Some random thoughts on Jacobs

    While Jacobs is in hiding her Aunt Nancy dies. After a lifetime of childless years brought on by emotional, mental, and physical suffering she is finally laid to rest (not at her mistress’s feet as the slave mistress insensitively wanted) but in her family plot with a service paid for by her free son, made free by the poor woman’s toil. How Mr. and Mrs. Flint could actually believe that Phillip’s actions were in homage to them is beyond me. How can people be so clueless, so oblivious to reality?
    One of my favorite lines in Jacobs’s narrative occurred in chapter 29. Stretching her literary muscles in this autobiographical memoir Jacobs’s grandmother becomes a metaphor for the whole oppressed race: “The poor old back was fitted to its burden. It bent under it, but did not break.” This image is iconic and captivating and every time Jacobs’s told another horror story about slavery I had the image of her grandmother’s bent back bearing the weight of a people’s hopes and fears.
    Though Jacobs’s novel is directed towards Northern white women, she does not fail to provide some advice to free Northern black women. She seems to give a prescription for how to treat women who have recently come to the North after their escape from slavery — with womanly sympathy. Jacobs tells her story to Mr. Durham soon after her arrival in the North more to unburden her heavy heart than in an effort to solicit help. Afterwards, she worried how much the kind reverend shared with his wife, but Mrs. Durham never said a word about what she might or might not know. Jacobs wrote: “I longed to know whether her husband had repeated to her what I had told him. I supposed he had, but she never made any allusion to it. I presume it was the delicate silence of womanly sympathy.”
    Finally, unlike Doglass’s memoir in Jacobs’s we see how the North is not the haven slaves would have had it be: “It made me sad to find how the north aped the customs of slavery,” Jacobs wrote. The use of the word “aped” is particularly striking. It suggests that the North, and the system it “aped,” not the slaves, were less than human and by extension, less than humane.