not allowed to marry at all. Women are frequently forced to sleep with the masters they despise. Worst of all, families are torn apart, with children sold to a place far away from their parents. Thus, even slaves who are not beaten or starved are stripped of their humanity. When Linda states that she would rather be a desperately poor English farm laborer than a “pampered” slave, she underscores the point that slavery’s mental cruelty is every bit as devastating as its physical abuses.
Harriet Jacobs was the first Afro-American woman slave who authored her narrative.

Her book was adored in the late 1970s which was the period of white and black rise of feminism. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl focuses on a destiny of slave woman depicted as a victim of sexual abuse. Harriet Jacobs depicted her struggle to unwanted sexual attentions of her master and her escape by hiding for with her two children for seven years. This is one of the major slave narrative topics. Slave narratives contain very often a description of a cruel master or mistress who abuses their slaves, overseers whipping slaves, savage barbarity and injustice not being protected by law. Frequently repeated motives are separation from family, hard labor and starvation, sexual abuse and physical punishment. Ex-slaves described their quest for literacy and

freedom.
Harriet Jacobs in an effort to add her “testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is” wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the pen name Linda Brent. Privileged as much as a slave could consider themselves, Jacobs enjoyed a mild introduction to slavery until her she was eventually relinquished to Margaret Horn blow’s five year old niece, and by default her father, Dr. James Norcom. A lifetime of enduring the lust and manipulations of men forged the life that Jacob shared in her narrative. Resisted and condemned by slave masters and their mistresses alike for her brutal honesty, Jacobs’ narrative depicted life as an enslaved woman with its entire unspoken and often neglected vicissitudes. Though she had her fair share of speaking engagements and published letters and essays, Jacobs’s abolitionist works were more grassroots in nature. Every bit as important to the cause, Jacobs participated in fundraisers, food drives, and medical shelters as well as many other events of this type. Ever ready to add her voice to abolitionist affairs, she penned letters, solicited funds and supplies, and drummed up support on behalf of many small organizations and concerned citizen groups aimed at the eventual dismantling of the slave culture of nineteenth century America.
A slave narrative by definition, Jacobs ironically spends the majority of her narrative outside of the direct authority of her master. Nevertheless, like Douglass, Jacob’s status as a slave was more than her legal designation as such or her actual physical bondage. Harriet Jacobs, as was the case for women in bondage, was a sex object first, and a working slave second, and a human being never. Jacobs’ spent the entire narrative trying to escape the pursuit of those who would reduce her to sexual servitude and though she was driven to use the same sexual wiles to manufacture aspects of her escape, it was Jacobs’ wit and fortitude that eventually gained her freedom. Jacobs in her narrative relates many details of her slave life and brutal experiences. This is a strong signal that, while her story seems to be in the familiar vein of the slave narrative, with the focus on the struggle for freedom and equality, Jacobs is ultimately concerned with the search for a “true home”.
In order to show how the violence of slavery affects the family in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this discussion will examine the major "homes" Jacobs presents: those of her childhood, her parents', grandmother's, and first mistress's homes; those of her adolescence, the Flint home and again her grandmother's home; and those of her adulthood, her garret hideaway and the Bruce home. Obviously, each differs in numerous ways, 'but what each has in common is Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent's inability to create a safe domestic refuge of her own for herself and for her family.
In part, this failure results from the inability of her own family to protect her; her father does not wield the sort of authority over his family the way a white man might and is unable, rather than unwilling, to free his children. And her grandmother's protection is uneven at best; she cannot keep Linda from the Flints' service, but she is an accomplice in Linda's later deception of her owners. Likewise, the men who have-the power to help her create a home are, in fact, obstacles to her success-Dr. Flint actively tries to steer her from the ''white" morality in which Linda's grandmother raised her, and, in response, she turns from it on her own 'through her decision to take a white lover, Mr. Sands. The problems Dr. Flint causes her, and Linda's reactions to those problems, are enormous factors in her later decisions: she bears two children to Mr. Sands in order to avoid Dr. Flint, which complicates her later escape by creating an attachment to the very area which she wishes to flee. Consequently, she mothers her children vicariously, so that when she is in a position to be a "real" mother to them, her family is already disrupted beyond repair, and she soothes her maternal instinct by ''mothering" another woman's child. In' this way, Linda completes a cycle of domestic failure through her responses to the various homes in which she lives.
Violence is a motif common to all slave narratives, and Incidents is no exception. One of Linda’s earliest memories is hearing Dr. Flint brutally whip one of his plantation slaves. She recalls seeing the blood and gore on the walls the next morning. Mrs. Flint, a supposed Christian, orders slaves whipped until they bleed and spits in their food so they will have to go hungry. She forces Aunt Nancy to sleep on the floor outside her room, continuing this practice even when Nancy is pregnant, causing her to give birth to many stillborn babies. Mrs. Flint’s treatment of Aunt Nancy, as Linda points out, amounts to murder committed very slowly. Slaves are burned, frozen, and whipped to death. Their wounds are washed with brine for further agonizing torture. Jacobs includes such accounts throughout the book, narrating them in detail to shock the reader into sympathy for slaves and to goad him or her into joining the abolitionist movement. Such stories of violence also counteract the common proslavery claim that most slaves were well cared for and led happy, peaceful lives.
Born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs by her own admission, “never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.” Due to the skill of her father and the luck of her mother and grandmother to have a descent mistresses, Jacobs had escaped much of the horrid, early images that plagued most common slaves in the plantation south. Nevertheless her fortunes changed by the age of six when her mother died. Left in the care of her grandmother’s mistress she was put to more intensive labor but still nothing close to the degradation experienced by the majority of other American slaves at the time.
No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed upon me. My mistress was so kind to me that I was always glad to do her bidding, and proud to labor for her as much as my young years would permit…Those were happy days- too happy to last. The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel (157).
Around age twelve Jacobs’ mistress died. Brief hopes that the bond her former mistress, she, her mother, and grandmother shared would result in her being freed were dashed when her former mistress’ will was read. She had been bequeathed to the daughter of her mistress’ sister. Even before Jacobs had knew the totality of the calamity that had just descended upon her, she was adequately traumatized by the fact she had been sold.
My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s word: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor. I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great wrong…I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice…I bless her memory…Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend (158).
If there remained any glimpse of freedom, any impression of humane treatment, or feeling of self-mastery Jacobs may have fooled herself into keeping from her sheltered childhood it was shattered at the reading of her mistress’ will. Jacobs was fully introduced to the records of slavery and the depths to which those who were a part of it would sink to maintain status quo.
Jacobs was sent to stay with the sister of her former mistress and her husband, Dr. James Norcom. Unlike her former mistress, the Norcoms were typical owners who treated their slaves like the chattel their social status dictated they were.
Mrs. [Norcom], like many southern women was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit easily in her chair and see a woman whipped, till blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church; but partaking of the Lord’s Supper did not seem to put her in a Christian frame of mind. If dinner was not served at the exact time on that particular Sunday, she would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and Jacobs then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meagre fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings…Dr. [Norcom] was an epicure. The cook never sent a dinner to his table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a dish not to his liking, he would either order her whipped, or compels her to eat every mouthful in his presence. The poor, hungry creature might not have objected to eating it; but she did object to having her master cram it down her throat till she choked.
This was a new life for Jacobs. To make matters worse she was quickly initiated into her fate with the death of her father. Miserable, distraught, and in need of consoling, Jacobs had one meager request: to visit her dead father who was but under a mile away. The need flowers for an upcoming dinner party required Jacobs’ time and attention preventing her from seeing her father. Jacobs was able to gain more insight to the manner in which her worth, or lack thereof, was constituted.