Jacobs’s memoir was gut wrenching, but I was particularly affected by chapter 22 when Jacobs described that she was unable to crawl out from her hiding place even when mortal sickness took her. She lay there sick and suffering even when her son, bloodied from a dog attack, screamed for his mother. She could not even rise to tend her sick grandmother when she collapsed from the strain of their tenuous position. And I have never understood how one mother can wish another mother’s child dead as Mrs. Flint does in chapter 22. Having born a child and feared for the loss of that little life, she should know better. By showing us this side of slavery, Jacobs makes the slave masters inhuman and the slaves human.
She continues to show the seedy underbelly of this cruel world when the father of her children, a man she initially portrays as semi-upstanding, does not immediately free his own children after purchasing them. Because it is not socially acceptable to do so this future U.S. senator drives the mother of his children to jeopardize all of their freedom to beg him to do the right thing. Even after this desperate plea, he ends up depositing his own daughter with a relative like burdensome, but undiscardable luggage. How could Mr. Sands not free the children the minute he purchased them? How could he stand to hold such a foul thing as the deed to his son’s and daughter’s life for even a second? I remember reading Jacobs’s memoir in 5th grade and I couldn’t comprehend such cruelty as a child and now as a grown woman and mother I still don’t understand it today. Such selfishness and self-centeredness is just beyond my understanding.
In direct contrast there is Jacobs, sacrificing life and limb to better her children’s lives while their own father is more worried about his reputation. In chapter 25 when Jacobs drops in the “I have been here five years” I gasped (I remember gasping like that as a little 10-year-old )! For five years she has opted to live in a “dungeon” so that she and her children may be free. Talk about personal sacrifice and possessing the will to be free. And I cannot believe it took her nearly 7 years to escape from the South and when an opportunity came she initially passed it up for the sake of her children and in deference to the plight of another poor soul.
What struck me was Jacobs’s complete selflessness in a system that breeds selfishness. When her brother, William, jumps at an opportunity for freedom Jacobs’s gently rebukes herself for thinking of how his actions might impact her children’s chance for freedom. Jacobs’s words were a slap to my own face because I too silently chided William for putting himself before the interests of his nephew and niece. As a mother I asked myself how such a loving uncle could risk their freedom for his own and then the answer was made simple; for this abominable institution to work it has to be everyone for themselves. A chance for freedom is so rare that when it presents itself you have to take it and those left behind must simply rejoice in that lucky twist of fate and pray that their time will come. What a horrible thing that the cost of freedom is family. What a horrible thing that one must put oneself ahead of all others. Sad that such an institution breeds such necessary selfishness.
And in the end William ends up being more honorable than Mr. Sands, who failed to free his own children and thus likely would not have freed William even though he said he “intended to give him his freedom in five years.” William doesn’t even steal from his master in order to attain his freedom. He buys it with the clothes on his back. I was saddened to see Mr. Sands fail to rise above Southern ideologies but as Jacobs pointed out slavery corrupts all involved. She wrote, “surely there must be some justice in man; then I remembered, with a sigh, how slavery perverted all the natural feelings of the human heart.”
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