How we cite our quotes: Chapter.Paragraph
Quote #1
The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him and his own household. (6.13)
White women's houses were often full of slave children who were half-siblings of the white children. These little asides are Linda's way of trying to explain Mrs. Flint's meanness as something other than basic human indecency.
Quote #2
[T]he husband of a slave has no power to protect her. (7.2)
The nineteenth-century view of marriage as a husband protecting and honoring his wife’s dignity and purity has no chance in slave communities—just one more way that women suffer.
Quote #3
I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery […] makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. (10.20)
Slavery affects every member of every family, and it's hard to say who's got it worse.
Quote #4
Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery. (11.17)
Here's one of the worst things about slavery: Linda may have prayed for her children to live, but she wasn't entirely happy when they survived.
Quote #5
[S]laveholders have been cunning enough to enact that “the child shall follow the condition of the mother,” not of the father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice. (14.3)
In other words, sex between a white woman and a black man might be a crime, but a white man's rape of a black woman is just a good investment.
Quote #6
What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery! (14.11)
Slaveholders liked to argue that slavery was okay because slaves were racially inferior. Not so fast, Jacobs says. Many slaves are actually of mixed ancestry, and so this slaveholder logic is… not very logical.
Quote #7
My friends feared I should become a cripple for life; and I was so weary of my long imprisonment that, had it not been for the hope of serving my children, I should have been thankful to die; but, for their sakes, I was willing to bear on. (24.7)
Linda’s emphasis on family makes her story tailor-made to appeal to Northern white women readers, since it confirms their own expectations about how women should behave.
Quote #8
“O Aggie […] it seems as if I shouldn’t have any of my children or grandchildren left to hand me a drink when I’m dying, and lay my old body in the ground.” (26.9)
When stoic Aunt Martha finally expresses a feeling, it’s pretty effective—effective enough to temporarily convince Linda not to run away.
Quote #9
“I wish it could have lived […] it is not the will of God that any of my children should live. But I will try to be fit to meet their little spirits in heaven.” (28.2)
Aunt Nancy's sad little story shows that slave women's children are sacrificed to the whims of their masters and mistresses—whims as trivial as the need for a midnight glass of water.
Quote #10
The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. (41.25)
The story might be over—but not really. Jacobs insists that, until black families can live together in freedom, there's work to be done. (And, actually, Jacobs did work for African-Americans until her death.)