Liberty Through Humanity

Liberty Through Humanity

            Harriet Jacobs, born in 1813 North Carolina, is best known for her tragic narrative, written under her pen name Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs tells the reader of her time spent as a slave, the time she hid from her slave owner, and the time she was finally granted the freedom she had longed for since she was six years old. Throughout her narrative, Jacobs shows the reader that slaves are human too, which means that they are deserving of individual liberty. Jacobs primarily shows the slaves’ right to liberty to the eighteenth-century reader through her use of pathos, showing the humanity of the slave through the atrocious things she faced during her time of captivity.

            Jacobs first shows this humanity through the telling of when she first realized she was a slave. Jacobs was born into a slave family, but her mother’s mistress was relatively kind to them (923). Jacobs was six when her mother passed away, causing her to be sold to another mistress who died when she was twelve, and then finally being sold to the daughter of the deplorable Dr. Flint (923). Jacobs started the chapter of her childhood saying, “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (921). Pathos has a strong presence in this sentence, because Jacobs is saying that as a child, she was blissfully unaware of the hardships she would have to face as a slave; she still had her childhood innocence until it was brutally ripped away when she was six and sold to another family. This portrayal of her loss of innocence hits the reader with the reality that slaves were human too, having been born with childhood innocence, same as white children, that the slave holders took away. Through this display, Jacobs proves that slaves are human and if they are human, then they deserve the same liberty as everyone else.

            Another instance in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl showing the humanity of slaves, is the time when Jacobs fell in love. Jacobs falls in love with a free man, a carpenter, who wanted to purchase her from Dr. Flint’s daughter so that they could get married and live a free life (924). When Jacobs approaches Dr. Flint with the proposal, Dr. Flint refuses to sell her—and refuses to let her get married. Dr. Flint is enraged when she tells him she is in love, and tells her that the only time she is allowed to be married is if it were to one of his slaves, which would keep her in his sights for the rest of her life (925). The humanity of slaves is shown by the fact that Jacobs fell in love and wanted to get married, the same as any white man or woman would have wanted to do. She shows that slaves can fall in love and have dreams of having a family, and would do so if it weren’t for the fact that they were hesitant of having such relations when they were literally owned by another white family. Jacobs asked, “Why does the slave ever love?” because if slaves fell in love, they had to fear so many more things, like having children born into slavery, which is something parents would never wish on their children (924).  Jacobs shows that slaves shouldn’t have to worry about things such as that, because they are human and should have the liberty to do these things because of the fact that they are human.

            Jacobs also showed the humanity of a slave through her desperation to get out of the household of Dr. Flint and his wife, and her sudden urge to get revenge upon Dr. Flint. Dr. Flint was constantly watching Jacobs with malicious intent. She was always aware of the sexual thoughts he held in regards to her. He was also abusive towards her, and those two combined were hard for Jacobs to endure. Couple those with the fact that because of his lust for Jacobs, Dr. Flint’s wife hated her and abused her as well, Jacobs came to the point that she was so desperate that she would do anything to get away from the Flint family, and that desperation soon turned into a want for revenge. She took action when meeting a young, unmarried white man, that made his interest for her obvious (929). She used this interest and ended up getting pregnant with this man’s children, thinking that there was no worse revenge against Dr. Flint than showing him that she favored another over him (930). These feelings are the ultimate display of humanity. Jacobs says, “The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation” (929). She is effectively showing the reader that she had been changed by the violent system that she belonged to, which turned her to making the desperately human choices that she made. Showing these unmistakably human choices, she is proving to the reader that slaves are humans, and deserve the liberty that the white people had.

            When Jacobs was finally granted the freedom that she had been wishing for her whole life, she used her experiences to show the eighteenth-century reader the horrors of the slave system. Her powerful narrative gives insight into the treatment that slaves received, and the liberties that were taken from them when they were in captivity. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is full of emotional scenes that depict the humanity of the slaves. Jacobs shows that slaves have the right to the liberties that have been taken from them, because of the fact that they are human and liberty is a human right.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.         8th ed. Vol. B. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. N. 920-942. Print.