Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.” 

Using comparison and analogy, Jacobs explains the status of slaves. They were property and so, similar to other valuable objects. Her comparison of slaves to horses echoes that of Frederick Douglass, who related an anecdote about an elderly enslaved man who was valued even less than a slave holder’s horse.

“When grandmother applied to him for payment, he said the estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with that money. I presume they will be handed down in the family, from generation to generation.” 

Dr. Flint refused Martha the repayment that she had been promised after her late mistress borrowed $300 from her. This underscore the fact that slave owners had no sense of honor toward those whom they owned. Modern readers can see how wealth did not pass down through Black generations, resulting in the contemporary wealth gap between Black and White Americans.

“But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother’s agonies.”

Emphasizing the unique hardships of enslaved women, Jacobs illustrates how holiday seasons, though festive in both plantation houses and slave quarters, were also stressful. New Year’s Day was also the day slave owners put some of their human livestock up for sale. This meant that Black families were often torn apart.

“Slaveholders have a method, peculiar to their institution, of getting rid of old slaves, whose lives have been worn out in their service. I knew an old woman, who for seventy years faithfully served her master. She had become almost helpless, from hard labor and disease. Her owners moved to Alabama, and the old black woman was left to be sold to any body who would give twenty dollars for her.” 

Jacobs’s anecdote demonstrates that Black bodies were regarded as disposable when they no longer served a commercial purpose. In the case of women, that purpose was primarily to produce more slaves.

“He said he was no longer a boy, and every day made his yoke more galling […] I reminded him of the poverty and hardships he must encounter among strangers. I told him he might be caught and brought back; and that was terrible to think of. He grew vexed, and asked if poverty and hardships with freedom, were not preferable to our treatment in slavery.” 

Jacobs is describing her conversation with her Uncle Benjamin—her grandmother’s youngest child. Benjamin ran away from his cruel master, thereby asserting both his freedom and his manhood. Jacobs’s warnings to him about “poverty and hardships” indicate that she, like many enslaved people, believed that she was safer with her masters, who discouraged slaves from running away by telling lies about how difficult their lives would be without masters. Jacobs later learned the truth when she escaped.

“No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.”

Jacobs explains that color made no difference in the life of an enslaved girl or woman. This undermines the false belief that the lives of house slaves, usually lighter-skinned, were preferable to or more privileged than those of field slaves, who were usually darker-skinned.

“Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves […] She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child.”

Jacobs explains that enslaved children did not experience the innocent childhoods of their White counterparts. While boys were often forced to work in the field by 12, girls were often sexually assaulted by their masters.

“The tears came to my eyes; but I was soon convinced that her emotions arose from anger and wounded pride. She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.” 

Mrs. Flint reacts with rage to her husband’s desire for teenaged Jacobs. Mrs. Flint feels no empathy toward Jacobs, despite the young girl’s inability to consent or refuse her master’s attacks, and did not identify with her shame. Instead, Mrs. Flint characterized herself as the victim and quietly exonerated her husband of responsibility.

“Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight. I am glad to say there are some honorable exceptions.”

Mrs. Flint’s distaste for enslaved people, particularly women, was not unique, nor was her willful avoidance of her husband’s sins. By denying enslaved women and their offspring any humanity, White slave-owning women placed themselves in a different class—one in which they held all feminine virtues, while their Black counterparts had none.

“My lover was an intelligent and religious man. Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me while I was a slave, the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master […] The dream of my girlhood was over. I felt lonely and desolate.”

Jacobs’s childhood friend—a free Black man—wished to marry her. However, as long as Dr. Flint refused to sell her, their marriage would have no standing.

“He was a slave; and the feeling was that the master had a right to do what he pleased with his own property. And what did he care for the value of a slave? He had hundreds of them.” 

Jacobs describes various incidents, such as this one, in which very wealthy slave owners expressed a cavalier attitude toward those whom they enslaved. Sometimes, their indifference permitted them to exact cruelty in the form of torture. In other instances, a slave owner would kill at whim, suffering no consequences other than financial loss.

“Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman.” 

In one instance, an enslaved woman’s family was broken up because she revealed that her owner had fathered her child. The knowledge caused quarreling between her and her husband, undermining the solidity of their marriage. Jacobs underscores how slavery strained Black family relationships.

“After spelling out a few words, he paused, and said, ‘Honey, it ’pears when I can read dis good book I shall be nearer to God. White man is got all de sense. He can larn easy. It ain’t easy for ole black man like me. I only wants to read dis book, dat I may know how to live; den I hab no fear ’bout dying.’” 

An older Black man enlisted Jacobs’s help to learn how to read. After proving to be a quick study, he expressed his reasons for wanting to learn at the end of his life. Jacobs’s anecdote underscores the importance of reading in helping people to make sense of the world, which is why slave owners forbade it. Reading would have made the enslaved aware of their condition and more inclined to seek freedom.

“When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

Slavery presented additional challenges to girls and women, who were usually raped or forced into concubinage. She feared that her daughter would be subject to the same harassment that she suffered under Dr. Flint.

“My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.” 

Jacobs refused to be cowed by Dr. Flint, despite her absence of any legal rights. Her unwavering sense of her own humanity preserved her in a setting in which no one else would recognize her humanity.

“Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.” 

Jacobs often uses rhetorical questions to help readers understand the peculiar circumstances of those who are enslaved. Disempowered slaves resorted to subterfuge to get what they needed from their masters (e.g., food, or time to see their families), which was imperative in a system in which they had neither rights nor humanity.

“Everybody knew he had the blood of a slave father in his veins; but for the sake of passing himself off for white, he was ready to kiss the slaveholders’ feet. How I despised him!”

Jacobs expresses her contempt for a free Black man who aligned himself with slaveholding Whites to maintain a degree of privilege. He is one of three Black people in the narrative whom Jacobs describes as a traitor, due to their complicity with the system that oppressed their brethren.

Any white man, who could raise money would have considered himself degraded by being a constable; but the office enabled its possessor to exercise authority. If he found any slave out after nine o’clock, he could whip him as much as he liked; and that was a privilege to be coveted. When the guests were ready to depart, my grandmother gave each of them some of her nice pudding, as a present for their wives.”

Being a town constable, a lower-class position, was appealing because it afforded a White man the opportunity to debase those who were Black. Grandmother Martha protected herself and her family against these contemptible people by currying favor through her cooking, as many older Black women did.

“Sometimes I thought God was a compassionate Father, who would forgive my sins for the sake of my sufferings. At other times, it seemed to me there was no justice or mercy in the divine government. I asked why the curse of slavery was permitted to exist, and why I had been so persecuted and wronged from youth upward. These things took the shape of mystery, which is to this day not so clear to my soul as I trust it will be hereafter.” 

Jacobs, who is devout, expresses some misgivings about the purpose of her suffering, which she assumed was going to become clear at the end of her life. Having relied on Christianity as a source of comfort reveals the hope that the enslaved maintained in the face of extraordinary oppression.

“If the secret memoirs of many members of Congress should be published, curious details would be unfolded. I once saw a letter from a member of Congress to a slave, who was the mother of six of his children. He wrote to request that she would send her children away from the great house before his return, as he expected to be accompanied by friends. The woman could not read, and was obliged to employ another to read the letter. The existence of the colored children did not trouble this gentleman, it was only the fear that friends might recognize in their features a resemblance to him.” 

Even the nation’s leaders, some of whom were slaveholders, were guilty of raping enslaved women, keeping them as concubines, and fathering children with them. In this anecdote, the Congressman has a “great house,” which indicates wealth. His main concern is his reputation, not his morals.

“At the south, a gentleman may have a shoal of colored children without any disgrace, but if he is known to purchase them, with the view of setting them free, the example is thought to be dangerous to their ‘peculiar institution,’ and he becomes unpopular.” 

Jacobs again points to the hypocrisy that persisted among Southern Christians. By determining that Black people were property and, thus, subhuman, they rationalized the reproduction of Black children. To free them would have been an acknowledgement of their humanity, which would undermine the system that the South upheld through consensus.

“But while fashionables were listening to the thrilling voice of Jenny Lind in Metropolitan Hall, the thrilling voices of poor hunted colored people went up, in an agony of supplication, to the Lord, from Zion’s church.”

Jenny Lind was a Swedish opera singer who did a popular tour of the United States in 1850—the same year in which the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. By analogizing the power of Lind’s voice with those of fugitive slaves, Jacobs highlights that Whites in the North had the privilege to be ignorant of the struggles of fugitives. Her reference also subtly points to the tradition of gospel, which grew out of spirituals—songs that the enslaved sang to alleviate their psychic pain.

“All that winter I lived in a state of anxiety. When I took the children out to breathe the air, I closely observed the countenances of all I met. I dreaded the approach of summer, when snakes and slaveholders make their appearance. I was, in fact, a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State. Strange incongruity in a State called free!” 

Jacobs recalls her time as a fugitive slave in New York City. Her comparison of slaveholders to snakes recalls her hiding in the swamps before safely boarding a vessel to the North. Her use of irony in this passage emphasizes for the reader that the North, too, was complicit in slavery, particularly after the passage of the 1850 law.