Abstracts of Papers
Jennifer Evans:
"Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace": Revisiting the Bondage of Slavery in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Like a diamond, the personal stories linked with the horror of slavery have many diverse facets. There is no clear cut, just as there is no one true experience. Slave narratives have taught that the multitude of opinions and experiences displayed in the narratives and personal histories are both varied and unique to themselves. As soon as we begin talking about slavery as a horrible memory for American society and history, we have to consider the big picture within the antebellum South.
For women, and particularly black women, the effects of slavery meant a loss of family and virtue. They endured unspeakable losses and abuses as slaves. Indeed, the narratives of the time display in graphic detail the suffering they endured under the system. It is impossible in a short presentation to encompass the entire experience of all black women, therefore I have chosen one autobiography of the time to showcase why, as Harriet Jacobs wrote, slavery is bad for boys but worse for girls. In her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she describes her life under the slavery system, which eventually drove her to hide for seven silent years in a cramped, wet, dark attic space above her grandmother's house, before running to freedom in the North.
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