Brief Summary Of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs focuses mostly on detailing the maltreatment of slaves and the impropriety of slave masters during the first part of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. By sharing facts about these incidents, she shows how slaveholding warps humanity and morality to a measure that would be considered deplorable outside of slavery. Jacobs describes the inhumane treatment of slaves when discussing a neighboring plantation. She shares how this plantation commits many cruel murders of its slaves. For example, she discusses how one slave had a “fire kindled over him, from which was suspended a piece of fat pork. As this cooked, the scalding drops of fat continually fell on bare flesh” (41). By sharing this antidote, Jacobs shows how the plantation owner not only murdered his slaves, but did so in barbaric ways.

In fact, “[h]e was so effectually screened by his great wealth that he was called to no account for his crimes, not even murder” (41). Because the plantation owner possessed great wealth, society disregarded his murders, despite their horrifying number and nature, because the slaves were viewed as his property that he could treat in whatever manner he wished. Jacobs uses this example to show how inhumane acts, which would be considered unacceptable in a free world, are accepted in slave society because slaves are viewed as property and not as human beings. In addition to describing how the institution of slavery corrupts societal morals, Jacobs also describes how individual morals become corrupted when discussing how white masters treat their beautiful female slaves. She dedicates much of the first part of her book to describing how her master, Dr. Flint, attempts to seduce her, and she outlines her