I 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 Jacobs

Categorized in : Children Lying Father

There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together

Harriet Ann Jacobs

strong suffering together

I 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

daughter father son

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

girl heart men

There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

injustice black doe

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

soul spring beautiful

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

slave-girl patriotism law

Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fastened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard her heart-rending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy; could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable!

Harriet Ann Jacobs

eye mother children

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

cruelty community literature

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

sunshine hue tears

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

degradation vices believe

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

slave-girl waiting children

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

adequate literature giving

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

differences religious men

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood

Harriet Ann Jacobs

childhood grandmother years

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

new-year mother morning

The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

powerless creatures war

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

slave-girl jealous giving

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 Jacobs

slave-girl attachment kindness

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

horse block children

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

sophistry principles practice