Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

One of the interesting side points of slave narratives is parsing the politics behind them. They were intended in part as an element of information campaigns and picked and chose what they did and did not disclose. Much as today's white US population refuses to believe that unwarranted police abuses happen regularly, let alone disproportionately to African Americans, so back then most whites refused to believe in the worst aspects of slavery. Harriet Jacobs, writing originally as Linda Brent, was unusually clear about the abuses suffered by women, whose children if they became pregnant were the property of their masters—and valuable property. The perverse incentives to rape come in many forms, but siring your own crop of slaves for profit has to be one of the more compelling ones. Jacobs also goes into more detail than usual about how slaves were treated and the punishments they endured. In many cases they were murdered, on purpose or by accident, and buried in unmarked graves. Her narrative is also in line with others as the 19th century went along in terms of more and more rejecting white Christianity as hypocritical. She professes her own faith, influenced by her grandmother, who mostly raised her. In the Library of America collection Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the longest and most detailed narratives, and probably the single best one, though they all deserve to be read, of course. But this might be the one to read if it's only going to be one. Another continuing theme is how hard the laws make it to do anything. Slaves were property and couldn't testify in court any more than domesticated animals. Another perverse incentive—a slave can never testify against you. This narrative has many good stories and lots of description of the way slaves lived and got along. It's the best one yet on the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law, a huge setback for abolitionists in 1850. And it has powerful feminist themes. Jacobs is a deeply moral person but makes no apology for becoming pregnant, given her circumstances. Indeed, as much as anything choosing the father was a way to assert herself with her master, who was determined to have her body and soul. The sad and ridiculous way it plays out after his death is only one more example of how depraved slavery was. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of our great books, whose best counterpart might be Anne Frank's diary.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)