Quotes from Harriet Ann Jacobs

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

The beautiful spring came and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.

There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.