In chapter 4 of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” Harriet Jacobs recounts the first time she was punished by her mistress, Mrs. Flint. She notes that unlike many other forms of discipline on the plantation, hers was not corporeal, but rather “petty” and “tyrannical.” Jacobs had gotten new shoes, courtesy of her grandmother, whose “creaking” upset Mrs. Flint. The mistress immediately ordered Jacobs to remove them, and promptly threatened to burn them should she catch her wearing them again. Mrs. Flint then sent the young girl barefoot out into the snow in retribution for her act, and Jacobs went to bed feeling ill, thinking she may wake up sick or even dead in the morning. She arose disappointed to find she was healthy, and imagined that should she have died, then perhaps Mrs. Flint would feel guilty for having caused it. In hindsight, she realizes that she created this fantasy out of ignorance, as she didn’t understand her mistress’ actual malevolent perception of her.
This incident with the shoes reflects the reality of enslaved peoples’ position on the plantation, the nation as a whole, and in the minds of their owners, and furthermore indicates Jacobs’ realization of this reality and her own circumstances as a slave. The shoes represent individuality, as they are a personal item and piece of property that Jacobs owns which differentiates her from her peers. They also represent mobility and the inherent freedom that comes with movement, as one typically wears shoes when they move from one place to another. On the plantation, enslaved people can have neither individuality nor freedom of movement (or freedom of any kind). This is because they are considered chattel, and property cannot own property, nor can property express individuality because they are not considered to be human. In the mind of Mrs. Flint, Jacobs and her counterparts are simply capital in the plantation economy.
Mrs. Flint’s expeditious threat to destroy the shoes, as well as the subsequent punishment she inflicts on Jacobs, demonstrates her own understanding of this reality, and shows how masters sought to reiterate to slaves that they were not people and had no rights. The fact that Mrs. Flint felt the need to execute this strategy for such a minuscule offense highlights the extent to which masters went to reinforce this idea to their slaves, and how deep-seated this logic was in their own minds.
The “extravagant imagining” that Jacobs fabricates, namely that Mrs. Flint would feel remorse for having killed or sickened her, and the fact that she realized it is just this – an imagining – points to her awareness of her own circumstances of bondage. Upon reflection, she now understands her place on the plantation and in the minds of her owners: she is not a person, but property. By the end of the incident Jacobs is no longer ignorant about how she’s perceived by her masters, and knows that Mrs. Flint, nor any other master of hers, cares about her or her well-being, beyond her value as a capital asset. Aside from being a source of labor, enslaved people were nothing to their owners, at least in Jacobs’ experience, and her first punishment as a child helped her recognize this harsh truth.
Discussion Question: How does the corporeal punishment described elsewhere in the book compare to the petty punishment that Jacobs experiences? How might different degrees of discipline effect the behavior of enslaved people, and how did it contribute to the hierarchy of control that owners sought to instill upon these people?