Week 7: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Deciding what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” is one of the most difficult conundrums any human will face in life. We all are told from a young age that there will be consequences if we do not choose the “right” thing to do. But who says what is “right”? Technically everything in life is right and just in life until something, whether it is religion or morals or the law says otherwise. There is no concrete right and wrong until the majority of the population agrees on something and votes it into law. We learn, at times, from the mistakes of our predecessors. The attitudes and views of slavery in America were passed down generation to generation coming over from England, which shared the same practice along with many European countries. Slavery in British North America started around 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony at Jamestown (http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_overview.htm). It was just the thinking of some people (and unfortunately still is of some) that African American people are nothing more than soulless creatures. Slaves were property to be bought and traded, just because of the color of their skin.

Some whites that owned slaves probably didn’t even know what they were doing was bad. Slaves weren’t human, which is no excuse, but it also may shed a little light into what they were doing. It is built into human nature to enact power over someone who is inferior (see Stanford Prison Experiment), as slaves were to their white “Masters”. However, through the slaves who could read and write we have a clear glimpse into the life of a slave from the slave’s point of view. I would relate this to reading a book of someone who had been conscious during a surgery, when his or her body was supposed to be under anesthesia. Most people think that it is an extended sleep with no pain, but what if it wasn’t. What if there was intense pain the entire time, or they were awake? This pain and injustice that many literate slaves tried to get across in their narratives.

Harriet Jacobs’ narrative “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is an exceptional insight into the life of a female slave. Many of the more famous slave narratives were written by men, yet Harriet herself even says, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women” (218). Women have more things to lose being slaves. In Harriet’s, or her literary alter ego, Linda’s case it was her children she was at risk of losing. Many in Linda’s family, including her grandmother, thought that her sole duty was to her children and family and not to her search for freedom. Yet Linda (Harriet) desperately planned her escape, leaving her children with her grandmother. Linda needed to be free; she needed to stick it to Dr. Flint and the system that she was not property. She refused to accept the constrains that were placed against her. She loved her children and knew the consequences of her escape, “I was about to risk everything on the throw of a die; and if I failed, O what would become of me and my poor children? They would be made to suffer for my fault” (240). She was away from her children for 7 years; this too was a selfless-selfishness in the pursuit of her own personal freedom. Yet her grandmother tells her to “stand by your own children, and suffer with them till death. Nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children” (234).

What is the morally “right” thing to do as a woman? Leave your children with a relative in search of personal freedom and victory? In hopes that one day you might save them too one day? Or staying with your children and suffering as much as they do? In today’s society, women face this same dilemma. While there is a push for women to be independent and work, this leaves their families to fend for themselves. Most times the children are raised by daycare workers or babysitter, or even sometimes become latchkey kids who take care of themselves every day. Just as Linda’s children were partially raised by their great-grandmother. So which is “right”? Should women choose to leave their children in order to be independent? Who’s responsible for the children? Men should be responsible also, but that’s a different story. Now I’m not talking about single mothers who have to provide for their families, just the women who do not need to work all day, but choose to anyway. Yes, women deserve to be happy to but not all children can be raised by daycare workers.