Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Harriet Jacobs- "The Life of a Slave Girl"

The narrative of Harriet Jacobs tells of her life as she experienced slavery. She tells of all the significant events that occurred to her while under the power of her owners.
She starts out by commenting on how her master speaks evil words to her ear and is scared to tell anyone of what is happening. This seems normal due to the fact that during slavery, the slaves had no right or couldn't be protected by anyone other than their owners. As her story goes on, she tells of several times in which she would have rather been dead than alive in order to stop all the bad done to her. She also mentions that she one day was caught learning how to write. This was extremely rare during this time due to the bad treatment that slaves received which caused me to wonder if her master truly cared for her.
Her master always protected her and never let anyone mistreat her which I thought was odd. What also struck me was that the doctor's wife had hatred towards Linda, but never did anything to stop her husband's abuse. The wife knew that her husband had 9 children with the slave women, but she never put an end to anything. During this time period I could understand that the wife was always under the husband's orders, but in the situation that Mrs. Flint was in, it was just too much. No women should have been allowed to be treated in that manner no matter what. Also, Mrs. Flint always took her anger out on the slaves because she could have possibly been jealous of them, which was also a contradictory dilemma.
The one line that caught my attention was that of around pg140 where she say's, " Truly the colored race are the most cheerful and forgiving people on the face of the Earth." This line goes to prove that society wasn't at its best and that the slaves did truly go through a lot of pain and suffering.

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