Corruption

Harriet Jacobs,

I would first like to say how heartbreaking this narrative is, yet how it did not shock me, sadly. Knowing how your childhood, your purity, and your innocence, were stripped from you is infuriating. Reading about you, a few things you wrote stood out to me. One of these is the story you told about Charity and her family. You wrote about this about the master: “had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman”. It’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around this phrase. Such a vile man he was, even if he was considered “a good master”. Current day, we have a president who is a racist, sexist, and contradicts many things people have fought for. In a way, because he is in an authority position, people see his behavior and his ignorance, as acceptable so they behave in the same type of way. This makes me think about all slave owners, how perhaps slavery was just an outlet for them to act out. It was accepted in society, so these beliefs of superiority and enslavement was “okay”, despite the painfully obvious fact that it was wrong.  

Your continuous optimism and hope is to such an extent that I can never imagine having such in myself. It breaks my heart to think that the definition of a “good person” was either one who did not harm their slaves or one who actually treated people like people. I see it as slavery did not “produce the corruption”, but rather it enabled the corruption that was already there to shine through.