3rd reading for comm 1 TF 10:30-12
Figures of Orality: The Master, The Mistress, The Slave Mother in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself.(Critical Essay).
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Papers on Language & Literature 37.3 (Summer 2001): p314. (7788 words)
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Author(s): HOLLY BLACKFORD.
Document Type: Magazine/Journal
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COPYRIGHT 2001 Southern Illinois University
On the title page of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl we find two important quotations. The first indicts Northerners for their ignorance of "the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY," while the second constructs the audience as Northern, white daughters who must hear Jacobs's voice: "Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters!"[1] Echoing Isaiah's ministerial words, Jacobs seizes the authority to speak from her experience as slave and as mother, capitalizing on Victorian culture's sanctification of motherhood. Ironically, from her sexual "fall" comes her voice, an abolitionist voice the slave mother is depending on her white, Northern, female readers to find within themselves. It is crucial that her readers be positioned as "careless," unknowing female bodies, for Jacobs's strategy is to coerce daughterly readers into a fall from their innocence by taking them through the sexual fall of the representative slave girl, imagined in precisely the terms of Eve's fall from the Garden:
I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. . . . The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. . . . [The slave sister] drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink. (29)
Jacobs retells this Biblical myth in terms of race; the patriarch's two children play in Edenic innocence, but the white girl thrives in her protected garden while the black child is raped by the slaveholders, creatures Jacobs repeatedly links with serpents in the "plantation" of Victorian America. Notice how she represents the slave girl's encounters with sexual knowledge through oral metaphors. Doing so allows her to construct what Julia Stern calls a perverse human food chain, a feeding economy controlled by those who own land and black bodies.[2] In the terms of a feeding economy, both land and black bodies are fertile, food-yielding and consumable.
This emphasis on the oral speaks directly to "the depth of degradation in that word, SLAVERY." To be forced to consume, to be consumed, is to be raped and silenced. The mouth stands in as the site of oppression in Jacobs's narrative, a site of vulnerable openness. But the oral is a source of tremendous power in the African-American female tradition, bringing to mind the West African origin of sass, traced by Joanne Braxton: "A decoction of the bark of this [sassy tree] was used in West Africa as an ordeal poison in the trial of accused witches, women spoken of as being wives of Exu, the trickster god" (31). Braxton references the words of Amanda Smith, who recounts how sass was used in a poisonous drink that the accused witch would be compelled to drink, uncannily reminiscent of Jacobs's description of the slave girl, "compelled to drink the cup of sin" by her sexually licentious master. Sass is thus associated with the witch, or unorthodox female power, and with both speech and consumption. Such duality underlies the oral paradigm that frames Linda Brent's conflictual relationships with Dr. Flint, Mrs. Flint, and her grandmother, relationships replete with both nourishing and poisonous food imagery. Repetitive food imagery asks us to compare these relationships, weaving them together more closely than we might like to admit. Jacobs imagines the oral as ordering the terrain of two rival relationships in the text: the law sanctioned master-slave economy and its most potent rival, the mother-daughter bond. We might miss the echoing tensions in these relationships without a close reading of oral metaphor. Mirroring the master-slave economy, the mother-daughter bond ultimately models the author-reader relationship that Jacobs constructs by framing her readers as daughters. The empowerment of Jacobs's "daughterly" reader depends upon the reader's recognition that relationships between women are similarly structured to perverse master-slave relations; with that recognition the reader can choose how to exert her power.
THE MASTER PREDATOR
The symbolic link between eating and female sexuality is a familiar Christian story, an apt myth to illustrate how patriarch-powered space simultaneously tempts innocent girls with the fruit of sexual knowledge and forbids them to accept that knowledge, compelling the slave child to "drink" and then blaming her for her rampant appetite. In Incidents, scenes of eating and feeding encode the power dynamics of slavery. Scenes that feature white appetite expose the contradictions inherent in slavery: those in power assert control by feeding and consuming black bodies, while they implicitly reveal their dependency, and anxiety about that dependency, on laboring black bodies for food sustenance. As a consequence, food is an obsessive concern between slaveholders and slaves. We see this motif in Jacobs's detailed accounts of food allowances that assert the slaveholder's power; in stories of slaves stealing food, defying that feeding power; and in tales of slave bodies becoming food either for vermin or the master's sexual appetite. The chapter titled "Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders" is the most obvious manifestation of this food obsession. As punishment for stealing meat, "a fire was kindled over [a slave], from which was suspended a piece of fat pork. As this cooked, the scalding drops of fat continually fell on the bare flesh" (46). Again, I draw upon Stern's interpretation of this appetite scene, which is that the slaveholder's "ordered" economy is imagined as a feast for which slave flesh is cooked. The slaveholders are repeatedly aligned with vermin, rats, snakes, vultures, and predators that ingest the raw flesh of the slave. One slave is screwed into a cotton gin and consequently becomes food for rats; trapped in the machine of slavery's oppression, the black body is eaten alive: "Perhaps the rats that devoured his bread had gnawed him before life was extinct. Poor Charity!" (49). Jacobs's analysis always returns to compassion for the slave's mother, for she--in this case Charity--represents the proper source of nourishment for her son, eaten alive. The black body is consumable before "life is extinct," while the white slaveholding body, pecked at by buzzards, becomes consumable only when dead and removed from the living food chain. The theme of the edible slave repeats with minute variations on how bodies are pickled and peeled--cut and washed with brine--devoured and torn by the bloodhounds, and subject to the venomous bites of slaveholding serpents in the hell of a Southern epicure.
"Dr. Flint was an epicure" (12), in fact a predator to Linda Brent: "He sprang upon me like a tiger" (39), or "No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly" (40). The status of the female slave in the food economy as breeder, wet nurse, kitchen laborer, and sexual object intimately associates her with food and appetite satiation; her status as slave precludes her consent to her body as food, a consent implicit when the slave woman nurses her own children (and when her children are a product of consensual sex). Early in the text we witness pivotal events in the Flints' kitchen; this kitchen epitomizes the kind of abuse the community cannot see--the sexualized abuse of slave women in the (so-called) private, domestic realm. Both master and mistress expend enormous amounts of energy as sexual voyeurs in the kitchen, revealing how this food chain is far from economic, far beyond the bounds of the rational. If chapter one repeatedly enumerates how the Flint family imbibes black breast milk, here bodily fluids between whites and blacks are reversed; both master and mistress are shown to be an affront to appetite. Mrs. Flint spits in the food, rendering it unfit to be eaten. What Dr. Flint forces his cook to consume is actually dog vomit, a metaphor for the semen or sexual "knowledge that comes from experience" (17), which the master forces his female slaves to ingest. Dr. and Mrs. Flint find perverse acts of orality, such as force feeding and depriving slaves of food, titillating because they assert "mastery" of the slave through the never fully mastered, or never truly consenting, black mouth:
Dr. Flint was an epicure. The cook never sent a dinner to his table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a dish not to his liking, he would either order her to be whipped, or compel her to eat every mouthful of it in his presence. The poor, hungry creature might not have objected to eating it; but she did object to having her master cram it down her throat till she choked.
They had a pet dog, that was a nuisance in the house. The cook was ordered to make some Indian mush for him. He refused to eat, and when his head was held over it, the froth flowed from his mouth into the basin. He died a few minutes after. When Dr. Flint came in, he said the mush had not been well cooked. . . . He sent for the cook, and compelled her to eat it. He thought that the woman's stomach was stronger than the dog's; but her sufferings afterwards proved that he was mistaken. This poor woman endured many cruelties from her master and mistress; sometimes she was locked up, away from her nursing baby, for a whole day and night. (12-13)
"Epicure" has a sensuous resonance. The word posits the master's power as excessively erotic and identifies the oral as his access to the black female body. Does not this explication shed light on his seemingly odd need for Linda's verbal consent and, conversely, his anger at her sass? This passage narrates the typical slave woman's story in terms of her status in an appetite economy; rather than names we get "the cook" with a "nursing baby" pitted against "her master" cramming food down her throat, highlighting the position allotted to black women in the "food chain" of Slavery. The cook's job is to stimulate the master's appetite, but she is also food for her nursing baby, an affront to his sole possession of her as consumable entity. This "creature" of the kitchen, a rather animalistic term, is hungry but is then choked and silenced when forced to imbibe Dr. Flint's perverse pleasures in force-feeding, forced to swallow his fantasies about her desire--about her "strong" stomach. We could substitute Linda Brent in this paradigm; she does not object to sexual awakening--she wants to marry a free black--but forced sexuality is abject, choking, silencing, eradicating of her own desire, subjecting her to the master's racist fantasies of the black woman as pure eros. Under slavery, the black mother's food is indeed dog vomit--revolting and abject--in direct contrast to the fluids the white child receives from the black mother, fluids that are nourishing and abundant. Patriarchal control depends on rechanneling the flow of black maternal milk into white bodies, disrupting natural familial bonds. Dr. Flint is quite ironically a doctor, a "knower" of the body, representative of legally-sanctioned authority to access bodies and rechannel bodily fluids to appease his rampant appetites. This tale of the nameless "cook"--the almost primordial "creature" of the cryptic kitchen, hidden from external eyes and mystified to dining room guests--provides a ready metaphor for the oral as bodily control, or lack of it, that the very state of slave woman encodes.
The master, "whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour" (18), is astutely recognized as a speaking cannibal: "He would eat slowly, pausing between the mouthfuls. These intervals were employed in describing the happiness I was so foolishly throwing away" (32). Linda's emphasis on Dr. Flint's slowly chewing mouth and vile slew of "foul words" (27) that emerge from his devouring lips signifies the black female body as his feast because the system in Jacobs's deliberate analytical imagery collapses slave women and "fertile" food. Stern points out that Linda fantasizes the revenge of the injured earth's womb, rewriting the myth of Persephone's rape by casting the female in the role of aggressor: "I thought how glad I should be, if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up, and disencumber the world of a plague" (18). Engaged in a battle of consumability, the earth's reingesting, or engulfing, of the villain is the perfect revenge plot. Rather than the man piercing the earth, the earth will open and swallow the man, using sexual knowledge against him. Linda embarks precisely on this course: "[The influences of slavery] had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation" (54). She uses the sexual knowledge she has been fed to subvert the patriarchal system, defying the master's appetite by choosing her consumers--first Sands, then the snakes, ants, mice, and rats that await her in "loopholes of retreat." Jacobs's brilliant analysis of power as it relates to feeding chains allows her to avenge the archetypal "mother earth" on the very terms by which the slaveholder precariously holds the reins on food production, or on reproductive bodies.
UNMANNING APPETITE: THE MISTRESS AND THE SLAVE MOTHER
Any surface reading yields some understanding of maternal power in the text, but what is the mechanism of this power, and how does this power of the dispossessed have any chance against the law, such that Jacobs can hope to transfer this power to the female reader? Male slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass's and Oladah Equiano's, identify the command of language as the tool to fight oppression, but Jacobs posits "that word, SLAVERY" as inherently linked to the language of white patriarchy, emphasizing slavery's status as WORD. She questions the acceptance of literacy and language as instruments of freedom, seeing them as tools in the machine of slavery, tools that require critical approach. If Linda Brent's sexual abuse is often channeled through words and letters, through "the foul talk of the master and his sons" (51), mother-daughter relationships tend to embody pre-verbal, feminine, domestic, and intimate forms of meaning. Several theorists note the importance of the non-verbal in mother-daughter relationships, but here it is a matter of survival. Within black female relational contexts, the inarticulate means. Children recognize the sound of the mother's cough, as William does; mothers and daughters communicate by gazing into each other's eyes, as do the grandmother and Aunt Nancy; women understand each other's different ways of knocking, as do Linda and her grandmother; women know truths by tones of voice, as attested to by Linda and Ellen; and women circumvent male physicians by healing each other with herbal teas, ashes, and vinegar. They express themselves with and without words, protecting themselves and each other from men. As an author writing secretly at night, Jacobs embodies the most sacred, meaningful texts of slave women's lives: Aunt Marthy's midnight bakings, Betty's kitchen secrets, Linda's mother's hushed grave site, the garret where secret maternal nurturing takes place. The first aspect of mother-daughter communication to note is thus its non-verbal tendency; nevertheless, eloquent communication it is.
This observation lays the groundwork for an analysis of food as communication, as lying at the center of many dynamic relationships. Remember that Jacobs's strategy is to ask readers to find voice. She chooses to do so by representing in text--putting into words--female channels of communicative power. She details the story of how a sentimental heroine can transform herself into the position of an educator. To educate and serve as a model for readers, thereby challenging them with "why are ye silent?" (29), she pulls the heroine from a position of edibility to defy the patriarchal system with its own weapon of oppression: the power to feed upon the black maternal breast and body.
Psychoanalytic and feminist critics inform us that gendered family relationships have consequences for both subject-formation and the ongoing reproduction of culture. As all humans are born of women and find their first satisfaction of hunger and human touch in the female bosom, female bodies get metaphorically and economically associated with food and food production. Black women, by virtue of their place in the Southern economy as wet nurses, cooks and "breeders," consistently face the literary trope of the black female body as food abundance, an abundance often irrationally translated into sexual promiscuity. This racist metonymy Jacobs sets out to reconfigure. In her first chapter, Jacobs places her grandmother in this discourse of appetite, indeed representing the maternal body and kitchen to reflect abundant food production, first as a slave:
She became an indispensable personage in the [white] household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress. She was much praised for her cooking; and her nice crackers became so famous in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them. . . . She began her midnight bakings. (6)
Linda's grandmother is an icon of food power, the power to satiate the hunger of her children and community. Her "midnight bakings" resonate with the female, mystical space of the dreamwork--the secret, unseen maternal that is realized when Linda hides in the womb-like space of her grandmother's garret. Not coincidentally, this hiding space is reached by a "trap" in Aunt Marthy's lush storeroom of baked goods: "My food was passed up to me through the trap-door my uncle had contrived. . . . It must all be done in darkness" (115). Linda's midnight visits to her own children mimic this kind of female power that lies outside the patriarchal gaze, glimpsed in such scenes as when the grandmother provides her slave granddaughter extra nourishment on the sly. In Jacobs's first chapter, appetite is pleasantly satiated, the grandmother's bodily labor used to clothe her children in defiance of the bad "mother" Mrs. Flint. The good mother is quite literally food and shelter for her children, harvesting the means of food and textile production that also support the slaveholder's privileged position.
Further along in this pivotal first chapter, we realize that something is horribly wrong in this loving, satiating space:
My mother's mistress was the daughter of my grandmother's mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother; they were both nourished at my grandmother's breast. In fact, my mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of the mistress might obtain sufficient food. (6-7)
Jacobs astutely traces the slave system's dependence on the black mother for food, a dependence that deprives the slave daughter while it implicitly admits its need for the black mother who is able to produce food; whites desire the grandmother's milk as much as they are "desirous of obtaining" her crackers. The black female body becomes depletable, her milk channeled into white mouths, like the grandmother's "best cream in town" (88). But this feeding ability is a tremendous resource that the slave system must take pains to contain. The grandmother holds in her hand the desired forbidden fruits of black mothering, jealously tasted by poor whites in the Nat Turner uprising. Linda's grandmother subtly communicates to her children what Stephanie Shaw notes so many slave mothers did: "And even as they performed mothering tasks that reinforced the system of slavery, they also chipped away at institutional assumptions about dependency (cultural, material, and political) and thereby helped to prepare their children for freedom" (253). Aunt Marthy problematically upholds the slave system by preaching passive Christian values but empowers Linda with a living, independent mothering example, an example Jacobs interprets as a sacrifice for her freedom.
Food is then Aunt Marthy's economic independence but also the source of her empowering maternity, a maternity that coincides with a religious "respect bordering upon awe" (29) in the mind of the daughter, for in Jacobs's rewriting of religious worship, the maternal body is the divine communion: "My brother Willie and I often received portions of the crackers, cakes, and preserves" (6), portions that do not quite satisfy and thus initiate desire. The children's first desire is for a home like their grandmother's, a land-owning independence gained by reclaiming the means of food production--her own "slave body"--for her own subversive sustenance. As a slave, the black mother gets "portioned" up, imbibed and sacrificed like the communal body of Christ; Aunt Marthy's baked breads and flowing milk substitute for the traditional bread and wine of the sacrament. The grandmother clearly has a religious, larger-than-life significance for Jacobs: "though my grandmother was all in all to me, I feared her as well as loved her" (28). Her grandmother is a religious woman, espousing a "beautiful faith, coming from a mother who could not call her children her own" (17). Jacobs resolves this faith, which she cannot embrace, by figuring her grandmother as a transcendent spirit who contains both the power of resurrection and Christlike sacrifice: "With those gloomy recollections [of slavery] come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds over a dark and troubled sea" (201). Both dark sea goddess and ethereal cloud, the power of maternal influence itself bears a double resonance of Gothicized, troubling evil and empowering good. We shall see why this doubleness is so important in a moment.
Let us reflect upon the double resonance of awesome power and love Jacobs treats her grandmother with in the context of the sacrament. In describing the Eucharist, Mervyn Nicholson notes that the ritual signifies both a communion between parties, a "oneness," and a substitution, a sacrifice of the divine body for the eaters:
By eating and drinking his flesh and blood, his worshipers become one with the god who must die to feed them. In Christian ritual the bread and wine symbolizing the divine body not only substitute for it but actually partake of its god-substance. . . . The divine body is sacrificed to appease the righteous anger of the Father God: not only does Christ feed his believers, he dies to
spare them from death. (40)
Shared maternal milk and shared breads, crackers, and preserves, as cast in Jacobs's narrative, bear the significance of a divine maternal body, portioned and depleted to appease the patriarchal (god) slavery but embodying a transcendent spirit through its sacrifice. To Jacobs, the communion of the black maternal meal is clearly supposed to unite white and black foster sisters. Linda's first white mistress, who suckled her grandmother's breast, is "almost like mother" (7). The "mother" part of this description pays homage to the ingested maternal milk, while the nuance "almost" reminds us of the black body's depletion. As Linda's mother bequeathed Linda to her grandmother's care, her mistress "bequeathed [Linda] to her sister's daughter" (8); the exchange of the slave body between women is starkly backdropped against the fact that they had all "shared the same milk" (8). The grandmother's sacrifice--bodily labor working for Linda's survival and initiating Linda's hunger for similar independence--fails across racial lines just as Mrs. Flint's ingestion of the "Lord's supper" (12) fails to mend her spirit.
The grandmother then feeds, clothes, and speaks "hopeful words" (9) to Linda, repeatedly preaching conservative, religious doctrines, yet also being sassy and "impertinent" to Dr. Flint. Problematically for Linda, her indoctrinating speech and nourishing food coalesce: "She spoke so hopefully, that unconsciously the clouds gave place to sunshine. There was a grand big oven there, too, that baked bread and nice things for the town, and we knew there was a choice bit in store for us" (17). Aunt Marthy's passive hopefulness is problematic for Linda but critiquing it would be to bite the hand that feeds and inspires her. She chooses a more subtle way to communicate what she fears in Aunt Marthy. As she interrogates the complexities of food as it reflects and upholds power, ownership, sexual appetite, and oppression, Jacobs deliberately juxtaposes Aunt Marthy's grand oven with Mrs. Flint's kitchen, where the depth of degradation is intensely graphic. Though Linda ostensibly claims that "little attention was paid to the slaves' meals in Dr. Flint's house" (11), we find quite the contrary. There, food lies at the heart of a demented power struggle; there, white anxieties about their precarious hold on black bodies burst forth. The cook, also a nursing mother, is subject to the perverse appetites of both master and mistress:
If dinner was not served at the exact time on that particular Sunday, [Mrs. Flint] would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day. I can assure you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour would make, and exactly what size they ought to be. (12)
These obsessively scrutinized ingredients are the very ones found in Aunt Martha's tasty crackers and baked breads, but the same diagnostic detail was unnecessary, for hers was a "midnight" endeavor--a magical, sacred rite. The passage above reminds the modern reader of anorexics; women's rage at their own bodies can be expressed through food obsession and accounting, unconsciously revealing fears of female appetite and desire. That this black mother is hungry and has needs threatens the assumptions of the slave system itself; to the mistress, the black body is food that always threatens to get hungry, a hunger projected upon the black body as specifically sexual in nature. The black woman's association with food provokes white fear of miscegenist communion--the fear of the black maternal body as a sacrament she drunk as a babe, an irrational and paradoxical fear mirrored in the scenes of Northern meals where white women refuse to eat with Linda. To share the eating table would be to commune with the black female body, to "become one" with her, which the hypocritically segregated North could not tolerate. In turn, to consume food tainted by Mrs. Flint's spittle would be to consent to the mistress's venom.
Jacobs launches into an analysis of female feeding through subtly comparing her grandmother and Mrs. Flint--women who represent two sides of the kitchen rite. The mistress's position as a mother, along with her housewifely knowledge--"she knew how many biscuits a quart of flour would make, and exactly what size they ought to be"--make her a far more tyrannical figure than her husband. Mrs. Flint is the side of Aunt Marthy Jacobs fears, the side that asserts the slave system in such intimate day-to-day acts. A woman so intimate with the slave "daughter" ought to protect and counsel, Jacobs suggests, but Mrs. Flint has a specific form of power over Linda and chooses to blame her for her "fall" instead. Linda speaks of Dr. Flint's persecutions to both her mistress and grandmother, but from the former she demands assistance, from the latter a divine forgiveness. Both fail her to different degrees. What is important to draw out is how Jacobs tells us Aunt Marthy is complicit with the monstrosity of the mistress through placing them both in kitchen excesses and forcing Mrs. Flint to bear the brunt of the demonic. The mistress spews forth spittle rather than richly coded milk, creams, and breads. On the one hand, she is the inverse of the black mother who nurtures, but on the other hand, she is all too familiar a figure, if we look closely at textual evidence. While the "mother of slaves is very watchful" (56), so is the mistress, holding nightly vigils to "watch" Linda. Mrs. Flint's (and later the young Flint's bride's) prominence in rationing and contaminating food brings her to the fore in oppressing black female bodies, bodies that in the white woman's fantasies deflect her own repressed sexuality. If Linda's grandmother retains an ambiguous "cloud" of meaning in the dreamlike space of Linda's memory, Mrs. Flint also occupies that space--as pure nightmare: "She spent many a sleepless night to watch over me. Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer" (34).
The grandmother and Mrs. Flint are hauntingly aligned with one symbolic mother, a figure whose power doubles as supreme good and supreme evil:
I went to my grandmother. My lips moved to make confession, but the words stuck in my throat. . . . If the girl is of a sensitive nature, timidity keeps her from answering truthfully, and this well-meant course has a tendency to drive her from maternal counsels. Presently, in came my mistress, like a mad woman, and accused me concerning her husband. My grandmother, whose suspicions had been previously awakened, believed what she said. She exclaimed, "O Linda! has it come to this? I had rather see you dead than to see you as you are. You are a disgrace to your dead mother." She tore from my fingers my mother's wedding ring and her silver thimble. . . . How I longed to throw myself at her feet. (56-57)
This desired confessional echoes the scene in which Linda confesses to her mistress after swearing on the Bible. The emphasis on words sticking to her throat echoes the food being crammed in the Flints' cook's throat. The slave mother is silenced and timid before women who embody the witchery of the kitchen, a culinary witchery that in terms of the text represents the power to nourish or kill, to lovingly embrace or smother. In the passage above, Linda's longing to throw herself at her grandmother's feet surprisingly echoes an earlier moment when Linda reflects upon her mistress: "One word of kindness from her would have brought me to her feet" (32). Indeed the grandmother's "hopeful" words are not altogether different in effect from the evil words Mrs. Flint whispers in the night, instilling guilt and even angering Linda when she reflects on them: "The words of my grandmother came to my mind, --'Perhaps your mother and father are taken from the evil days to come'" (60). As readers we are astounded to discover that the grandmother is actually disappointed to lose Mrs. Flint's company: "This wounded my grandmother's feelings, for she could not retain ill will against the woman whom she had nourished with her milk when a babe" (89). We are shocked to find out that the grandmother owned Linda's children all along. The equation between the black mother--and only Aunt Marthy calls herself Linda's "mother"--and the white mistress represents the dichotomies Jacobs cites in orality and power, a power that can lead to abject abuse or nourishing strength. As we will see shortly, it is up to the female reader to decide which manifestation of power to emulate.
Both female figures loom large in Jacobs's imagination, and in the moment Linda's pregnancy is revealed, neither believes the truth. Faced with their blame, Linda even projects their dual natures onto her dead mother: "in many an hour of tribulation I had seemed to hear her voice, sometimes chiding me, sometimes whispering loving words into my wounded heart" (90). Ironically, the deceased mother is the most unproblematic mother; righteously a black man's wife, she is the most lovingly imagined. Certainly Ellen's instinctual faith in her mother's unvoiced confession is a better model for the reader to follow. Troubling as it may be, Jacobs seems to equate the black mother and white mistress for a particular reason: figures of the female, domestic food chain rival the male appetite for the female body, by virtue of their double power to abuse and nourish. By subtly repeating patterns in Linda's relationship with her abundant yet depleted grandmother, and her madly cruel yet victimized mistress, Jacobs asserts a food chain internal to women who feed and drink each other--an economy that rests entirely outside the male gaze and to which male mouths are, in fact, irrelevant and excessive. This feeding economy, which holds the seeds for both life and death, becomes more important than the sentimental seduction plot in inciting female readers to "rise up" and speak.
RISE UP, YE WOMEN THAT ARE AT EASE! HEAR MY VOICE, YE CARELESS DAUGHTERS! GIVE EAR UNTO MY SPEECH.
Linda confesses her sexual transgression to her grandmother and mistress, two women who hold tremendous power over her psyche and who simultaneously trigger her respect and resentment. Jacobs's relationship with the white women she addresses, women she elevates to the position of judge, bears this same fascinating blend of sacred and demonic elements--the same ambiguity we see when Jacobs is "sold at last" to her Northern female employer. In fact, empowering the female reader depends upon this duality of female power I have traced in Incidents. Women must be depicted as both victims of the system and as monstrous forces within it in order for the white women of the North to recognize their own complicity and/or villainy in their choice to speak or not speak, to hear or not hear. Jacobs quite brilliantly represents the oral terrain between women as rich in conflict, as loving bliss and subversive weapon, to transmit the power of the oral to her reader, who is then yoked into as familial a relationship with Jacobs as Linda is with various good and bad mothers. The female food chain, harder to detect than the master plot but far more binding, is then a model for the tale itself, designed to circumvent white men and communicate directly with white women.
The invective Linda uses against Dr. Flint and against Slavery in her text's rhetoric emulates the power of female orality, evident in Aunt Marthy's spunk against the Flints, in her sometimes comforting and sometimes accusatory words to Linda, and in Mrs. Flint's perversely erotic "whispers in the night." Just as Aunt Marthy provides a model of rebellious independence, the autobiography provides a model for argumentation, for "sass." But Jacobs's relationship with the white reader bears the same simultaneously empowering and restrictive aspects as her relationships with women in the autobiography. She vacillates between sisterly confidence, drawing parallels with the reader, and protective silence, emphasizing that her readers can never really understand her experience, being "women at ease." To ask that her speech be heard is also to expose the black body in the terms that slavery does. Jacobs herself states that it would be more pleasant to have remained silent about her history, to maintain the privacy slavery denies black women. To expose herself and to speak out on unseemly sexual matters as a fallen woman is also to risk abuse at the hands of the reader, either that she will be condemned or her story will be placed in the realm of the titillating, the racist black-erotic stereotype confirmed. To solve these problems she constructs her white readers as daughters who fall from innocence into knowledge of the perverse sexual "food chain" empowering and reproducing Slavery. Jacobs's voice is, in turn, a mother's, mirroring maternal figures in the book who hold kitchen power, power over consumers--here, textual ones. Jacobs forces her readers into the oral contract we view in her relationships with other female characters. Readers cannot react with indifference but must side with the power of women to commit sacred or demonic acts.
The text is replete with stories about finding empowerment in the most tension-fraught spaces. For example, by returning to the slave kitchen itself, in the black woman's province, the heroine ironically finds refuge, even subterfuge. In Betty's kitchen Linda finds the kind of black female power symbolized by the link between women and food; beneath what white men see, or symbolically beneath the place dedicated to serving white mouths and stomachs, lies a protected, private black body, foreshadowing the garret itself. Betty, a comforter invested in the oral and in food, is reminiscent of Aunt Nancy, rendered barren by the consuming whites yet brimming over with mothering instincts towards the coming-of-age heroine. What repeats and what Jacobs ensures her reader will feel is the hidden strength of black maternal connection, so powerful it is transformed into a curse by that law in which the child shall follow the condition of the mother. Forced to bear the reproduction of the beast Slavery, the black mother-daughter bond, rivaling the master predator with its own eros, most fittingly serves as an affront to what patriarchal law and language can control, to what patriarchy can inscribe as a condition.
In Incidents ceaseless reproduction of mother-daughter images and stories, patterned after an oral tradition, becomes a theme in itself. Jacobs's narrative is so fraught with repetitive tales of nameless, faceless black women who are raped and bear fair babies that they become an archetype or a kind of mantra: the "poor mother" and "dying daughter" (14) with an already dead slave child in Mrs. Flint's household; the nameless "mother" Linda sees leading seven children to the auction block; the "mother" who commits suicide; the mother sold for revealing the father of her child; the white "daughter" corrupted by the illicit sexual relations around her into sleeping with a slave herself. The theme repeats with subtle variations; like a maternal lullaby, in which the cradle always falls, the familiar formula of the sentimental seduction novel occludes yet reveals shocking, ugly truths. By her compulsion to repeat her own story in vignettes of others, Jacobs tries to emulate the rhythms of the milk shared by white and black sisters, maternal links that are simultaneously cups of sin given the inexpressible depths of degradation involved in appropriating women for lust and profit. The depth of feeling created by these rhythmic, repetitive stories expresses that depth that lies beyond linguistic understanding, a depth of intimate feeling Jacobs associates with women and the pre-verbal: "I had no words wherewith to comfort [this slave mother]" (16). Jacobs has, of course, a rather troubled relationship with language, associated with patriarchy, rape, violation, and abolitionist appropriation. But patterns reveal loopholes, seeds of empowerment within patriarchal "curses"; even the demonic mistress communicates a subversive message about white women's power, a power that can be used to service patriarchy or to defy it. The recurring imagery Jacobs presents to her readers encourages them to think in terms of the cyclical, to recognize the complex and reproducing structures that keep the system in place, and to understand that the most compelling means of torture can be subversively reclaimed.
Ironically, mothers lie at the center of reproducing systems of power; their milk, their food production, their maternal investments nourish its life cycle. Destructive, suffocating bonds are then part of the power of mother figures and, consequently, part of the narrator's compelling maternal quality. The paradoxically empowering and restricting presence of black mothers makes it a force to be reckoned with--a force that cannot be "escaped" by either the white master or the slave daughter. While Jacobs's uncle and brother can more easily walk away from Aunt Martha, Linda Brent cannot until she has internalized such bonds or become the maternal "tie to life" herself. Read metaphorically, Linda is forced to close the gate that bounds her childhood home when she is pregnant, no longer simply the daughter, but reopens it to confront a small piece of herself as slave child when she visits her daughter in the night, replicating the midnight nurturance of slave mothering. The birth of Ellen initiates Jacobs's lust for freedom and the birth of Jacobs's appetite for being the maternal savior that must sacrifice in an intense, purifying rite of passage through confinement. This sacrifice symbolizes the narrative itself. Consumption of Jacobs's tale as knowledge ushers in a kind of death to Jacobs's bodily integrity--her privacy--yet life to her story and to her sisters in slavery. Jacobs writes her story in nighttime secrecy, replicating the reservoir of secret and sacred orality that lies beyond the gaze of white male eyes, eyes that cannot fully control structures ordered by mothers.
If patriarchy's continuance relies upon father-son inheritance, black woman's survival depends upon a mother-daughter one that language cannot access, that remains privy to its own meanings and interpretations, that the oral as 'readable text' can only symbolize. "O Virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave" (55), Jacobs moans. To replicate the reader's innocence, to set the reader up for a "fall" from ignorance, to 'rope' the Northern woman into the discourse passed down from black mothers to black daughters, to construct them as both victimized (being women) and culpable (being white), Linda introduces her story as a series of falls from innocence to knowledge, beginning in her first sentence: "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away" (5). Freedom, not bondage, is the natural condition. She uses the word "passed" to resonate with her grandmother's "passage" to knowledge of slavehood: "It was during the Revolutionary War; and they were captured on their passage, carried back, and sold to different purchasers. Such was the story my grandmother used to tell me; but I do not remember all the particulars" (5). Her grandmother's passage, like Jacobs's "Perilous Passage," has no "particular" destination, for it is the story of the abduction and Middle Passage retold in the ironically twisted context of a newly "freed" America. Her point is a poignant one. The very figure that should represent safe-keeping, security, and nurturance can only be perceived as ambivalently culpable when the slave girl realizes her safe-keeping is false. The slave child is never safe, though she is the "careless daughter" who hears maternal tales, tales that she should have understood, tales to which the reader must give ear.
Having trusted in one happy childhood, Linda must suffer another fall, the fall from the "happy home" of her first white mistress, her heart again "free from care" (7), an ignorance cherished yet indicted as hardening the fall. The sexual fall of her grandmother's mother--expressed as a liaison with the "planter" of white seed--and her grandmother herself never gets completely voiced; rather, their privacy is maintained, their abuse only hinted at by the "tangled genealogies" of Linda's ancestry. The "life of a slave girl" is fated to repeat the "fall" of her ancestry, a fall Jacobs's literary recording takes to a new level. But Jacobs is able to transform the meaning of her ancestors' perilous passage to gain power, symbolically repeating her grandmother's passage from white male prey to a loopholed retreat, where motherhood becomes a rite of passage--a subversive circumlocution. Linda is then forced to replicate the pattern of her grandmother's life by nursing a white daughter North, but the unfinished nature of the autobiography hints that this replication is yet another loophole, another repetition of the mother's life that will be avenged in a brighter day for her own daughter, also force-fed the "vile language" "poured" (179) into her ears by Northern masters. Patterns so entrenched by racist ideology, so excessively and predictably Gothic in Jacobs's Incidents, communicate the pervasiveness--the persistence--of both father-son and mother-daughter reproductions, an hermetically sealed code that Jacobs breaks both by seizing the pen, traditionally serving patriarchy, and re-signifying the oral power of women. The mouth, shown to be a constant source of anxiety to white male authority, should well be feared. Indeed her entire narrative project depends on the stimulation of her readers' metaphorical hunger, expressed as outrage and vindication against the treatment of the mothering female body, a body that could be their own, a body that should only be its own.
What shines through Incidents is a maternal reservoir that fights through its very power to conjure up both "light, fleecy clouds" and "a dark and troubled sea" (201), both the ethereal and the stormy underworld, making it a viable affront to male appetite. Jacobs begins to address her readers as mothers when she confesses her illicit sexual affair. If all women, as mothers, occupy the center of a feeding economy between men and infants--both eaters of female bodies--then maternal power to nourish and suffocate must be together digested by readers for them to realize the strength of the maternal voice, a voice that can enter the male political sphere. Linda's "fall" enables her to realize her own hunger for divine maternal sacrifice; after her sacrificial rite of passage in the garret, during which she repeats the midnight nurture of the slave mother, she ascends the food chain: "My innocent young daughter had come to spend a vacation with me. I thought of what I had suffered in slavery at her age, and my heart was like a tiger's when a hunter tries to seize her young" (199). Interrogating ancestral mother-daughter links in terms of a patriarch-constructed food chain, Linda grows to an understanding of her own ferocity and violence in terms of nourishing her children. Tigress that she becomes, she forces the reader to taste the "perilous (middle) passage" of female sexuality with her and be re-birthed as divine mothers with oral defense, whose hungry speech against male predators will avenge mother earth for the rape of her daughters: "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 2.5).
WORKS CITED
Braxton, Joanne. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within A Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Nicholson, Mervyn. "Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others." Mosaic 20.3 (1987): 37-55.
Shaw, Stephanie. "Mothering Under Slavery in the Antebellum South." Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency. Ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey. New York: Routledge Press, 1994. 237-258.
[1] Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987) title page. Hereafter, page references follow quotations in text.
[2] The concept of the human food chain articulated in Incidents originates in Julia Stern's lectures on American women's writing at Northwestern University. My reading is indebted to her enlightening class discussions of Incidents. I am also grateful for Katherine Bassard's discussions of Incidents in "Black Women's Writing" at the University of California, Berkeley, and for her suggestions on improving this paper.
HOLLY BLACKFORD, of The University of California at Berkeley, is writing her dissertation on American fantasy and gender. Her work has appeared in Film/Fiction, Wrestling with the Angel of the House (in press), and Moon Days. She teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British literature.
Named Works: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Book) Criticism and interpretation
Source Citation
BLACKFORD, HOLLY. "Figures of Orality: The Master, The Mistress, The Slave Mother in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself." Papers on Language & Literature 37.3 (2001): 314. Academic OneFile. Web. 11 June 2011.
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