Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 131father was a skilled man, a carpenter, Jacobs recalls; and, on condition of paying his
mistress two hundred dollars a year, and supporting himself, he was allowed to man-
age his own trade and affairs. He and she, and her mother and brother, “lived
together in a comfortable home”; and, although they were all slaves, “I was so fondly
shielded,” Jacobs tells her readers, that, to begin with, “I never dreamed that I was a
piece of merchandise, trusted to them for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of
them at any moment.” The revelation that she was, indeed, a slave came when she
was 6. Her mother died; and she learned from the talk around her that this was her
condition. The strongest wish of her father had been to purchase the freedom of his
children. But he, too, died a year later with his wish unrealized. Aside from her
brother, Jacobs’s closest relative was now her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, an
extraordinary woman whose history had been one of betrayal. Molly was the daugh-
ter of a South Carolina planter who, at his death, had left her mother, Molly herself,
and two other children free. But on their journey from the plantation to live with
relatives, all four of them were captured and sold back into slavery. As she grew
older, Molly became indispensable to the household into which she was sold, Jacobs
explains. Her master and mistress “could not help seeing it was for their interest to
take care of such a valuable piece of property.” However, when the master died, that
did not stop the mistress dividing Molly’s children up among his heirs. There were
five children, and four heirs; and so “Benjamin, the youngest one, was sold, in order
that each heir might have an equal portion of dollars and cents.” Molly still hoped to
purchase the freedom of her children; she ran a bakery in her home and had laid up
three hundred dollars from the proceeds of her work for that purpose. The mistress,
however, borrowed it one day, promising to pay it back, then never did so; and Molly
had no legal redress. “According to Southern laws,” Jacobs caustically points out, “a
slave being property, can hold no property.” So there was nothing she could do.
Betrayal of different kinds lies at the heart of Incidents. It was an experience her
grandmother had had repeatedly, Jacobs reveals; and it was an experience that then
happened to her. Her mistress died when she was 12. She had promised Jacobs’s
dying mother “that her children should never suffer for anything”; and, from many
“proofs of attachment” the mistress had shown to Jacobs herself, she could not help
“having some hope” that she would be left free in the will. She was not; she was
simply bequeathed to another member of the family. “My mistress had taught me
the precept of God’s Word: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ ” Jacobs
remembers bitterly. “But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as
her neighbor.” No ties of honor, obligation, or intimacy mattered, not even the
memory that many of the slaves now sold off were nourished at the same breast as
the children of the white family selling them. “These God-breathing machines are
no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they
tend,” Jacobs reflects. So far, Incidents is a familiar if powerful tale, not that different
from the Narrative of Douglass. And yet there are differences of tenor and tone that
perhaps alert the reader to what is coming next. There is, first, more of an emphasis
on family ties, blood relationships within the black community, than there is in the
Douglass story. In addressing the reader, there is more of an appeal to sentiment, toGGray_c02.indd 131ray_c 02 .indd 131 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM