Harriet Jacobs and the Tightwire of Reform

When I first read Jenny’s response to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which stressed her impatience with the apologetic tone and her desire for a stronger protagonist than Linda Brent, my first reaction was to think of all of the exceptions to that rule: Linda Brent crawling around in an attic for seven years, lying there silently suffering the torture of fire ants to be near her children without exposing her hiding place, Brent’s refusal to simply give in to Dr. Flint’s sexual advances, and so on. My first thought was that if Mary Rowlandson is “ridiculously strong,” as a former student put it, then Linda Brent is moreso. She is, in the words of another student, “legit.”

There is a submissive tone throughout the narrative. Brent refers to herself more than once as “poor,” and includes phrases such as “I know I did wrong” in order to placate her more judgmental readers, who might have looked askance at her affair with a white man as a way of avoiding the lecherous Dr. Flint. But this is not the first time we’ve heard language of this sort, is it? Cabeza de Vaca bemoans his fate repeatedly throughout La Relacion, stressing the fact that sacrifice and service are the only things he has left to offer after returning “naked” from his failed expedition. Bradstreet strokes the fragile egos of her male readers by reassuring them that they are the “high flown quills” who deserve the prestigious laurels or “bays,” whereas she asks only “thyme or parsley wreath,” since her “mean and unrefined ore” will only enhance the “glist’ring gold” of her male counterparts by comparison. We have only a brief interlude of references to Greek mythology in Bradstreet’s “The Prologue [to Her Book]” to signal her subversive purpose, which is to gain a place at the literary table (a feat in itself for the 1600s).  On the contrary, Jacobs embeds much more powerful language throughout her narrative to counterbalance the obsequious portions. Double voicing is no hidden message in this text when we read that Linda Brent “pitied Mrs. Flint” (the slave pitying the master!) or that her grandmother described Dr. Flint, her stony master, as a “[p]oor old man” after his death (2036, 2050). Jacobs allows Brent to vent openly about the ironic necessity of a Christian slave avoiding churches where she might be discovered and returned to her owners. We get her rational yet poignant observation that she was not as capable as her grandmother of simply forgiving Dr. Flint’s “odious” crimes against her (2050).

In the end, I’m not convinced that Linda Brent is necessarily passive as a character; in fact, we have more evidence of her strength than we do for many of the other writers in the American tradition who have sought to address a resistant audience. Cabeza de Vaca groveled more thoroughly before the Spanish crown in an attempt to win respect after his mission of conquest failed, and Anne Bradstreet prostrated herself more pathetically before male readers, certainly, than Linda Brent does before her intended audience of white Christian women. However, we have the dismal image of the conclusion to consider, because for all of Linda Brent’s strength, she still ends up as a servant who feels obligated by moral shackles, if not literal chains, to devote her attentions to her “liberator,” the venerable Mrs. Bruce, who was able to secure Jacobs’s freedom for the paltry sum of $300–admittedly a greater sum in the late 1800s, but still not even as great as the $1,000 fine imposed on those who interfered with the Fugitive Slave Act. If Linda Brent is so strong, why does she still end up as a servant? The text’s conclusion suggests that we ought not be satisfied with the notion that freedom is won so easily.

In considering this question, it occurred to me that a troubling thread runs throughout the history of American reform. The truly courageous souls, those who stood up and refused to couch their true message (or double voice) in a subversive tone of apology, have rarely achieved the reforms they sought as effectively as those who have nodded in some way to the majority. Anne Hutchinson was a groundbreaking figure for her outspoken opposition to the theology of Puritan ministers like John Winthrop, more courageous than any one of us, yet her earnest efforts simply got her banished from Massachusetts Bay. What good could she do as a reformer if she was shut out of the very society that she wished to reform? In fact, one might argue that as noble as Hutchinson’s aims were, she contributed nothing to the eventual downfall of Puritan New England: rather, it self-destructed through the Salem trials. Likewise, Thomas Morton had the right idea with his egalitarian society at Merry Mount, which liberated servants before the slave trade even began. However, he was too saucy for his own good in satirizing the “precise Separatists” and brought down the wrath of the uncompromising Miles Standish upon his head, as Hawthorne so comically illustrates in “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” where he maintains that ”jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” Roger Williams left a mark on Providence, Rhode Island that remains to this day; he might be seen as one of the few reformers of this period that really made a difference in his own time. Despite the enticing imagery of defiant and self-reliant non-conformists in the mythology of the American West, the most successful reformers in the American tradition have often been those who found compromise more effective in getting the attention and sympathy of their audience than outright defiance.

Case in point: whom do more Americans remember and celebrate as a hero, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X? The obvious answer to this is no coincidence. MLK, Jr. was an advocate of nonviolence, and as such was much less threatening to his white audience than was Malcolm X. Spike Lee begins his biopic Malcolm X with the audio of one of Malcolm X’s speeches (read by Denzel Washington), which provides indirect commentary on video clips of white police beating Rodney King nearly to death. In one line, Malcolm X declares that the history of America is not democracy, but hypocrisy. It’s hard to disagree when I think about Winthrop and Bradford and even Thomas Jefferson. All of the so-called liberators were, themselves, guilty of some kind of oppression. But that is not a popular message. The “I Have a Dream” speech was more palatable to its audience because it did not directly confront the grave injustice of white America. It invited, but did not force, the audience to introspect. Does this mean that MLK, Jr. was more effective as a reformer merely because he now has a national holiday in his honor? Maybe he was simply mainstreamed, like a band that has signed a million-dollar record contract that undermines its principles. Maybe there is more integrity on the fringes. But too much truth, as Christ himself discovered, can make people tune out the prophet.

Crevecoeur gives us another glimpse of this pattern of mob resistance against the aggressive reformer as Farmer James witnesses a minister trying to convince his hearers that they ought to be more compassionate toward their slaves. Aside from the obvious irony that real compassion would amount to liberation, the minister is trying to speak up against cruelty (a baby step toward justice perhaps). He is silenced by one of his hearers, who says, “Sir…we pay you a genteel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the Gospel as the rule of the church directs, but we do not want you to teach us what we are to do with our blacks” (938). Never mind that slavery is utterly incompatible with Christ’s teachings. James informs us that from that point onward, the minister “found it prudent to withhold any farther admonition” (938). Another would-be reformer silenced. So what was Jacobs’s alternative? If she had grown one decible louder in her opposition to hypocrisy, she could have been dismissable to her audience, which in turn could have rendered her utterly powerless as a reformer. How does a person with a message make sure that it gets not only aired, but actually heard?

In some of the journals this past week, I wrote that I often feel some sympathy for the minister that Farmer James describes, because many of my attempts to apply the readings from early American history to our present time inspire resentment. Reform is one of the themes that I think is the most encouraging in American history, perhaps even a central facet of American identity. The day that we stop reforming is the day that we stop caring about liberty, because caring about liberty requires the sense of urgency inherent in the famous line from Rousseau’s essay “The Social Contract”: “Man was born free; and everywhere is in chains.” To me, the true patriot is the American who is never satisfied with the existing state of freedom and never stops asking the question “Who is still in chains in our nation, and what can be done to set them free?”

Perhaps this extends to Darfur, as well, but we have an ongoing battle to fight at home with immigration reform, ongoing indifference toward Native American reservations (the fact that we still have legally recognized ”reservations” is shameful, I think, and a sign of cultural degeneracy), racial profiling in criminal justice, the exploitation of domestic laborers and the outsourcing of social injustice through international sweatshops, and on and on. When students want to say that we’re so much better than we were in the nineteenth century, I think, “Well, yes, it’s good that we’re not literally selling people on the auction block. But isn’t the point of Jacobs’s conclusion that winning legal freedom is just the start? What about our present society suggests that we have achieved universal justice or that we ought to simply give up on the pursuit of it?” To me, it is no stretch to read Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a parable for our time.  It is a small stretch to substitute words like “insurgent” for “savage” in Columbus’s diary and entertain the notion that the same patterns of conquest in the name of democracy/salvation are ongoing. Yet those are aggressive statements of dissent, and I often wonder if they have as much effect as more cautious statements might. How can I, as an educator, get the attention of my audience about issues that I believe are ethically urgent without falling off the tightwire of reform? Do I not have a civic obligation to voice arguments against war, to ask Christian students what evidence exists in the New Testament to support the use of violence for any cause (and how it is that so many churches support the war effort), and to expect that all students might recognize the potential for contradictions in present-day ideology by reading a text like Jacobs’s? I see it as my patriotic duty to perform some acts of dissent, since this is perhaps the oldest assertion of national ethos that we have. Dissent is not the same as complaint. Dissent has as its goal cultural reform; that is, it is an attempt to make a difference, to do something.

It is also crucial to defend freedom of speech, which is why the personal views articulated above are more productively expressed in a forum like this, where other views are not directly stifled or subordinated to the power structure of a classroom. My purpose is not to tell students what to think, but to encourage them to consider provocative questions and grapple toward their own answers. In the end, the reformer’s ideas are useless if the audience does not have an internal aha that makes the notion of reform an individual truth and not a top-down mandate. So, we carry on with open forum discussions, and I do not lead marches around the town square in Pella, because I recognize the principle that Harriet Jacobs was fully aware of, which is the necessity of some caution while tiptoeing over the tightwire of reform.

I close with an admonition from Thomas Jefferson, which is that the effect of coercion has been “[t]o make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites” (1008). Rather, he argues, “Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves” (1008)? This is why the classroom must be centered on dialogue. This is why the open forum, which we try to foster in this class, is so important. If I believe that I have the final truth, that my understanding of cultural reform is so thorough and impenetrable that I have nothing to gain from hearing anyone else’s perspective, then I cannot expect others to respond charitably or receptively, because I myself have become miserly and unreceptive. Thomas Paine risks this very characterizaiton when he begins to deride the “Christian mythologists” for their misguided perceptions, because Paine comes across as if he has the corner on truth. I have watched class after class tune him out and immediately shift into defense mode because of his confrontational tone, which is a shame, since Paine’s application of reason to the discussion of religion is one of the most thorough and courageous projects that we have in American literature.

Perhaps this is what Jacobs has to teach us, not to grovel before a resistant audience, but to suspend impatience for a time and try to wedge one’s foot in the door so that the conversation with the audience keeps rolling, because if the audience slams the door, the project of reform is utterly lost. And if the reformer is incapable of experiencing mental and personal reform him/herself, then the cause is in jeopardy. Is some element of humility not also essential to Jefferson’s notion of “free enquiry”? Might the tightwire of reform be the tenuous space between the void of conformity and the pit of deafness to others?