11 Quotes & Sayings By Harriet Ann Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. She was the only child of a slave mother and a white father. After her father was sold to work on a plantation in Georgia, she was sold many times and was ultimately sold to a slave-trading family in Richmond, Virginia. In 1856, when she was in her early thirties, she escaped into the North and lived in Philadelphia with her brother for five years before returning to North Carolina Read more

There she met and married a free black man and continued her life as a house servant until he died in 1879. In 1884 she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl which became an immediate best seller.

1
The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also. Harriet Ann Jacobs
2
Death is better than slavery. Harriet Ann Jacobs
3
But 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 Jacobs
4
There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious. Harriet Ann Jacobs
5
When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Harriet Ann Jacobs
6
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. Harriet Ann Jacobs
7
Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word. Harriet Ann Jacobs
8
I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. Harriet Ann Jacobs
9
But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. Harriet Ann Jacobs
10
Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name. Harriet Ann Jacobs