1820-1865: Short Answer Quiz

Harriet Jacobs, from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl


  1. When describing the fate of her industrious grandmother’s children, Jacobs holds no hope that hard work might lead to freedom someday: “Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend” (pp. 1811-12 [full ed.] pp. 807-08 [shorter ed.]). Why does Jacobs call her aunts and uncles “God-breathing machines”? Explain how the language of this passage elevates her relatives over both their masters’ property and their masters themselves.

  1. Linda spends a great deal of time justifying her decision to take Mr. Sands as a lover instead of Dr. Flint. What are the reasons she gives? Why does she feel the need to explain herself in such detail to her readers?

  1. When her grandmother writes to tell Linda that Dr. Flint has died, she mentions how she hopes he made his peace with God before he died; Linda cannot bring herself to pity him (1774). Later, when she is on the run from the Dodge family, she hears church bells and responds with “contemptuous sarcasm”: “Will the preachers take for their text, 'Proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them that are bound?' or will they preach from the text, 'Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you?’” (p. 1826 [full ed.] p. 822 [shorter ed.]). Consider the effect that the hypocrisy of southern religion has had on Linda. How does her narrative use Linda’s disillusionment to argue further against slavery?

  1. Account for the bittersweet tone of this passage from near the end of Jacobs’s excerpt: “My brain reeled as I read these lines. A gentleman near me said, ‘It’s true; I have seen the bill of sale.’ ‘The bill of sale!’ These words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.” (p. 1828 [full ed.] p. 824 [shorter ed.]) While Linda does not yet know that Mrs. Bruce will free her, her fears of a new master are not the first thing she thinks of when learning of the bill of sale. Why are her first thoughts of New York City?



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