Quote

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.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

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Harriet Ann Jacobs
Died: 1897
Died: March 7
Autobiographer
Nanny
Writer
Edenton
North Carolina
Harriet Ann Jacobs
May
Year
Peculiar
Dawns
Might
Dies
Dawn
Cabin
Children
Wish
Slave
Cabins
Years
Often
Watching
Laden
Comes
Sorrow
Sorrows
Next
Cold
Sits
Mother
Morning
Torn
Doe
Literature
Floor

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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
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No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
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Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.
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When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
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Death is better than slavery.
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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.
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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.
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Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fastened the irons upon his wrists could you have heard her heart-rending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable!
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There must be sophistry in all this but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women.
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The war of my life had begun and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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When I was six years old, my mother died and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.
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I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds but God let it live.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
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The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
Harriet Ann Jacobs