Journal 6

Caught Between Black and White

From reading Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I got a new perspective on exactly how convoluted race relations were between blacks and whites in the south prior to the Civil War. It is horrifying to see how people were treated as property, but what is worse was how many White slaveholders used slave women for their own pleasure. 

Jacob's described her parents as being "a light shade of brownish yellow, and were termed mulattoes" (770). Obviously her parents and thus herself had white ancestry. I cannot imagine how someone could have a child with a black woman, and yet let their own child live in slavery. I know that in the 1800's people didn't know about DNA, and how a child is literally half the mother and half the father, but they still understood that it takes two people to make a baby, and that the child has some of each parent in them. How could anyone deny the humanity of the slaves, and yet see proof that they are capable of bringing another child into the world. A child that is obviously the product of a white person as well as a black person.

Jacob's mother was especially caught between two worlds. She was raised with her white mistress, they were both breastfed by her mother, they played together as children, and yet she was forced into a life of servitude. Jacob's says this made her family lucky, that the mistress promised to be kind to her children. And yet, she didn't free a single on of them. This wasn't kindness. If anything being treated so good, and then being forced into a life so horrible, could be worse. Jacob's received kindness from some whites, and then was beaten and told, "Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you, -- that i can kill you, if I please?" (774). I wonder where exactly whites of the time thought they got this right? It certainly isn't mentioned in the Constitution or the Bible.