Harriet Jacobs: 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."

The narrator in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is recalling that even though her grandmother has devoted her "long and faithful service" to her master's family, she is still nothing to them but a piece of property.

After reading Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, Jacobs' story seemed somewhat tame, and less shocking, perhaps. While her life as a slave was by no means easy, it seems that it was less harsh than that of Douglass. In fact, she admits to having it easier than many slaves of her time. She claims never to have gone hungry, or to have been beaten too terribly or worked incredibly hard. Still, her life was unfair. She was owned as property by another human being, and struggled to live a "virtuous" life and to gain her freedom, all the while being perversely pursued and verbally abused by her master, "Dr. Flint." And she struggled and suffered to keep her children safe and attempt to gain their freedom.

I try to imagine her, a young mulatto woman, who I guess must've been physically beautiful... irresistible to her master and to other men mentioned in her accounts. And on top of her beauty, she seemed to be strong-willed, relatively speaking. She stood up to Flint when he tried to claim rights to her, even though he beat her for it. And what was it about her that made Flint keep pursuing her, and even apologizing to her and promising not to hit her again (but not keeping his promise)? What stopped him from simply raping her and beating her senseless like the white men in the other story? Was he a better man? It doesn't seem so.

It seems there was a certain appeal, aside from possible physical beauty, for Flint. He wanted her, and she refused him outright, instead of bowing down and begging for mercy. I wonder if it could've been a case of Flint liking the chase. It may be absurd to assume so, since this wasn't a regular game of "courting" between two free people. And I doubt Jacobs was intentionally playing such a game with him. She did seem aware of a certain sexual "power" she had over Mr. Sands, though. I wonder if she was aware of any such power over Flint.

It seems only natural that there were sexual situations between black slaves and white owners. After all, the slaves were human, sexual beings, and with the immense sexual oppression of the time, there was bound to be consentual as well as non-consentual sexual acts between white men and black women. I wonder how prevalent other sexual situations were. I wonder how many white women engaged in sexual affairs with black slaves, and how many homosexual encounters there were.

I guess the big difference between the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs is that of gender, but it doesn't seem as simple as that. One wouldn't read the two narratives and conclude that either male or female slaves had it any easier than the other, since it was obvious in Douglass that women were severely beaten and treated harshly just as men were. Jacobs appears to have had a better situation all around, at least physically, but I wonder if it's a true account. I wonder if she downplayed events in order not to go overboard and scare away her intended readers.

The genres of the two are argued by critics to be different as well, although the genre of Jacobs' Incidents seems to be widely argued on its own. Carolyn Sorisio is mentioned in this article as looking at Incidents "in terms of both the slave narrative and the sentimental domestic genre and concludes that Jacobs' story—which, Sorisio contends, focuses most heavily on the issue of identity and the conception of self—cannot fit into either of the genres Jacobs has used to tell it."