Figures of Orality: The Master, the Mistress, the Slave Mother in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself

Abstract

On title page of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl we find two important quotations. The first indicts Northerners for their ignorance of the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY, while second constructs audience as Northern, white daughters who must hear Jacobs's voice: Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters![1] Echoing Isaiah's ministerial words, Jacobs seizes authority to speak from her experience as slave and as mother, capitalizing on Victorian culture's sanctification of motherhood. Ironically, from her sexual comes her voice, an abolitionist voice slave mother is depending on her white, Northern, female readers to find within themselves. It is crucial that her readers be positioned as careless, unknowing female bodies, for Jacobs's strategy is to coerce readers into a fall from their innocence by taking them through sexual fall of representative slave girl, imagined in precisely terms of Eve's fall from Garden: I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; other was her slave, and also her sister. . . . The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. . . . [The slave sister] drank cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are to drink. (29) Jacobs retells this Biblical myth in terms of race; patriarch's two children play in Edenic innocence, but white girl thrives in her protected garden while black child is raped by slaveholders, creatures Jacobs repeatedly links with serpents in plantation of Victorian America. Notice how she represents slave girl's encounters with sexual knowledge through oral metaphors. Doing so allows her to construct what Julia Stern calls a perverse human food chain, a feeding economy controlled by those who own land and black bodies.[2] In terms of a feeding economy, both land and black bodies are fertile, food-yielding and consumable. This emphasis on oral speaks directly to the depth of degradation in that word, SLAVERY. To be forced to consume, to be consumed, is to be raped and silenced. The mouth stands in as site of oppression in Jacobs's narrative, a site of vulnerable openness. But oral is a source of tremendous power in African-American female tradition, bringing to mind West African origin of sass, traced by Joanne Braxton: A decoction of bark of this [sassy tree] was used in West Africa as an ordeal poison in trial of accused witches, women spoken of as being wives of Exu, trickster god (31). Braxton references words of Amanda Smith, who recounts how sass was used in a poisonous drink that accused witch would be to drink, uncannily reminiscent of Jacobs's description of slave girl, compelled to drink cup of sin by her sexually licentious master. Sass is thus associated with witch, or unorthodox female power, and with both speech and consumption. Such duality underlies oral paradigm that frames Linda Brent's conflictual relationships with Dr. Flint, Mrs. Flint, and her grandmother, relationships replete with both nourishing and poisonous food imagery. Repetitive food imagery asks us to compare these relationships, weaving them together more closely than we might like to admit. Jacobs imagines oral as ordering terrain of two rival relationships in text: law sanctioned master-slave economy and its most potent rival, mother-daughter bond. We might miss echoing tensions in these relationships without a close reading of oral metaphor. Mirroring master-slave economy, mother-daughter bond ultimately models author-reader relationship that Jacobs constructs by framing her readers as daughters. The empowerment of Jacobs's daughterly reader depends upon reader's recognition that relationships between women are similarly structured to perverse master-slave relations; with that recognition reader can choose how to exert her power. …