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Summary: This Story Must Be Told Often!
Review: Incidents in the Life Of A Slave Girl is a harrowing, personal experience of a AA female born and raised during the tumultuous, infamous and tragic era of slavery in America's history. Harriett Jacobs, aka Linda Brent, tells in her own voice-one that is explicit and easy to understand-the story of a young woman born into the brutal, horrendous slavery era who later escapes to freedom in the North. Incidents is emotional and the feelings are raw as you experience the tale of a slave who desired freedom so badly that she hid for SEVEN YEARS in a narrow, cramped quarter without much freedom of movement. The story is riveting and moving and shows what an individual is able to accomplish in spite of sex, race and slavery. Incidents is a story of bravery in light of insurmountable circumstances and ones belief that they can succeed in spite of unmeasurable difficulties.Incidents is an excellent reading selection for a bookgroup and a book that I highly recommend to everyone. Remember the story and share the story so that history doesn't repeat itself.
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Summary: Component forces of the Civil War Revolution
Review: Incidents is typically viewed as an outstanding example of Black feminist resistance to slavery as well as a protest against the fugitive slave laws. Yet, it can also be seen as an assessment of the forces available to eliminate slavery as a whole, part of a debate that unfolded in the years leading up to the civil war about what force could possibly overthrow slavery whose ascendancy not only over the South, but over the entire nation seemed unstoppable when this book was written.
Its history is a testament to the growth of racism among American literary "experts" and historians. While Harriet Jacobs was celebrated in her time as the author of this book and used this celebrity to advance her struggle to advance the lives of refugee slaves during the Civil War and of freed slaves after the Civil War, the racism that followed the imposition of Jim Crow Segregation and the US grab for colonies in Asia and Latin America in the late 19th and 20th Centuries led to the memory of her work being extinguished. By the 1950s and 1960s the scholarly world had come to believe this book was a fiction written by Lydia Maria Child. No one familiar with Child could think that she would do such a thing.
We owe Jean Fagan Yellin and her collaborators the honor of resurrecting Harriet Jacob's authorship and career. In a startling masterpiece of research ,Yellin's team documented the truth of everything narrated in this book. We are also enriched by Yellin's recent biography entitled Harriet Jacobs.
Besides the usual, Incidents represents a catalog of different ways to escape or lessen the impact of slavery. We have the noble faithful servent in the person of Linda Brent's mother who buys herself with the aid of white who honors her position, we have attempts to escape through the sexual favors of a white man, we have people buying their way out of slavery, we have violent and non violent escapes. We also see Linda Brent's resistence and the success of her clandestine life and later her escapes to Philiadephia, then New York, then England, as a result not only of her individual bravery, character, and devotion to her people and her family and her honor, but of the existence of resources beyond the slave and Black community that can free not only the individual slave but put an end to slavery. We also have the racism that made Jacobs feel not totally free in the North.
This is the crucial place Incidents belongs. The publications (Uncle Tom was first published as a serial in an antislavery newspaper and later published as a book) of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1850 and 1852 unleashed at the dialog opened among contemporary African American texts about how to eliminate slavery in response to Stowe's great work. Harriet Beecher Stowe had recommended the Christic experience of evangelical Christianity in Uncle Tom, Martin Delany recommended the reculturation of Blacks by a bourgeois independent state's aristocratic and cultural leadership, William Wells Brown pointed to the ship of capitalism coming the vanquish the slave ships.
Jacob's text enters this debate with an array of forces within the African American slave and free community, as well as within the Southern white community, as well as the Northern and even international community that can be used to defeat slavery. We have the slaves themselves debating, organizing, and resisting. We have freed Blacks North and South helping. We have whites in the South itself helping, if inadequately. We have supporters of women's rights and opponents of slavery among the women of the North. We have the international opponents of slavery in Britain and beyond.
Jacobs highlights not only her own incredibly courageous resistance to slavery, but to the array of forces available to fight slavery. In the weeks and months after this book was published in 1861, those same forces did in fact overthrow slavery and crush it forever more.
This is a stirring book written by an articulate and educated writer. Indeed contrary to what is said elsewhere, even narratives written or told by semiliterate African Americans who escaped slavery never contained dialect, but were written in clear standard English. Indeed, scholars have noted that where Jacobs tries to reproduce Black English spoken by unacculturated slaves, she had to fall back on the conventions of theatrical stereotypical imitations of Black English, rather than reproduce real Black English. She had been reared in a standard English environment, had escaped and lived and functioned among an even more stardard English environment, and by the time she wrote this book, almost 20 years after she had escaped from slavery, she was actually unfamiliar with real Black English!
Not only was Jacobs literate, but she was apparently very familiar with contemporary Womens or sentimental novels exemplified by Uncle Tom and Susan Warner's Wide Wide World.
Jacobs had spent much time in her bondage in Edenton, reading. Later, in Rochester New York, Jacobs ran a anti-slavery reading room associated with Frederick Douglass's North Star. For nearly a decade in New York, Jacobs worked as a house keeper and nanny for one of the most popular journalists in the country. She also knew and received support from her boss's estranbed sister, the widely popular journalist and fiction writer Sara Payson Willis Parton, known by her pen name Fannie Fern. In Ruth Hall, Parton's famous novel a roman A clef biography, Fanny Fern, there isa chacter obviously modeled after Harriet Jacobs. Jacob's maintained an extensive correspondence with some of leading activists in the womens and antislavery movements of her time in both the United States and Great Britain.
Incidents follows the styles and conventions of the sentimental novels so well that for decades many believed that it was actually a novel written by a white female sentimental author, not by a escaped slave. The Sentimental novels whose central work is to create sympathy usually signfied by the reader's tears, by the suffering, the righteousness, and ultimately the lack of physical power in a wicked world for its heroines and heroes. To that extent, they reflected the lack of social power and opportunity for liberation of 19th Century women.
Jacobs has a totally different approach, remarkable given these conventions. Susan Warner, author of the first big blockbuster novel, Wide Wide World, could make a day in the life of a 10 year old girl seem like a life of torture. Yet, Jacobs forgo the obvious, easy opportunity to dwell on Harriet Jacobs's undeniably extreme suffering hiding in an attick. Instead the book focuses on her spirit of resistance, the availability of allies, and the real possibilities for her deliverence through her own power. Rather than the isolated slave mother locked in an attic, Jacob's Linda Brent is a person who is helped in her struggle by white and black, free and slave in Edenton, helped by sailors and antislavery activists up and done the US coast and in Canada, and helped by people as far away as England. Rather than a victim who deserves our tears, Jacobs shows how there are forces to help her fight for freedom, and she wins.
If in the weeks and months in 1860 and early 1861 when this book was written the slave power seemed unstoppable. Yet, the power, the ability to act, the ability to defeat slavery shown in Jacob's book, discloses the forces and the will that would abolish slavery forever in a few brief years.
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Summary: Great!
Review: Intended to convince northerners -- particularly women -- of the rankness of Slavery, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl presents a powerful autobiography and convincing writing that reads like a gripping novel but is organized and argued like an essay. Incidents follows the "true story" (its authenticity is doubted in some places) of Linda [Jacobs uses a pseudonym] who is born into the shackles of slavery and yearns for freedom. She lives with a depraved slave master who dehumanizes her, and a mistress who mistreats her. As the novel progresses, Linda becomes increasingly starved of freedom and resolves to escape, but Linda finds that even escaping presents its problems. But Incidents is more than just a gripping narration of one woman's crusade for freedom, and is rather an organized attack on Slavery, intended to convince even the most apathetic of northerners. And in this too, Incidents succeeds. The writing is clear, and Jacobs' use of rhetorical strategy to preserve integrity is astonishing. Well written, convincing, entertaining, Incidents is an amazing book.
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Summary: Amazing Account of Our History!!
Review: Jacobs has contributed a wonderful document to our nation's history of her experiences as a slave. This is a must-read for anyone with an interest in our country's history!!
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Summary: Another of the most important books you'll ever read...
Review: Jacobs was a slave-- and endured unbearable harships to escape the unwanted "romantic" attentions of her owner and eventually slavery altogether. Her text, written as an autobiography to prove, in part, that an African American woman could be just as moral and brave as the target audience of white women who were ignoring the slave system as something they had nothing to do with, is a classic of African American literature. The story is interesting, well-written and sometimes as tense as any dramatic nail-biter. This is a historical document as much as it is a good read. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know about the US troubled relationship with race, still today and in our past.
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Summary: Excellent for analysis of intersection of race and gender
Review: My theory is that the tension between gender ideology and racial realities is demonstrated by the way escaped bondswoman Harriet Jacobs must tell her tale to pro-abolition Whites in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (writing as Linda Brent) (edited by Lydia Maria Francis Child) (introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1987) (1861). At the time Jacobs wrote, popular culture defined femininity based on chastity and child rearing. But Jacobs was writing about experiences of sexual assault not encountered by most White women. In order to establish credibility with that audience, Jacobs goes to great pains to describe both her attempts to prevent her owner from raping her and her desire to care for her children.
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Summary: A powerful testimony of enslavement and defiance
Review: The enslavement of African people in the United States is, without a doubt, one of the best-documented examples of systemic human rights abuse in world history. According to one estimate, more than 6 thousand ex-slaves left behind, in various formats, written testimonies of their experience. One of the most important of these testimonies is "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," by Harriet Jacobs. First published in 1861, it is still a powerful piece of literature. Jacobs' narrative, although validated as factual by such 20th century scholars as Jean Fagan Yellin, is written in an almost novelistic style. As a narrative, it is well-structured and vividly written. Jacobs is an outstanding narrator; her voice is rich in moral outrage and psychological insight. Jacobs writes movingly of the terrible sufferings of Black slaves. But equally fascinating is her portrayal of the whites who were involved in the terrible institution of slavery. Her master and mistress are not one-dimensional villains; rather, her layered portrait depicts them as pathetic individuals who are psychologically crippled by the overlapping scourges of white supremacy and male chauvinism. Their cruelty seems to reflect an inner pathology. Elsewhere in the book Jacobs reveals the southern whites' fears of slave revolts, and she paints a richly satiric portrait of a white clergyman who exploits the Bible and Christian theology as "tools" with which to psychologically intimidate the slave population. "Incidents" is a fascinating text that will amply reward the attentive reader. But this is more than just a fine piece of writing; it is also the powerful personal testament of a woman who survived a harrowing ordeal and emerged as a bold advocate of justice.
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Summary: Love it!
Review: The story is about the life of a little slave girl who the master is trying to make a mistress out of and is continously trying to sleep with. The girl eventually escapes to the north after a very long period of agony in which she had to hide out in a space for over a year barely moving, and even after escaping her master still comes up north looking for her. I love the book because first of all it was written by a woman slave and it was an autobiography, therefore she is speaking from first-hand experience. She not only had to go through racism but being a woman made some people view her as an even weaker person. In this day and age, I don't have to go through many of the things she did, but reading this book helped me to understand older people view of many aspects of life now.
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Summary: Knowing there's more to life
Review: The thing that struck me so personally was how this woman knew in her deepest part that the way she was forced to live was not right and that she would push the limits of all possibility to achieve what she knew in her heart was possible. If, like me (a white, middleclass male), you ever deeply felt there is more to life than what is routinely offered, you will identify at this level. Being freed was not enough. She spent the second half of her life working to free and educate other slaves. That is true enlightenment. Her writing is sparse, eloquent and heartfelt. I could blather on and on about how wonderful this book is. If you are unsure about how much racism has wounded the spirit of African-Americans, this book will lay some foundation for that understanding.
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Summary: Poignant
Review: This autobiographical condemnation of the south's Peculiar Institution puts a face on the suffering of the enslaved. American history is full of accounts of slavery which tend to broad overviews of the institution, whereas this book is written by an escaped slave who does not flinch at sharing every detail of her miserable life. Unlike other narratives which distorted the slave's voice through the perspective of the interviewers/authors who were notorious for exaggerating the uneducated slaves' broken english, this book is largely Ms. Jacobs' own words. She was taught to read and write as a child by a kind mistress, so she was able to put her thoughts on paper with clarity that surprised many. Ms. Jacobs had an editor, but this book seems to be her unfiltered view of the world. It is one thing to hear about how slaveholders took liberties with female slaves, it is quite another to read in stark detail about women being commanded to lay down in fields, young girls being seduced and impregnated and their offspring sold to rid the slaveholder of the evidence of his licentiousness. The author talks about jealous white women, enraged by their husbands' behavior, taking it out on the hapless slaves. The white women were seen as ladies, delicate creatures prone to fainting spells and hissy fits whereas the Black women were beasts of burden, objects of lust and contempt simultaneously. Some slave women resisted these lustful swine and were beaten badly because of it. It was quite a conundrum. To be sure, white women suffered under this disgusting system too, though not to the same degree as the female slaves who had no one to protect them and their virtue. Even the notion of a slave having virtue is mocked. The author rejected the slaveholder's advances and dared to hope that she would be allowed to marry a free black man who loved and respected her. Not only was she not allowed to marry him, she was forbidden to see him or speak to him again. The author shows us the depth of a mother's love as she suffers mightily to see that her children are not also brought under the yoke of slavery. Though she was able to elude her odious master, she does take up with some other white man in hopes that he would be able to buy her freedom. Her "owner" refuses to sell her and tells her that she and her children are the property of his minor daughter. Her lover seems kind enough as he claims his children and offers to give them his name, and he did eventually buy them, though he failed to emancipate them to spare them from a life of forced servitude. Ms. Jacobs noted that slavery taught her not to trust the promises of white men. Having lived in town most of her life, Ms. Jacobs is sent to the plantation of her master's cruel son to broken in after she continues to refuses his sexual advances. She is resigned to this fate until she learns that her children -- who were never treated like slaves -- were to be brought to the plantation also. It is then that she takes flight. After enduring 7-years of confinement in cramped quarters under the roof of her grandmother's house, the author escapes to the North which is not quite the haven she imagined. Still, it is better than the south, and she makes friends who buy her freedom leaving her both relieved and bitter that she is still seen as property to be bought and sold like livestock. In New York Ms. Jacobs is reunited with her children and a beloved brother who'd escaped a few years ago while accompanying his master -- her former lover -- to the free states. There is no fairytale ending to this story because the author endures plenty of abuse and uncertainty even after she makes it to the North. She is hunted down by the relentless slaveowners who were aided by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and "The bloodhounds of the North." This is a wrenching account of this shameful period of American history, and should be required reading for all.
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