Abolition vs. Assimilation: The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abolition vs. Assimilation

The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

In Mr. Leff’s U.S. History class we are taught to evaluate narrator bias through five lenses: Historical Context, Audience, Point of View, Purpose, and Significance (rather oddly abbreviated HAPPY, with the Y representing the homophonic “Why”). In this blog post, I will investigate comparatively the role of the second of these lenses, Audience, in shaping the autobiographical narratives and the representations of the Black experience found within Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. 

According to the Preface by the Author in Jacobs’s Incidents, “I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself… But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women in the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered” (5). Although it is possible that free Black women in the North would have read the book and learned something of the author’s experience in slavery, Jacobs far more likely wrote with a white audience in mind, evidenced by the cosigning by the editor – a white woman convinced by Jacobs’s thesis, just as they hope to convince other white women – for the purpose of proving the author’s credibility.

        Washington’s Up From Slavery similarly caters to a white audience; often he makes broad generalizations about the enslaved population as a whole in an attempt to explain the Black perspective in a simple and unnuanced manner, saying that “As a rule… the members of my race entertain[ed] no feelings of bitterness against the whites” and “it [enslaved people’s resentment of landowners] was not true of any large portion of the slave population in the South where the Negro was treated with anything like decency.” However, Washington’s inclusion of his speech at the Atlanta Exposition, which addresses Southerners of both races, indicates that all members of the intended audience of Up From Slavery reside in the South – unlike Jacobs’s audience of white Northerners. Additionally, Washington makes no special effort to speak directly to women of any race in his narrations, instead using male-centered pronouns when discussing his vision for the future of the South (“they [Southern whites] will protect him [the Negro]”, “I do believe that in his voting he should…”, etc.), so another difference between the two texts lies in the gender of their intended readers.

The difference in the intended audience of the two works results in a difference of storytelling, especially in terms of their descriptions of the conditions of slavery. Both narrators experience relatively sheltered childhoods in slavery on account both of older enslaved people protecting them from the harms and of the kindness of their masters (so far as a master can be “kind”). For example, in Incidents Jacobs says that “my parents… lived together in a comfortable home; and, though we were all slaves, I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise” (9); later, she describes her mistress as being “so kind to me that I was always glad to do her bidding” (11). In Up From Slavery Washington writes with similar sentiments, saying that “my owners were [not] especially cruel” (1) and describing as his most arduous experience in slavery an incident wherein he was briefly forced to wear a flax shirt which irritated his skin, although his older brother saved him from this suffering by breaking in the shirt (8). However, despite the similarities in the way the two authors represent their masters and their experiences as enslaved children, a distinct difference lies in their representations of the fundamental relationship between master and slave.

        Throughout Incidents Jacobs, even when describing the kindness shown to her by her childhood mistress, acknowledges the inherent inequality of her relationship with her mistress, as evidenced by the quotes “My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word… But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor” (11) and “These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend” (12). In both quotes, but especially the second, Jacobs points out that, kind or otherwise, all slaveowners still see the enslaved people in their households as their property, and therefore cease to treat them as people, in particular as God’s people. The objectification of enslaved people lines up with Jacobs’s mission to convince Northern white people to condemn slavery, as it reveals the evil of the institution of slavery and the complicity of all Southern slaveowners, rather than pinning the blame of the suffering solely on cruel masters like Dr. Flint. On the other hand, Washington in his Up from Slavery has a very different mission, since slavery has already been abolished by the time of the book’s publication.

        In contrast with Jacobs, Washington highlights the humanity acknowledged between slaveowners and enslaved people at the time of emancipation, saying that “our master’s family… did not at the moment seem to be sad because of the loss of property, but rather because of parting with those whom they had reared and who were in many ways very close to them” (14). Unlike Incidents, Up From Slavery directs itself towards a white Southern audience, many of whom may have been slaveowners themselves; therefore, Washington’s humanization of and empathy for his own masters represent a certain pandering to the sensitivities of white Southerners who may feel wronged or stolen from by the emancipation of their enslaved laborers. Indeed, he appears to prioritize in his writing and advocacy the opinions of his white audience over those of fellow Black people, even despite (a) his acknowledgement that his masters were kind “as compared to many others” and (b) the tokenization, both self-imposed and imposed by his white audience, of his own experience as representative of the broader southern Black experience (1). This prioritization comes through in his dismissal of Black readers’ criticisms, saying that “I did not utter a word of explanation or retraction. I knew that I was right, and that time and the sober second thought of the people would vindicate me.” On the other hand, Washington seems to have highly valued the opinions of notable white readers, as shown by his quotation of various letters from them in Up From Slavery (these included President Cleveland and the President of John Hopkins University).

        Although both Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exemplify Black autobiographies and slave narratives, the way that the two authors present their experiences within the context of racial oppression during and after slavery differ due to the intended audiences of the respective works. In Up From Slavery, Washington caters to a white Southern audience in his promotion of complete meritocracy, resulting in a minimization of the conditions of slavery and overgeneralizing his own relatively comfortable and brief experiences as an enslaved child to describe the wider experiences of ex-enslaved people. Conversely, Jacobs’ goal in convincing white Northern women to help in the endeavor of abolishing slavery results in a more honest portrayal of the horrors inflicted on enslaved people by white slaveowners.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. 1901.