Six Women's Slave Narratives Sparknotes

Narrative Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and
Six Women's Slave Narratives
African American Women, HIST 3000-A03 While reading the auto-biography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and several of the short stories written in Six Women's Slave Narratives, several recurring themes were mentioned in these very different viewpoints written by very different women with different circumstances, responsibilities and resources at their disposal. All of the women mentioned in these stories suffered greatly, some, like Mary/Molly (The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave) suffered more physically then mentally and others, like Linda's (Incidences) experiences were more mental. In a slave's life, all activity revolved
Double true that they owned your children if they were your children's father, unacknowledged, of course. This power held over part or all of your family made it easy for a master, even the kindest of masters who were upon hard times, to sell a family member to pay off a debt or to make some extra money. In the novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda states that her master, Dr. Flint often sold the women that bore him children because he could not bear to see the illegitimate and "sinfull" children that he had born. Linda tells about the "pious", church-going "Christian" slave owner whose children could call him father but are forced to call him master and the unfairness of the situation on the slave women, taught by their aunts, mothers and grandmothers and even, on occasion, by a kind mistress that they should be chaste and pure and virtuous, being forced under penalty of beatings or worse to submit to their masters in bed. However. it is also in this story that Linda puts forward the great paradox of the master's wife: how one woman can rail against her pregnant slave knowing who the father is, and beat her senseless and how others see
Flint's advances. In the short story Struggles for Freedom, Lucy talks about how her mother encouraged her to go for freedom when she traveled North and how she encouraged her children to live free no matter what stood in their way; to that end, Lucy's mother fought for her daughter's freedom in court and refused to give up on getting her family free. Their story is one where they triumphed together, but other slave narratives tell a different story about familial love: in The History of May Prince, a West Indian Slave, Mary talks about her forced separation from her parents and the pain it caused her to be torn apart from her support system. Worse still was when she abandoned the violent and masters who beat her even in her old age, she was forced to part, probably forever, from her husband back home because of her master's stubborn pride refusing to sell her and be rid of her but rather keeping her at his mercy for the rest of her