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Situational Irony
Chapter Eight: What Slaves are Taught to Think of the North
Explanation and Analysis:
The book's style shuttles back and forth between confessional and didactic: Jacobs is not only telling her own story but also educating northern readers about the horrors that the institution of slavery visits on everyone it touches. For example, in Chapter 8, Jacobs describes the manipulative tactics enslavers use against those they enslave:
Slaveholders pride themselves upon being honorable men; but if you were to hear the enormous lies they tell their slaves, you would have small respect for their veracity. I have spoken plain English. Pardon me. I cannot use a milder term. When they visit the north, and return home, they tell their slaves of the runaways they have seen, and describe them to be in the most deplorable condition. A slaveholder once told me [...]
Jacobs is describing the general social landscape of the South. "You," the reader, is assumed to be a Northerner, because that is who Jacobs is appealing to. The book was published in Boston, where literacy rates were far higher than they were in the South. Jacobs wanted to use her memoir to mobilize Northerners (especially white Northerners) against slavery. She knew that Northerners did not witness the same daily horrors she had during her childhood and early adulthood in South Carolina. So, to help illustrate the argument she is making about enslavers' deception, she follows it up with an example from her own experience. In this example, an enslaver claims that formerly enslaved life in the North is worse than enslaved life in the South. Northern readers would probably be able to spot this as a lie, and Jacobs's broader claim would be more likely to persuade them.
Jacobs often uses her own experiences as evidence of her larger persuasive claims. Early on in the memoir especially, she alternates between chapters focused on formative experiences and chapters that take more of an essay form. These essay-like chapters are addressed, like the passage above, directly to a Northern reader who is relatively unfamiliar with the particulars of how the institution of slavery works. This style makes Jacobs's memoir a popular choice for teaching students in the 21st century about the institution of slavery. Readers should keep in mind that Jacobs does not provide an all-encompassing account of enslavement, even of her own. When she describes her own experiences, she is straightforward and does not mince words about the trauma of being enslaved. Still, she is selective rather than exhaustive. Everything she describes serves her goal of appealing to readers, so there is the sense that she has endured and witnessed more trauma than what she describes.
Related Themes:
