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"The laws were laid down to me anew": Harriet Jacobs and the reframing of legal fictions
African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Christina Accomando
Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into a "Jim Crow car," . . . neither was I invited to ride through the streets on top of trunks in a truck; but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people. (176)
Her description makes the exception she benefited from sound little different from slavery. Her conclusion makes a connection between external laws and practices and internal reactions. Her proposals for action generally address whites in the North, calling on them to take action against slavery for their black sisters. At the close of this chapter, Jacobs also calls for action among fellow African Americans, having first warned against the repression of their energies. After describing her persistence in the face of racist treatment at a Northern hotel, she reveals her triumph in quiet, general terms: "Finding I was resolved to stand up for my rights, they concluded to treat me well." She does not stop at example, however, going on to declare: "Let every colored man and woman do this, and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by our oppressors" (177). Everyone who might read her book - black or white, Northern or Southern - is given avenues for action. She seeks in her testimony not only to inform and educate, but also to enrage and activate.
While not always read as legal critique, Harriet Jacobs's narrative certainly issues a call to activism - a demand to reframe the law and redefine standards of womanhood. Since Thomas Cobb argues through the law, he always claims rationality and objectivity, not the "zealous interest" of abolitionist tracts. Part of Cobb's power is his pretense at disinterest and political neutrality. Part of the power of racism is its ability (in ever-static and ever-changing ways) to appear rational, objective, invisible. Jacobs, on the other hand, exposes that lie of neutrality as she challenges the legal fictions of black subjectivity created by the laws that Cobb itemizes.
The contradictions of slavery run deep and have a long history in this nation. While the pilgrims were stepping on Plymouth Rock to escape European oppression, European ships were bringing kidnaped Africans to the American continent.(25) While the founding fathers were writing about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," many of them also were fathering slaves. In the same breath as they spoke of equality and morality, nineteenth-century legal scholars and judges also would speak of African Americans as aliens and animals. Examining Jacobs's analysis, Cobb's rhetoric, and laws around slave subjectivity and sexuality helps expose the erasures and instabilities of such legal fictions that present themselves as fact. Such an exploration also reminds us to interrogate the seeming rationality and neutrality of modern legal discourse that also may obfuscate racism and sexism today.
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