Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The excerpt we read from “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs was very thought provoking and disturbing. The story starts out with the slave girl, walking across town to her grandmother’s house where she is to be hidden in a small shed. The space where she lived was only nine feet long, seven feet wide, and the highest part was 3 feet high. I was astounded by her living conditions, she lived in a small space above a house with no light, very little air, and she could not even sit up. She was forced to sleep with rats and mice running over her body and deal with extreme heat as well as extreme cold. One thing that caused me to look deeper within the story was her dynamic with her master, Dr. Flint, because I found it very interesting and confusing. Dr. Flint and his family repeatedly tried to bribe the girl’s children by offering them “bright little silver pieces and gay handkerchiefs.” Dr. Flint offered a reward to a woman in New York for any information on her, and he even traveled to New York. Why was he trying so hard to find her? Why did he care that much about her? Was it because she “belonged” to him and he did not want to lose property, or was it because she was held some kind of value more than just being a slave to him?

One thing I wondered about was if the man who she passes at the beginning and described as “the father of my children.” I believe it is someone who does not know her well, because they are not able to recognize her dressed differently and with charcoal on her face, even when they touch her. She does not have any emotional attachment to this person when she is describing him. Is it another slave who she was forced to breed with, or is it a white man who took advantage of her? It seems like it is a white man, because he does not seem to care about his children because they are mixed, and he is not able to identify someone who he was intimate with. His ability to walk around town freely is also not something that many slaves would have the pleasure of doing.

Some things I was confused about, was why she was hiding in the attic instead of escaping to the North to be free. I wondered why she would leave her children, who she seems to care for deeply, behind. If Dr. Flint was so bad, why did she chose to leave her children with such a horrid man?  Was Dr. Flint’s treatment of her so much worse than the others? If so why? I was also confused about what her end goal was, where is she going to go after living in the tiny space above the roof, and how long does she end up staying in there for?