Appealing to the White Audience in Black Autobiographies

        As we read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, I was really struck by the extent to which Jacobs (Brent) extends a hand outward from her narrative to the reader. She’s constantly aware of how her experience will influence her largely Northern white readers; where they will be horrified or outraged and where she can call them to action. Booker T. Washington also actively makes space for a white audience in his narrative, redirecting blame for slavery and pointing to the lack of ill will among the slaves on his plantation when they were freed. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery differ significantly in their primary objectives, due largely to the different historical moments in which they were created. We see these different aims reflected in the way each author chooses to depict their experience in bondage. Despite these differences, however, both autobiographies find it necessary to reach out to white audiences in their narratives which gives insight into the shifting relationships between black and white people as the established racial hegemony was changing form. 

                                                                               Harriet Jacobs

Linda Brent (aka Harriet Jacobs) actively engages with the audience many times, making clear her aim to open the eyes of those who would have no concept of life in bondage. From her preface, she admits that she would rather not tell her story due to her feelings of inadequacy but that she does so she does “earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered and most of them far worse” (Brent 5). In this preface, Brent openly states her target audience: white women of the North, women who have access to more power and resources and are seen as the primary champions of morality in American society. Jacobs remains tuned into her audience throughout the story, especially when she describes, in theory, her relationship with Mr. Sands in response to Dr. Flint’s advances. Brent spends the majority of the chapter “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life” trying to put her actions in context, more time than she spends actually explaining what happened. She says, “Oh ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood… do not judge a slave girl too severely!” (Brent 49). She feels the need to excuse her moral “wrongdoings” when it comes to Mr. Sands and she emphasizes how slavery forced her from the typical chastity associated with the pinnacle of (white) womanhood. This is something that other enslaved women do not have access to and these ideas of chastity are not as integral to womanhood as they once were. Still, if we put ourselves into this era, this loss of sexual purity, separate from the coercion and violation it necessitates, is one of the most egregious crimes of slavery.

                                                                        Booker T. Washington

While Linda Brent’s autobiography functions as an abolitionist work, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery seeks to instruct black people on how to live in the aftermath of slavery. Washington’s description of his experience in slavery is very different from Brent’s. In the first chapter of Up From Slavery, Washington clarifies that while his reader may assume, “that there was bitter feeling toward the white people on the part of my race… In the case of the slaves on our place this was not true, and it was not true of any large portion of the slave population in the South where the Negro was treated with anything like decency” (Washington).  In this passage, Booker T. Washington presents a very different image of slavery than Brent, one in which slavery is not a great interpersonal injustice. He posits that most slaves are treated with something at least approaching decency, while still admonishing the “institution” of slavery. Washington's description of his experience supports the fact that envisions interpersonal relationships between black and white people as staying fundamentally the same after slavery’s end. While Brent/Jacobs makes space in her story for a white audience to sympathize, calling them to invoke change, Washington addresses white audiences by ensuring white people that very little needs to change. 

Overall, both authors situate white people (Southern or Northern) as a critical or even central audience of their work. On either side of the coin, these black authors are grappling with the reality of American power dynamics. Neither stance is careful to redirect blame around white people or at least the white demographic comprising the audience. At the same time, both these works are autobiographies and I don’t mean to say that their experiences as slaves are in some way deceitful in order to make their point. I think both authors are shaped by their experiences in bondage but especially by what freedom meant and looked like for each of them. The system under which Jacobs lived her life demanded an urgent and more clear-cut agitation against a system. Meanwhile, Booker T. Washington wrote his autobiography when the social status of black people was extremely precarious and he was paving the path forward that made the most sense to him. Perhaps the shifting and ambiguous form of racial hegemony plays into his less critical view of the responsibility of white society. I see their appeals to white audiences of the channeling of double consciousness as a tool for survival.