"The laws were laid down to me anew": Harriet Jacobs and the reframing of legal fictions

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Christina Accomando

"We could have told them a different story": Placing Frames at the Center

Harriet Jacobs and Thomas Cobb both claim the truth, but they have very different views of truth-telling, objectivity, and evidence. Jacobs frames her own text - an autobiographical narrative told by "Linda Brent," a constructed first-person narrator - with an awareness of framing and with attention to multiple perspectives. Jacobs knows that context matters and that narratives frequently are contested. The first line of the preface promises truth: "Reader, be assured, this narrative is no fiction" (1). Unlike Cobb, however, Jacobs does not pretend to lack purpose or agenda. Jacobs not only crafts her text with great power and purpose, but she also calls attention to craft in various ways. She often presents two different versions of something to reveal the differences between versions depending on the framer and her or his agenda. This approach reminds her reader to question sources and pay attention to who is telling the story.

For example, when Linda Brent is hiding in her grandmother's attic (her refuge for seven years while she plans her escape to the North), she writes a letter to try to fool her owner, Dr. Flint, into thinking that she is already in the North. Jacobs includes both the summary of Brent's staged letter to her grandmother as well as the text of a falsified letter with which Flint replaces it. Jacobs includes Flint's counterfeit letter in direct quotes and indented, so it looks real, but she precedes it with a discrediting introduction: "The old villain! He had suppressed the letter I wrote to grandmother, and prepared a substitute of his own" (130). So the letter appears genuine, but we know it is fake. Jacobs is fully aware of the many layers of representation here. Flint invents a manipulative and phony version of the letter, and the hidden Brent - along with the reader - is in the privileged position of knowing that he is lying. The "original" letter, however, also is a construction and a manipulation, as Brent, hiding in North Carolina, pretends to write from New York. In fact, the narrator obtains the data for the false letter by lifting street names from a proslavery newspaper: "It was a piece of the New York Herald," she writes, "and, for once, the paper that systematically abuses the colored people, was made to render them a service" (128). Jacobs uses the Herald subversively, reminding us that texts are used - that they can be employed, deployed, reframed, and revised for various purposes, good and bad.

By juxtaposing different framings, Jacobs dislodges the speaking authority of those who are complicit in slavery. While status might otherwise validate these voices, Jacobs urges us to question the source. The narrator reports a white version of her brother William's escape before she recounts William's own version, for example. Mr. Sands, the white father of Linda Brent's children (and a member of Congress), purchases Brent's brother, supposedly with plans to free him, and takes him to the North. Once there, the brother flees, and Brent hears two different tellings of the escape. In this pairing of stories, Jacobs first includes the white slaveholder's rendition without comment, presented as Sands's direct words. Then she immediately follows that version with another, in the narrator's voice, opening with: "I afterwards heard an account of the affair from William himself" (136). The direct quotes around the white man's story do not lend it validity. In fact, quoting the story without interruption, like quoting and indenting Flint's fictitious letter, highlights its constructedness. Jacobs's text clearly forces us to notice sources and speakers and to take into account agendas and points of view. In particular, anyone implicated in the institution of slavery, including the seemingly well-meaning Sands (who also neglects to free Brent's children), is to be viewed with special skepticism. The conditions and events of slavery, Jacobs contends, are best conveyed by the voices of slaves themselves.