Personally, whenever I’ve heard the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death”, my automatic assumption is that the person saying it would much rather receive liberty than die. However, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this idea of preference is largely eliminated by the absolutely brutal nature of slavery.
Harriet Jacobs, by way of Linda Brent, constantly mentions how much she yearns for death during and through the birth and development of her children. When she learns of Dr. Flint’s plans to build a secluded house for him to torture her in, she laments, “I vowed before my Maker that I would never enter [the house]. I had rather toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death” (46). After she told Dr. Flint and her grandmother that she was pregnant, to their outrage and rejection, she, “prayed to die; but the prayer was not answered” (49). Even after she became a mother and received “a new tie to life”, she said, “I had often prayed for death; but now I did not want to die, unless my child could die too” (52). She even states plainly, “Death is better than slavery” (53). This heartbreaking and steadfast conclusion was only made possible by the unique torture of Linda as a slave, more particularly a female slave. Slavery is, “terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women”; there are many unique things about the lived experience of enslaved women that make it far more psychologically torturous for them than it is for men (64).
The primary piece of evidence for this is the sexual predation that is inflicted upon female slaves. For Linda, Dr. Flint had done, “his utmost to pollute [her[ mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated [her] my grandmother, and the good mistress of [her] childhood” (46). Although Dr. Flint never raped Linda, he constantly threatened it and went so far as to build a cabin that he could use for his private sexual torture of her if he so chose. This kind of threat was not relevant to male slaves; to them, any psychological torture was meant for submission to work. Male slaves were not entitled to their freedom or to the outward labors of their bodies, but female slaves were constantly stripped of any intimate ideas of safety. For women like Linda, the one part of themselves that male slaves were often (but not always) able to protect was inherently insecure, and this insecurity likely lead Linda to her conclusions about death being the only true escape from slavery.
Further, escape was a much more treacherous option for female slaves. Any woman seen unaccompanied during this time period was of note, let alone a Black woman. For male slaves, they had the advantage of patriarchal norms and physical strength when they attempted to escape. For women, misogyny both in terms of physical perception and duty to family greatly hindered their chances or inclinations towards escape. Although Linda does eventually make an escape attempt, her grandmother attempts to dissuade her by asking, “Do you mean to leave your little, helpless children?” (75). Male slaves attempting to reach freedom were not burdened with the same sense of parental guilt Linda was made to feel; her obligations as a mother were also a large part of what made it so difficult to escape and, in turn, to believe that freedom was worth pursuing.
We don’t often hear the stories of female slaves told for many reasons, but one that cannot be ignored is the inherent misogyny woven into our prioritization of male slave narratives and white mens’ preference for taking them on for editing, as women were seen as unreliable sources. The oppression of misogyny on top of the torture of slavery made the life of the female slave especially bleak, and it is easy to understand why death would have perhaps been more freeing than freedom itself for women like Linda Brent.