Harriet Jacobs - Slave Quotes

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The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

Harriet Jacobs
When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

Harriet Jacobs
I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

Harriet Jacobs
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 Jacobs
If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.

Harriet Jacobs
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

Harriet Jacobs
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 Jacobs
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 Jacobs
No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.

Harriet Jacobs
[My parents] lived together in a comfortable home; and, though we were all slaves I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, trusted to them for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment.

Harriet Jacobs