Harriet Ann Jacobs Essay

In the autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave miss, it tells the written report of a female slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs. Losing her mother and fore scram at such a adolescent age, she experienced firsthand the account of a slave spirit. She deliberates in great detail the humiliation, sacrifice, and struggle specific to female slaves of the late nineteenth century. Though she lowstood the risks involved in publish an account of her life, she moved forward with the idea and published her story under the pseudonym Linda Brent.Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina to femme fatale and Elijah. eon growing up she enjoyed a relatively cheerful life until she was six years old when her parents died. After the death of her parents, Harriet and her younger crony John were left to be raised by their grandmother, mollie Horniblow. Molly was an older cleaning woman who was well respected in the slave community, as well as by the slave own ers. She was never mistreated, and she frequently sunbaked goods for the people in her community.Harriet Jacobs gained the knowledge for all of her educational essentials from her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow. She taught Harriet how to read, write, and tailor which gave her advantage over the rest of the slaves. It also would attract some uncalled-for attention. Margaret would afterward on will Harriet to her twelve year old niece whose father would subject Harriet to raptorial and unrelenting sexual harassment. Dr. Flint sexually provoke and physically abused the teenaged Harriet for as long as she was a servant in his household.Afraid that one day Dr. Flint would chip in his antics reality, she began to pack an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Tredwell, whom she later on beared two children for. Instead of discouraging Flint, she enraged him. He then sent Harriet away to a life of hard labor on a grove he owned, threatening to break in her young ch ildren as field hands, seeing that they legally belonged to him. She soon ran away from the plantation and spent seven years hiding in a comminuted attic crawl space in her grandmothers house.During those seven years she put to use the skills that her first mistress had taught her, and watched over her children by means of a small chink in the roof. Being cramped in the attic for so long, left her permanently physically disabled. In 1842, Harriet was last able to escape to the north, and found deform as a nursemaid in the household of a prominent abolitionist writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis. She later on is reunited with her children in New York, and farther down the line her employer purchases her freedom from Dr. Flint.While reading this autobiography you acquire a feeling that is very unusual. close slaves that you hear about usually have harsh lives and are exceedingly unhappy, but in this particular case it was the complete opposite. Harriets life wasnt hard not one bit. She was never mistreated because her fathers mistress found her to be very appealing, and she didnt have to do any hard labor. But, she also wasnt allowed her freedom which is what she uneasily longed for. That particular entity is what places everything into perspective.At the end of the day whether she liked it or not, she was cool it a slave. She could not walk away from her situation, she could not undertake everything that she precious to do, and she definitely could not enjoy her life to the fullest because she belonged to someone, and that someone was a jealous, aggressive man named Dr. Flint. Harriet Jacobs insisted on telling her story honestly and completely, determined to perform white Americans aware of the sexual victimization that slave women commonly approach and to dramatize the fact that they often had no choice but to bear their virtue.Jacobs knew that her contemporaries would see her not as a virtuous woman but as a fallen one, yet she published the story any way. She wanted to bring light to a situation that slave women face every day. She was an incredibly strong woman for doing so, and by directly confronting the uncouth realities that plagued African American women in the late nineteenth century, Harriets work occupies a significant place in African American literary tradition.