From time to time, I will be sharing what I think may be relevant and interesting essays from my graduate studies at Mercy College. I am pursuing a master of arts degree in English literature with a concentration on African American/Africana literature. In light of Women's History Month which is butted right up against Black History Month, I thought that it would be cool for me to share one of the shorter responses I wrote to a question asking me to explore how Harriet A. Jacobs wrote to power in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave, Written by Herself. Being both a self-liberated African slave and a woman, Jacobs's is a human rights pioneer whose life story aptly addresses the themes of both months—both race and gender.
Before we jump, I'll introduce you to Harriet A. Jacobs, if you haven't met, and reacquaint you if you have.
Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, as Harriet Ann Jacobs on an unknown day in 1813, Jacobs was orphaned early and was raised by her maternal grandmother, who as a free woman. Still Jacobs lived the tortured and violated life of an enslaved woman under the ownership of a local physician and his fiercely jealous wife.
After refusing to give in to her master's indecent proposal and his vengeful threat to sell her children, Jacobs arranged for her children to be bought by their father (a white lawyer). Her children were sent North, and Jacobs went into hiding for seven years in her grandmother's cramped attic.
Finally escaping to the North in 1842, Jacobs ended up working in a reading room just above Frederick Douglass's newspaper, North Star. Through a series of events, Jacobs became friends with Quaker reformer Amy Post, who encouraged Jacobs to write her story. After five years of writing, Jacobs self-published Incidents in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, which is how I first read it several years ago.
Upon this second reading, I agree with the experts, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is "an eloquent and uncompromising slave narrative" and is "arguably the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman." (Encyclopedia Britannica) In her writings we can clearly see the intersecting, overlapping, and oppressive struggle of a person of color and of a woman.
How Harriet A. Jacobs Wrote to Power
In writing Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Harriet A. Jacobs "wanted to contribute her life story to the abolitionist cause in a way that would capture the attention of Northern white women in particular, to show them how slavery debased and demoralized women, at once subjecting them to white male lust and also depriving them of the right to make homes for their families." (Baym 921) There were two power structures at which Jacobs aimed her writing: race and gender. Jacobs was a forerunner for black feminism, having little choice but to take on two power structures at once, since for black women and other women of color both overlap and one can hardly be undone without the undoing of the other. This is where our contemporary concept of intersectionality rears its head, where two or more systems of inequity overlap within one group's social connection with the world, creating multiple platforms for discrimination and injustice.
For black women, there's always been a struggle with race and gender together. And Jacobs was a genius for understanding this intersectionality and knew whom to set as a target for her writing. Realistically, her target audience could not have been other blacks, because they had no power and no influence, as they too were trapped by slavery and its surrounding mind-set. She could not have targeted white men because they were her direct oppressors and did not place a high value on the word of women, let alone a black woman. But Northern white women held a unique place in society. They were opposed to slavery, many of them, and they too were bound by paternalism and patriarchy, suffering many of the same abuses black women suffered at the hands and wills of white men. Being part of the dominant race and class, Northern white women also had leverage within the power systems that oppressed Jacobs and other enslaved blacks. In order to "write to power" and get the necessary passionate response and sold-out commitment to aid and assist, Jacobs' utilized a her keen knowledge of her target audience to very humbly and prudently highlight her oppressor's guilt while playing up her innocence and inability to effectively choose sound responses to that oppression. The two actions worked out in harmony in this writing causing the reader to be emotionally moved to act, to help, and to rescue.
The place where this move on the reader's emotions is set in high gear is in chapter 10, "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life." Jacobs had confessed to her master, Dr. Flint, that she had fallen in love with a free black man and wanted to get married. His reaction was so strong that Jacobs couldn't even bear to give the reader the details. He tried to make up with her and declared that he would build her a home away from everyone, especially his wife so that she would be unbothered and he could "make a lady out of [her]." (928) Even as he spoke, she vowed to never step foot in that home, no matter what she'd have to do. So she began to devise her own plan to regain a sense of control and ownership of her own body, mind, and spirit. But instead of just telling the reader what this plan is she spends a suspended amount of time expressing guilt and remorse while employing direct address with her target audience. She really wanted the reader to know that under normal circumstances, she would not be caught ever making decisions like she was to make. She faced her audience eye to eye, "And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could." (929) The reader would be bracing themselves for the worst. Then before she told of the act, she recounted for the reader what the master had done to "pollute [her] mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by [her] grandmother, and the good mistress of her childhood." (929) The reader had already decided that they hated Dr. Flint, but she brought it up close again for another whiff, so that the reader would know for sure that she was "struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery," and the reader would sympathize that indeed "the monster proved too strong for [her]." (929) For anyone, really, the reader might have been compelled to think. What person could withstand these horrors?
Jacobs had so humanized her struggles, her internal battle, that the reader can only so very closely relate. If there had been any subconscious thought that black enslaved people didn't feel real physical or emotional pain or somehow could endure hardship in ways whites couldn't, that somehow blacks are super-strong, and especially black women are more emotionally strong, Jacobs stripped down those stereotypes and harmful mind-sets to show that she was just as broken and beaten down by slavery and abuse as any other woman might have been. Her targeted efforts in writing a transparent piece pointed directly at oppressive power structure, while highlighting the slavery victim's point of view, were strategic and well-enacted.
We still have Jacobs's writing compelling us today because of how she invited her readers into her honest internal strivings. We understand the outline and basic sketches for what external and physical forces came against her—for this was not a tell-all for the general market reader. However, for her target audience, connecting with the internal emotional struggle was what won their hearts, sympathies, and committed actions that fueled their fight for the liberation of enslaved people.
Works Cited
Baym, Nina ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th. (2012). NY: W&W Norton.
"Harriet A. Jacobs: American Abolitionist and Author." Encyclopedia Britannica Online . Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. 03 Mar. 2016.