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

Jacobs demonstrates a subtler contrast with the difference between a constructed white telling of Aunt Nancy's funeral and an implied slave perspective. She provides pages of context and history, describing Mrs. Flint's cruelty and hypocrisy toward Nancy in life and death, and then observes:

Northern travellers, passing through the place, might have described this tribute of respect to the humble dead as a beautiful feature in the "patriarchal institution"; a touching proof of the attachment between slaveholders and their servants; and tenderhearted Mrs. Flint would have confirmed this impression, with handkerchief at her eyes. We could have told them a different story. (146-47)

Jacobs argues for multiple representations by and for African Americans - the italicized "We" who "could have" offered an alternative narrative. The dominant narrative is represented by the quoted and discredited phrase "patriarchal institution." She cautions against believing interpretations that fail to take into account multiple perspectives and silenced voices. Neither story actually is told here: Whites "might have described" those images; slaves "could have told" them something different. Different, contested framings exist even when they have not yet been uttered. Jacobs demands an active reader who will focus on the "different story" that normally remains untold or unheard, from sources likely to be unauthorized or silenced.

As Jacobs was well aware, various laws existed in the nineteenth century to silence slaves, to attempt to deny them a legal, political, or literary voice. They could not testify against a white person or serve on a jury. They could not vote, run for office, or petition the government. They generally were barred from learning, teaching, or practicing reading and writing.(11) Free blacks were denied many of these rights as well. While slavery's defenders asserted that the enslaved were happy, they also were determined not to let these happy slaves say a public word, whether in a courtroom, ballot box, or novel. The official line on slavery declared that slaves had no subjectivity to speak of, yet there was tremendous anxiety that there be no public arena where such a subjectivity might somehow speak. This central contradiction helps reveal the fictions underlying legal constructions of slavery.

The official story suggested that slaves had no will, and no real arena in which to express any such will. As it turns out, the official story was not the true story. Slaves and ex-slaves - like Lucy Delaney's mother and Sojourner Truth, for example, who both sued for their children's freedom - found their way into courtrooms.(12) Numerous slaves learned to read and write, and taught others to do the same, and many used their literacy in the fight against slavery, from the well-known cases of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to individuals like the Louisiana woman who taught hundreds of fellow slaves to read in her clandestine "midnight school" (Davis 22). Such gaps between legal fictions and actual experiences occurred in various forms, and exploring these gaps reminds present-day scholars not to rely upon "official" discourses alone. Especially interesting here is the anxiety-ridden attention to detail in the official discourses designed to suppress the subjectivity that slaveholders claimed did not exist in the first place.