A Portrayal of Suffering to a White Audience

The prompt I chose for this blog post was to compare and contrast an element of Black autobiography between Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Washington's Up from Slavery. The specific element I decided I wanted to focus on was their respective portrayals of their suffering during slavery, and how they interact with that topic to their audience. To start with, while they endured similar struggles while enslaved, the extent of the details are different between the two autobiographies. Even the way Jacobs and Washington were freed from slavery differ. 

While she doesn’t disclose every single thing about all that she went through, Jacobs sheds a lot of light on the suffering she experienced while enslaved. While she was born under the control of a master who was at least kinder to her than most, that small sense of security she was able to feel was stripped away from her as soon as her new masters, Dr and Mrs Flint, took over. Jacobs described the extent of the mistreatment that she endured when the Flints first became her masters, ranging from physical to sexual assault. At the start of her narrative Jacobs tells the reader something of a disclaimer, that the events written in her autobiography were in fact true, and that she had not in the slightest exaggerated the wrongs that she had been dealt during her time enslaved. 

Jacobs also tells her readers about the hardships she endured to escape from slavery to her freedom. First, to escape the Flint household, she stowed away in a cramped space in her grandmother’s house for years with only a few holes in the ground as a source of light. From there she was able to escape north with the help of a friend and find shelter in Boston. However, when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed her life was put into danger again, and she had to be on the run once more. Jacobs’s time of being a fugitive came to an end when a friend of hers paid for her freedom. That is where Jacobs ends her narrative: with the announcement of her freedom, and a plea for her white readers to consider what she’s said. Throughout her work Jacobs speaks to her readers-most of whom are likely white- about her suffering as a way to shed a light on and bring attention to the horrors of slavery.

Booker T. Washington, on the other hand, presents his experiences with slavery differently in a more straightforward way. From the beginning he mentions in his preface that with his work he intended to tell a simple story without embellishments. In Up from Slavery Washington states the facts of his enslavement plainly, one of which being the fact that because of the disregard to black family records he does not have the exact date of what day he was born. While Washington does talk about the suffering he endured as a slave, such as the bad living conditions of the home that he was born into, at no point does he try to appeal to his readers. 

The way both of these writers interact with the topic of their suffering is also likely based on their circumstances of how and why they were writing it. In the prelude of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs mentions the desire to find sympathy in her readers, specifically the white women of the North, in order to draw attention to the conditions of the several black people who were still enslaved. Washington, on the other hand, says that Up from Slavery is an outgrowth of a collection of several articles about incidents in his life that were requested to be told. This contrast of the two writer’s intentions for their books shows itself in their writing.