Linda's Escape

When locked away in a cage, the only thing that can escape is the bird’s song, or voice. The little bird Linda may have been physically trapped in her cage, but she sent her voice out into the world to influence those around her. She manipulated the direction of her voice by addressing letters to her family/Dr. Flint from the Free States. These letters achieved their purpose and sent Dr. Flint on several goose chases around the northern Free States in an attempt to find Linda and bring her back. These trips were expensive and yielded no monetary return, which may have been a cause of Dr. Flint finally agreeing to sell Linda’s children. Linda finally escapes the confinement of the crawl space and is able to achieve a fragile freedom in the
north. However, she still is considered the property of Dr. Flint, leaving her trapped in the cage that is slavery, until she her freedom is bought by a white women from Dr. Flint’s daughter. However, the cage that Linda will never be able to escape, except in death, is her bodily flesh. Having brown skin means she will always be viewed first as a slave and a person. The only way to escape the color of her skin is through death. The escape through death and choosing it over living in slavery had been brought up throughout the novel.
Once she had children, Linda prayed that they would die, as to not suffer the cruelty of slavery. However, when Benjamin became very ill, she prayed to make him well again. “Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.” She acknowledged how praying to bring her child back to life contradicts how she feels about that life her child will have if he lives. When Benjamin survived, it was bittersweet relief and regret for Linda. However, that flicker of relief would foreshadow Linda’s determination to provide a better life for her children, one where they are not trapped in the cage of slavery. Benjamin surviving his illness allowed him to experience freedom and fly far away to California. Later when Linda is trapped in the crawl space, it was her children that prevented her from succumbing to the release in death. The ties between death and family are woven so that family and their freedom always comes first for Linda, even as the expense of her own comfort through death. Her children were still vulnerable and she could not protect them from inside the shed, so she had to fight to stay alive and eventually escape to
freedom. Aunt Martha would rather keep her family together than see them free and alone.
She tells Linda to “stand by your own children, and suffer with them till death” and “she sobbed, and groaned, and entreated [Linda] not to do” when Linda had the opportunity to leave the shed and escape to the Free States. While Linda vocalizes her desire for freedom and prayed for her children to be freed from slavery through death, she is actually more like her grandmother than she may admit. When it comes down to her child dying or the option of escape, she ultimately chose to keep her family together, over freedom for herself or freedom through death for her child. She did not pursue freedom until her secret was discovered, forcing her to leave to survive and protect her family. But, she made arrangements so that she would eventually be reunited with her
children. Linda also points out that the cage of slavery confines everyone, in different ways. “I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.” The practice of slavery is destructive to everyone involved. It is not to say that without slavery fathers would always be kind and polite and the sons gentle and moral, nor that daughters would remain pure and the wives happy. Many things besides slavery creates cages around a person’s being and sometimes human nature and their path in life twists people into something wicked. However, slavery is the big, thick cage in Linda’s life that has subjected her to the most cruelty. While abolishing slavery won’t cleanse the world of all evil, it would be a major step in the right direction for Linda and allow people like her the freedom to experience life for themselves and have a choice which cages they enter in, rather than be locked away in one against their will. Jacobs has been very selective with her words and how she addresses the reader. From the introductions, the reader knows that this story is directed towards white women of the north and is a call for action. Linda attempts to move these white women by subtly pulling at their emotional heartstrings and complimenting them (“Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader”) to get her desired outcome. This was a skill many abolitionists used to promote their cause, according to Ginsberg. Many of her examples were works that were directed towards children and as such they needed to be soft in nature and appropriate for young eyes and ears. Most children have little experience in the real world. In order to explain complex ideas, such as slavery, to them, it has to be presented in a strategic manner, as to get the point across without being too graphic nor too ambiguous. While at first glance, images of children releasing animals and insects from confinement doesn’t seem to hold a deep message, it plants a seed of the giving of freedom to those who cannot take it for themselves. White women were treated/portrayed as delicate, child-like creatures. If she wanted her whole novel to be accessible to white women, Jacobs had to just approach the edge of what was considered acceptable and could not go any further to provide all the details of the horrors she and others faced, so her story could still be heard by the delicate ears of white women. After all she sacrificed and all the mental and physical pain she endured, Jacobs and her family still did not have the power to reach their own happy ending. “The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble.” Now like a bird trapped in a cage, Harriet Jacob’s story is trapped in the binding of this book. To set it free, a white woman has to open the book and let the story out. Linda becomes her little bird to do with has she pleases, and Linda is at her mercy. She puts her trust in these strangers that they will release her and her story into the world, just like the child releases the bird.