Harriet Ann Jacobs Quotes

36 quotes in 470 categories

• Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
• 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…
• If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there…
• No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
• Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
• The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
• 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…
• When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
• 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…
• When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.
• 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…
• I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away
• Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows
• DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress
• But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul…
• Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and…
• 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,…
• The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
• Death is better than slavery.
• There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together

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