Chapter 14 of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) includes a passage where the author recalls the horror she feels at the possibility that “they will leave you in some cold cabin to die, and then throw you into a hole as if you were a dog” (Jacobs 118). Jacobs regularly seeks to inspire her readers with the same outrage that she feels, upon thinking of how slaves are treated no differently than non-human animals, in death as well as in life. She refers, for example, to one slave who dies after being locked for days in a compartment of an agricultural machine, as punishment for attempting to escape. When the compartment was opened, “the dead body was found partly eaten by rats and vermin. . . . (He was) put . . . into a rough box, and buried . . . with less feeling than would have been manifested for an old house dog” (Jacobs 76). In this emphasis on the importance of treating human remains with dignity, Jacobs’s book touches a persistent theme in the literary classics that we consider in HUM 101W: both Antigone in Sophocles’s play, and Charlemagne in The Song of Roland, determines to prevent the bodies of people they love from being left as carrion for wild animals.
Jacobs’s Chapter 14 reflects at least three other themes that are prominent in her book. They are the special sufferings beyond those common to all slaves, to which female slaves are exposed, the destruction of male authority within the enslaved community, and its partial replacement by structures of female authority.
Entitled “A New Tie to Life”; Jacobs’s Chapter 14 covers Jacobs’s second pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. It is in describing her despair upon learning that she gave birth to a girl, that Jacobs articulates the first of these themes. “Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women,” Jacobs writes. “Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (119).
The men, who in the normal order of nineteenth-century family life, would be responsible for protecting Jacobs and her children from such dangers are either absent or incapable of assisting. Her uncle, Benjamin, for whom her older child derives her name, removes himself from the scene by escaping to the north / his relatively pale skin facilitates the escape, which brings up another of Jacobs’s themes: the “tangled . . . (mixed-race) genealogies of slavery” (Jacobs 39, 121). Her children’s father, a local white man, offers the meager symbolic comfort of allowing them to use his surname. However, Jacobs rejects this offer to avoid further provoking her “master,” and thereby imperilling her long-term strategy to secure her children’s freedom (Jacobs 120). As for Jacobs’s father, death removes him from the scene. Jacobs emphasizes that the legal powerlessness of enslaved fathers, and their exposure to physical coercion, tends to negate or corrupt their paternal authority. “Some poor creatures,” have been so brutalized by the lash that they will . . . give their masters free access to their wives and daughters” (Jacobs 68).
The reason why Jacobs’s children are born enslaved like their mother, and not free like their father, is that “slaveholders are cunning enough to enact that ‘the child shall follow the condition of the mother,’ not of the father“—a law designed to ensure that the sexual exploitation of slave women will not lessen their economic value as breeders of saleable property
(Jacobs 117-18). This law sets up a symbolic connection between slavery and womanhood; and between slave-holding authority and the male gender. The events narrated in Chapter 14 bear these connections out. Jacobs describes repeated instances of physical violence directed against her by her legal master, Dr. Flint (actually the father of her legal owner, who is still a child). Dr. Flint’s rage at Jacobs’s defiance causes him, on one occasion, to “pitched me downstairs in a fit of passion”; on another occasion, he strikes her; on another, “storming and swearing,” he forcibly shaves her head (a biblical punishment imposed on women for sexual immorality) (Jacobs 118). Against such abuses, Jacob’s grandmother affords a small measure of protection from his moral authority, in whose house she is living this whole time. Generally speaking, Jacobs seeks to prevent her grandmother’s “natural and motherlike” instincts from stirring up conflict with Dr. Flint (Jacobs 119). However, one occasion, her grandmother arrives when unconscious Jacobs is being “shaken . . . violently” by an enraged Dr. Flint, causing the latter to “hurried out of the house” (Jacobs 119-20). Jacobs’s grandmother has no legal and presumably little physical power to oppose Dr. Flint. However, as an older woman and a respected member of the community, she possesses a degree of moral authority that makes Dr. Flint think twice about getting into public spats with her. Earlier in her book, Jacobs describes how, when she was still living in the Flint household, the moral force field that surrounds her great aunt shields her from the old creep’s sexual predations, also a slave of the Flints, by whose side she sleeps. “She was an old woman and had been in the family for many years. Moreover, as a married man, and a professional man, he deems it necessary to save appearances in some degree” (Jacobs 51-52). Such moral pressures only work because it is in the relatively fortunate position of living “in a town where all the inhabitants knew each other”; had she “been on a remote plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city,” her predicament would have been far more frightening (Jacobs 55).