Linda's Escape

When locked away in a cage, the only thing that can escape is the bird’s song, or voice. The little bird Linda may have been physically trapped in her cage, but she sent her voice out into the world to influence those around her. She manipulated the direction of her voice by addressing letters to her family/Dr. Flint from the Free States. These letters achieved their purpose and sent Dr. Flint on several goose chases around the northern Free States in an attempt to find Linda and bring her back. These trips were expensive and yielded no monetary return, which may have been a cause of Dr. Flint finally agreeing to sell Linda’s children. Linda finally escapes the confinement of the crawl space and is able to achieve a fragile freedom in the
Once she had children, Linda prayed that they would die, as to not suffer the cruelty of slavery. However, when Benjamin became very ill, she prayed to make him well again. “Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.” She acknowledged how praying to bring her child back to life contradicts how she feels about that life her child will have if he lives. When Benjamin survived, it was bittersweet relief and regret for Linda. However, that flicker of relief would foreshadow Linda’s determination to provide a better life for her children, one where they are not trapped in the cage of slavery. Benjamin surviving his illness allowed him to experience freedom and fly far away to California. Later when Linda is trapped in the crawl space, it was her children that prevented her from succumbing to the release in death. The ties between death and family are woven so that family and their freedom always comes first for Linda, even as the expense of her own comfort through death. Her children were still vulnerable and she could not protect them from inside the shed, so she had to fight to stay alive and eventually escape to
She tells Linda to “stand by your own children, and suffer with them till death” and “she sobbed, and groaned, and entreated [Linda] not to do” when Linda had the opportunity to leave the shed and escape to the Free States. While Linda vocalizes her desire for freedom and prayed for her children to be freed from slavery through death, she is actually more like her grandmother than she may admit. When it comes down to her child dying or the option of escape, she ultimately chose to keep her family together, over freedom for herself or freedom through death for her child. She did not pursue freedom until her secret was discovered, forcing her to leave to survive and protect her family. But, she made arrangements so that she would eventually be reunited with her