Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

To comment on a narrative like Harriot Jones’ without being reductive is, for all practical purposes, impossible. The immensity of the experience that she communicates is, by her own admission, one that falls short of her reality. Rather than talk about the harrowing particulars of her experience, then, I have a more general observation to make. As we’ve seen from previous readings, it is a consideration of particular narratives that bring home the relevance of the general. What this reading did for me, more than any other, was drive in the extent to which the condition of subalternity dictates the terms of one’s existence. In the preface to the book, Harriot tells her readers that she was “born and reared in Slavery”. The phrase was probably commonly in use at the time, but coming from an emancipated slave, I can’t help but feel the significance of the way the circumstance is described. To say that one was “in Slavery”, as one would say “in the desert” or “in” anywhere, really, seems quite different than to say one “was a slave”. What I feel this does is really reinforce the nature of the conditions that create or enforce this particular form of subalternity. Obviously, to be in Slavery one must be a slave, but what comes through so strongly in the text is how the institution of slavery operates as an inescapable overarching narrative, as wholly responsible for determining experience as, say, climate.

In Harriot Jones’ story, this comes through most strongly when she speaks of the social rules governing marriage and the sexual exploitation of female slaves by their owners. Although her language is never explicit, there is a conscious portrayal of an awareness of their sexuality that comes to colored women living in Slavery very early on. This awareness permeates all levels of the household, even the white women are not exempt from it, although the consequences they suffer are obviously different. Harriot’s own struggle against the advances of her owner Mr. Flint are an example of this. She describes a spectrum of personal moralities that dictate these decisions amongst slave women, but also explains that none were exempt from a painful awareness of the sexual, regardless of their moral position. That the only escape she could find from Mr. Flint’s advances was to turn to Mr. Sands, is indicative of the extent to which she was defined in terms of her sexuality, and the extent to which she saw herself in terms of it. Harriot reflects multiple times on the fate of the children of white fathers that were born to slave women. These children were also born “in slavery”: they had to follow “the condition of the mother”. When her second child was born, she had no legal name to give it, she even describes feeling like she had no right to her own name. To possess the surname from their white father, as Harriot’s own father did, would not give them any sense of identity stemming from belonging to him; they did not even properly speaking belong to Harriot, but to Mr. Flint. There is a sense that, to be born in slavery is more than just to be born a slave. It is to be born of slave parents, to be destined to have children born slaves, to have one’s whole lineage in the control of a more powerful other, and to be forced to define and understand oneself through this circumstance above all others. To be subaltern then, to live in subalternity, is to be stripped of more than agency. It is more than being completely outside a hegemonic power structure, it is the condition of having that power structure influence not only what one does, but the very terms in which one perceives oneself.