This is the transcript from the Wednesday conversation in class on Harriet Jacob's. Anyone who is short journal assignments may want to respond to this, elaborating on various points, questioning certian points, correcting or clarifying points that were muddled by may transcription of what you said, or what have you, in a way that can kick off or extend a discussion. Click "read more" at the bottom to see the full text.

Compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin Jacob’s seemed to be complaining a bit, and compared to Stowe, who kept her opinion to herself and let the reader make conclusions themselves but Jacob’s seemed to shove the opinion down the reader’s throat.

This could come down to the narrator’s omniscience. This could be interesting because the author is talking directly to the reader and it makes the text more interesting. The intro says she wrote in an overly dramatic way, so rather than complaining she was more honest about how she was treated—pity me reader, I am unprotected by laws and custom, entirely subject to the will of another-this is important because we don’t know and the way she wrote helps draw us in as readers and not so much just to get sympathy.

It’s hard to tel how much is the truth, and what is exaggerated, and some things made to sound worse because the slave narrative was written after the fact. Even if she is complaining it would be hard not to relate to that. It’s traumatizing and we should make it so readers see things from the writer’s perspective.

Even if you disregard the sentimental aspect and look at what she is saying it’s enough with just the bare bones of the story., it’s still a really bad situation and the reader cannot just brush away the horror of the situation. If she were to exaggerate, she could have made things a lot worse if she wanted to, so the multiple pictures of white owners is a testament to her objectiveness.

If she was happy about something she would say, she would let us know she was grateful and that could have made the story worse. She does state the good and the bad where in some slave narratives we see only the bad, but someone going out of the way to teach her to read and write is a good thing. The contrast fits well with our nig, with how some masters are really mean and others go out of their way to protect the slaves in the tale. Similarly, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin one o f the main characters and the slave owners were really nice and there were others who were terrible to their slaves and you’ll find that in any slave narrative.

When UT meets Simon Legree, Legree accuses the good slave owners of perpetuating slavery, but the good owners make it so slavery seem not so bad. This fits with Jacobs too, because her early master was nice but she didn’t grant her freedom. It’s not enough to be nice to slaves, you have to give them their freedom. This is echoed in the last chapter, and “there are wrongs that even the grave does not bury” says Jacobs of dr. flint. Jacobs didn’t want he freedom paid for because it’s her right as a human being, because accepting the payment would mean that it’s right to be owned.

That raises a question about her having the chance to run away but she didn’t because of her children. Does this make it better to stay with the children or to take freedom when you can have it. When she had her daughter Ellen she talked about how she wanted, how sometimes slave mothers would kill children so they wouldn’t have to be slaves, and Jacobs thought the same when she had a sick child, that it’s death would be freeing. This indicates just how bad things are when a parent would rather see their child dead than a slave.

Separation from family members is bad enough in some ways. So, even though all slaves didn’t have it as bad as others. It would be hard for slaves because the people of the north would act like bloodhounds and return the slaves to the south, which was required by the Fugitive Slave Act.

Jacobs spokes highly of her grandmother, selling her goods, how her grandmother is smart and faithful, but the owners wouldn’t give a way such a valuable piece of property. It’s ironic that Jacobs referred to her grandmother as property, the children as piglets to be sold off at auction. Jacobs knew she was reduced to this mentality and she uses it to raises the reader’s awareness of the situation, almost as if slave owners had to disassociate slaves from being humans to treat them as they did.

They were property, that the disassociation, made them just another piece of property, work horses. It also gods to the other side, when they treat them bad, but I could treat them worse, so I’m doing a favor by treating them the way I am, by giving her a better life, by being his concubine, the niceness is for ulterior motives, he is trying to brainwash her, and uses threats to the children to sway their mother through the children’s fears. This behavior was tied into contemporary pedophiles and sexual abusers, the grooming of victims.
When they brought the children to the house to break them in, to force them into accepting the master slave relationship, was a key moment in the story.

When her mistress was alive, Jacobs wrote about how she it might take a bad master to get the slave to hate slavery. She loved to serve because she was treated well, a major contrast to how the master of the house treated her. A god quote that sums up dr. flint’s way he acts on 2215, top of the page, “he was too scrupulous to sell me but he had no scruples about doing me wrong as his property.” She gets in family as daughter’s property, and she never spends time with daughter and is always he is by her side except when he has her sleep in the daughter’s chamber so he can get at her.

Jacobs wasn’t that upset to serve her mistress, so maybe some people don’t care what they do with their lives as long as they are treated well. There are people we want to work hard for because that person is nice but not so much for managers or bosses we don’t like. Liking the boss, students report, makes them willing to work harder. Maybe it comes down to mutual respect, even though she was a slave, and the mistress would let Harriet have a lot of freedom. How would this work with an older woman?

Liking bosses, would you work hard if not paid. There is some satisfaction in working without money? If you didn’t get paid, but you were taken care of. Slaves never got paid, and were treated like dogs, like very bad dogs. Slaves wouldn’t be very motivated to work and would generally work as much as they were forced to at the end of the whip, and they do work for something, for their food. This was meant more in the context with Harriet and mistress, Harriet would have been motivated to work because she looked up to and respected the mistress. But a poorly treated slave wouldn’t have this same motivation.

It would suck to be a slave because even if they got free, they had nowhere to go, no money, no family to run to. And they would never really be free, having to think about going back, being brought back, having nowhere to go, relying on the kindness of strangers. There would be some support to a certain extent, even with the underground railroad.

The legacy of slavery, 2231, a human being sold in New York, with the bill of sale as evidence of the way people were treated, that we need to remember this, showing the fallibility of humans. Has humanity taken a lesson from slavery? China has factory workers making peanuts and often they are stuck on the job site. There is definitely modern slavery, capital slavery, sex slaves. Has slavery been abolished? Is it hypocritical to buy products made by slavery? Are we culpable as consumers when we buy products of slavery and sweat shops? People have to see the conditions. We can vote with our dollars and stop buying from places that. How do we motivate those people who are driven by the economics of their circumstances? Also blood diamonds from Sierra Leone.

Education is one of the most important things, tons of people don’t know about a lot of things, and when they do it seems to be a sound bite on the radio or something, not seeing how consumer behavior affects the life of the worker who is exploited for our gain. People need to open their minds to learn about that sort of thing as a first step, because if you don’t know, you can’t solve it. What could a solution be? How much will buying locally? Who is going to do something about this? How can we change the attitudes that people have in this regard? It comes down to what we are willing to do.