In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs narrates the hardships she endures due to the color of her skin. At an early age, she “could not study the arts of reading and writing” (765). Slaveholders kept their slaves in the dark by not allowing them to receive an education. Slaves would not be able to read abolitionist papers, the Bible, or even write letters to others. In this sense, they would only know their direct surroundings and be too afraid to run away.
Jacobs also recounts the time she first loved. She asks the question, “Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence?”(772). Since her lover was a free black man, her Mr. Flint would not allow the marriage to be carried out. Slaves were property and “had no right to any family ties of their own”(772). Jacobs is definitely caught between cultures because she wants to have a free life with a free man but is still a slave.
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