This is a great book, autobiography about an escaped slave from the South before the Civil War. I highly recommend it to anyone older than about 16. This along with Uncle Tom's cabin really show how slavery worked. There were evil slaveholders and better slaveholders, but they were slaveholders and the system those slaves endured was awful.
Harriet had a good childhood. Her owners were good to them and allowed her parents a Christian wedding and they all lived together as a family. Her father was a freeman, but her mother and grandmother were slaves. Harriet didn't understand the danger and sorrow of being a slave until her parents died and her good owners died and left their slaves to relations. This was when Harriet learned the sorrow of being a slave. Her new slaveholder made inappropriate advances toward her and would never sell her even when she was able to escape his advances. This led to her sending her true love, a free black man, away and then eventually bearing 2 beautiful children out of wedlock to a kinder white bachelor hoping that would lead to her being sold. The owner still would not sell her and continued to treat her with spite and hatred and continued to try to take her over. Once Harriet realized that the owner would hurt her children to get to her, she ran away. She hid in a tiny compartment under the roof of her grandmother's house for seven years until an opportunity to escape the hounds and people of the South arrived. Once in the North, she was eventually able to free herself of the evil of slavery and give her children what she had been denied.
It is a fascinating read and I don't do it justice here at all. Some of the aspects I found to be quite interesting were that Harriet herself was part white, and many slaves were children of their white slaveholding fathers. These fathers would sell their children without a second thought. It was also sad to read about people she knew who were even worse off than she. Many mothers' children were sold with no way for them to ever reunite, even nursing babies were sold from their mothers. The poor white men who didn't own slaves had as much if not more contempt for the slaves than the slaveholders, and they relished in searching for runaways and loved to search the slaves' houses and take whatever they wanted. There really was no way out for these people. There was also terrible prejudice in the North once the lucky onew got away, and the Southerners still had the law on their side if they could locate a runaway in the North. Also, Northerners were given a rose colored view of slavery when they visited the South, and anybody who tried to help the slaves learn or better themselves at all was run out of town.
There are more interesting aspects. It was a sad story, but also one of triumph of the human spirit. Harriet never gave up. She was a true mother and lived for her children. I hope I always appreciate the blessing I have to live with and raise my children freely in a society where mothers are respected and appreciated. (I also read the Good Earth which I will report on sometime and that story reinforced my gratitude and appreciation.) What a woman, Harriet Jacobs was. She did what she had to do and she perservered and never gave up and in the end she was able to send her children to school in the North and give them what she never had: FREEDOM!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment