Harriet Jacobs And Moody

The quest for freedom is a reoccurring theme throughout the lives of Harriet Jacobs and Anne Moody in their respective biographies Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Coming of Age in Mississippi. Both narrators’ families are trapped: Jacobs and her children by dehumanizing bonds of slavery and Anne and her family by institutional poverty in the rural South. The roles these women take on to free themselves from these burdens define their notions of freedom, as well as their later activism. Harriet Jacobs’ and Anne Moody’s respective desires to be maternal and fiscal protectors of their families defines their notion is freedom, which in turn effects their beliefs and actions in their respective reform movements.
Throughout her time

in the South, Harriet Jacobs longs to fiercely protect and maintain a maternal relationship with her children, which she finds impossible under slavery. Jacob’s first mentions the futility of slave motherhood when she speaks of the “Slave’s New Year’s Day” during which she recalls “s[eeing] a mother lead seven children to the auction block…[the trader] would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price” which causes the mother extreme “anguish” (Jacobs 1861, 40). Jacobs observes that because slavery values those in bondage only as individual commodities to be bought and sold “one by one,” familial relationships between slaves are destroyed. This “anguish” displayed by the slave mother in the story later becomes apparent in Harriet herself. After spurning Dr. Flint’s repeated sexual advances, Harriet is sent to his son’s plantation to be ‘subdued’ through hard labor. When she learns that “[her] children were being brought to the plantation to be ‘broke in’” in this same manor, she is “nerved to immediate action” (Jacobs 1861, 80). Though Harriet has been subjected to innumerable instances of harassment from her master, she is only moved to action for the sake of protecting her children from the brutality of slavery, highlighting the significance of familial bonds to Harriet. Yet it also demonstrates the unobtainability of this familial affection under slavery. This reality prompts her to escape. Jacobs claims that, “it was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom.” (Jacobs 1861, 76). Referring to her children as “helpless” underscores Jacob’s desire to protect them, whilst acknowledging than in order to do so, she must escape. Due to Jacob’s desire to provider to her children, she defines freedom in personal terms: abolishing slavery and thus securing safety for her family.
Similarly, Anne Moody’s conceptualization of freedom stems from her upbringing as a provider for poverty-stricken her family; however becomes an economic provider as opposed to a maternal protector.

From an early age, Mood is conscious of her family’s abject poverty, which drives her to take on domestic jobs to support them throughout her childhood and adolescence. Even though her employers such as Mrs. Burke can be condescending and cruel, she cannot give up this work as she is “faced with a sick mother, crying babies, an unemployed step-father…[she] knew [she] had to take that job, [she] had to help secure that plate of beans if nothing else” (Moody 1968, 121). Like Jacobs, Moody is forced to endure hardships to protect her “helpless” family. The repeated motif of food (the dismal meals that are all the family can afford) serves as reminder of the family’s degree of poverty and their struggle for sustainability. But while Jacobs and Moody have a similar desire to protect their families, Moody instead does so by taking on the role of a breadwinner, not a maternal figure. She values the practical outcomes of getting food on the table more so than the personal relationships with her family. Moody only accepts the union between Ray and her mother because he can provide housing for them, which would allow them too “have a place of their own…moving off white people’s places probably for good” (Moody 1968, 45). Moody sees living with Ray’s people not as an extension of new family, but as some degree of freedom from her family’s economic situation. She asserts that they are moving off “white people’s places,” showing a degree of independence from her white employers, demonstrating how Anne seeks fiscal independence from the system of poverty in which she lives. Her family life, in which she lives hand-to-mouth, causes her to equate freedom not with the capacity for personal relationships but with economic

sustainability.
Due to her history as a breadwinner and belief in the importance of economic independence, Anne Moody’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement focuses more on the practical issues of employment and poverty relief than ideological battles. Much of Moody’s work in the small town of Canton, Mississippi is providing food and clothes to the poor of the town. She mentions one case in particular in which she bought two girls necessary clothes for school out of her own paycheck, as the sight of them “was a replica of my [her] past” (Moody 1698, 341). Anne’s own experiences in poverty directly inform her activism; instead of fighting for abstract ideals she fights for issues directly affecting people. In fact, Moody holds a near disdain for those in the movement who are not as focused with concrete issues. At the March on Washington, Moody muses that the movement “had “dreamers” instead of leaders…in Canton [she] never had the time to sleep, much less dream” (Moody 1968, 337) To Moody, the bread-and-butter matters of Canton—as tireless and unforgiving as they are—make up the heart of the movement; they practically benefit the lives of black southerners. However, the leaders of the movement are so focused on the ideological “dreams” that they have become ineffective. This is the same reason that she opposes the symbolic “Freedom Vote.” Although it is ideologically well intentioned, Moody “couldn’t see mobilizing the Negroes around a false campaign” (Moody 1968, 363). Anne differs from the other activists in that she focuses purely on the tangible effects of reform. In contrast, she supports employment measures such as getting farmers FHA loans to make their land viable for farming and therefor employ themselves and the community. Moody comments, “if there were 29,000 independent Negroes…instead of 29,000 starving Negroes…things would be different” (Moody 1968, 365). To her, obtaining freedom for the poor black south hinges on economic stability and employment and in her activism enables this.
In contrast, Jacob’s work of activism is to take her personal accounts of attaining freedom and make her narrative a rallying cry for abolitionist reform. Abolition, in the content of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is a personal fight for Jacobs: to liberate her self and her family from slavery and begin a new life in the north. In her closing of the book, Jacobs declares, “I and my children are now free…and though that not is saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition.” (Jacobs 1861, 164) Jacobs again emphasizes that the abolition of slavery in her family was a personal struggle. However the presentation of this narrative is used to inspire more widespread reform. She claims in the forward of the novel that she wants to “add my testimony …to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only my experience can anyone realize how deep, dark, and foul is that pit of abominations” (Jacobs 1961, 3). In writing this narrative, Jacobs is able to take these individual, personal accounts and use them to convey a larger message—the vile nature of slavery. Jacob’s narrative is made up of personal accounts (not just her life, but the lives of friends and family) of those who have suffered under slavery. As in Moody’s work, Jacob’s focus is on the harsh realities and depravity of oppression of black people in the south. But Jacobs additionally uses these personal accounts to inspire widespread reform. She does this is by directly addressing her audience of “you happy free women” to “contrast your New Year’s day with that of the poor bond-woman!” (Jacobs 1861,16) Jacobs forces her audience to consider that while they live in comfort with their families, slaves are faced with dehumanization and brutality which fractures their family trees. Jacob’s work of reform in the abolitionist movement is not in the content of the autobiography (as in Moody’s work) but in it’s function—Jacobs has written a call to arms to its white Northern readership to recognize and end the perils of slavery. While Moody recounts with the bread-and-butter issues of reform, Jacobs uses personal experience to appeal to wider ideological change and education about the evils of her oppression and pushes those in her audience to action.
For both Harriet Jacobs and Anne Moody the definitions of freedom formed by their familial bonds drive their involvement in reform, in both the content and function of their works.
Both accounts are heart wrenching and personal in their content, yet in their individual aspirations serve as catalysts for change.