There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.
Harriet Ann JacobsEvery where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows
Harriet Ann JacobsThe war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.
Harriet Ann JacobsI was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.
Harriet Ann JacobsBut to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Harriet Ann JacobsI can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.
Harriet Ann Jacobs