Six Women's Slave Narratives Sparknotes

Narrative Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and
Six Women's Slave Narratives
African American Women, HIST 3000-A03 While reading the auto-biography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and several of the short stories written in Six Women's Slave Narratives, several recurring themes were mentioned in these very different viewpoints written by very different women with different circumstances, responsibilities and resources at their disposal. All of the women mentioned in these stories suffered greatly, some, like Mary/Molly (The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave) suffered more physically then mentally and others, like Linda's (Incidences) experiences were more mental. In a slave's life, all activity revolved
around the master, his whims and his attitude; there were certainly days where he could be kind, gentle and fatherly (and some masters were, undoubtedly, always this way), and others where this ever-present force was cruel and overbearing. Most of the time, escape was the only exit, how that escape came, however, whether by death or running, was another story. For many slaves, escape was risking too much but for those that could risk it all, escape brought forward a new life, maybe the joyous one that they envisioned, maybe not, but either way, the North, Canada and England offered the promise of freedom and a new beginning. Family was one of the bonds of slavery that both restricted and encouraged slaves; a family allowed for a greater sense of community and self-worth, but the master who owned your body could also own your mother's, brother's and sister's, father's, grandparents', aunt and uncles', husband's and especially your children's.
Double true that they owned your children if they were your children's father, unacknowledged, of course. This power held over part or all of your family made it easy for a master, even the kindest of masters who were upon hard times, to sell a family member to pay off a debt or to make some extra money. In the novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda states that her master, Dr. Flint often sold the women that bore him children because he could not bear to see the illegitimate and "sinfull" children that he had born. Linda tells about the "pious", church-going "Christian" slave owner whose children could call him father but are forced to call him master and the unfairness of the situation on the slave women, taught by their aunts, mothers and grandmothers and even, on occasion, by a kind mistress that they should be chaste and pure and virtuous, being forced under penalty of beatings or worse to submit to their masters in bed. However. it is also in this story that Linda puts forward the great paradox of the master's wife: how one woman can rail against her pregnant slave knowing who the father is, and beat her senseless and how others see
that this "shame" is not the slave's fault and actively pooch to have the slave children fathered by their husbands freed from bondage. Family serves to boaster and support many slave women, especially those who have found good homes with good families who take care of them; in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when Linda's grandmother is to be sold in direct opposition to his mother's will, no one in the community will step forward to buy the woman who is like family save the sister of her former master for the measly sum of five dollars, and it is this woman who encourages her "children" to be strong and Linda to remain chaste from Dr.
Flint's advances. In the short story Struggles for Freedom, Lucy talks about how her mother encouraged her to go for freedom when she traveled North and how she encouraged her children to live free no matter what stood in their way; to that end, Lucy's mother fought for her daughter's freedom in court and refused to give up on getting her family free. Their story is one where they triumphed together, but other slave narratives tell a different story about familial love: in The History of May Prince, a West Indian Slave, Mary talks about her forced separation from her parents and the pain it caused her to be torn apart from her support system. Worse still was when she abandoned the violent and masters who beat her even in her old age, she was forced to part, probably forever, from her husband back home because of her master's stubborn pride refusing to sell her and be rid of her but rather keeping her at his mercy for the rest of her
life. Family really was a double-edged sword to many slave women; Mary, Lucy and Linda all talk about seeing mothers on the auction block about to be separated and express how sad and broken these women were. In fact, in Lucy's story, years after the fact, when her children are all grown and married, her mother reminds Lucy after her husband's tragic death that her own husband, Lucy's father, was sold years ago and that she still doesn't know what became of him. The not knowing where your loved ones would end up, and to whom they would end up with, must have made the sales that much harder to bear, this is especially seen in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when the mother of two recently sold children asks where they will be sent to and the trader that purchased them can't tell her as he isn't even sure where they will end up save that it will be in bondage. But husbands and children must have offered some form of joy to the slave women, especially Linda since she risks everything to be with a man of her choosing rather than to give in to her master's advances.