Slave Girl Sparknotes

The book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl tell the story of Harriet Jacobs, under the pseudonym of Linda Brent, and her story of surviving slavery in the American South. Not surprisingly, it is a long and brutal story filled with the violence of slave masters and an immeasurable hatred for the institution of slavery. Jacobs recounts her time as a slave and her years-long attempt at an escape before finally fleeing to the north where she eventually became a free woman. Being a female slave rather than a male slave made her life particularly cruel by the fact that she could raise children who were seen as future slaves or future profit for slaveholders and slave traders. Not to mention the heartache that comes from having your child ripped

Jacobs portrays slaveholders as having near unchecked power, only sometimes blocked by the community at large. The hierarchy goes top-down from slave owners and whites to poor whites, then free black men, then male slaves, and finally female slaves. The slave and slave owner dynamic is clear to see, but the classes in the middle have more uniqueness to them. For example, the reason poor whites are seen as ‘above’ free black men comes from Jacobs’s description of a ‘musket day’ where gangs of poor white men were gathered together and permitted to search and seize any ill-gotten gains that slaves may have had. This reinforced the racial hierarchy, even for whites who were too poor to own slaves themselves, they were still given the opportunity to brutalize them on behalf of slave owners. Slave owners themselves were given special legal privileges and protections, as was mentioned before, that codified this hierarchy. For example, if there was a child from a female slave and a male slave owner, the child would follow the lineage of the mother and therefore be considered a slave. Then the slave-owning father would not partake in caring for the child, sometimes not even their white children, and would outsource child-raising duties to the female slaves who obviously could not legally refuse. These differences in how people were treated based on their race were the key denominating

This comes at a high cost for her through incredibly risky situations. Most obviously, there is the risk of physical punishment if she is caught running away, she observed this when her brother was jailed for attempting to run away previously. She had successfully tricked Dr. Flint into thinking she had made it to the north while she was in hiding to successfully avoid this particular outcome. Slave owners also told stories of how deplorable conditions were for free slaves in the north, so awful that they were begging to return to slavery, as a way to head off any potential thought of escaping. Jacobs later learned that this particular tactic was a lie when she later made it to the north and observed her friends living comfortable lives. What kept Jacobs personally from running away was her family, specifically her grandmother and two children. She recounts what horrible things could happen to her family if she ran away and could not help them. To ensure her children’s safety she hid in an attic for 7 years nearby while family and friends took care of her children under the assumption that she had already escaped to the north. In secret, she revealed that she had stayed the entire time and when the opportunity arose, she fled to the north on a ship and later reunited with her children who were also moved to the