On Freedom

I don’t know why reading Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents reminds of Maya Angelou’s early writing, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Jacobs calls slavery the “cage of obscene birds”. Like Angelou’s caged bird who “sings of freedom", Jacobs's narrative is also one that actively pursues freedom (to the point that the narrative becomes fast-paced and itself mirrors a deep longing for freedom).

Jacobs forces one to reconsider what freedom means. In the obvious sense of the word, given the context of the narrative, one would think there is a binary between freedom and slavery and Jacobs yearns to cross over to the other side from slavery. Yet the narrative complicates this further. There is a strange oppressiveness that freedom contains for colored people.Free black men are seen as “half free niggers” by the white population. Jacobs tells us of a continuing agony which follows her throughout, “I called myself free, and sometimes felt so; but I knew I was insecure.” Thus, freedom too is a precarious state. This precarity is also shaped by a burden that comes with the realization of one’s freedom in the face of the suffering of others. Jacobs writes “I could never go out to breathe God's free air without trepidation at my heart.”

Freedom is found in little things. Jacobs writes that the first thing that she did on the “dawn” of her freedom was “to see the sun rise, for the first time in our lives, on free soil”. When Jacobs is in hiding she hates the fact that she is not able to breathe freely. At that moment while Jacobs movements are restricted she thinks of Dr. Flint who was “out in the free air, while I, guiltless of crime, was pent up here, as the only means of avoiding the cruelties the laws allowed him to inflict upon me!” Freedom is not just the grand idea of what freedom at the end of slavery felt like but it also includes small acts such as the ability to breath freely and deeply. This freedom also contains the ability to speak and write. About slaveholders, Jacobs says, “Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other. What a comfort it is, to be free to say so!” This ability to write is also one that Dr. Flint found threatening when he would ask Harriet about the lovers with whom she exchanged letters. Therefore, for Harriet Jacobs to be free is to be able to breathe and see sunrise and write and speak freely.

These small acts which for Jacobs are reflective of a person’s freedom show her believe that freedom is a natural state. Freedom for Jacobs is as natural to man as “the air he breathes” and anyone who takes that freedom away is “guilty of murder”. It is a search for freedom from socially acceptable behavior for a young black woman that dictates Angelou’s narrative too. Both Jacobs and Angelou show that freedom is an expansive yet precarious state. They also show that to actively create circumstances that allow for one to be free is the most radical thing one can do.