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On the title page of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl we find two important quotations. The first indicts Northerners for their ignorance of "the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY," while the second constructs the audience as Northern, white daughters who must hear Jacobs's voice: "Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters!"1 Echoing Isaiah's ministerial words, Jacobs seizes the authority to speak from her experience as slave and as mother, capitalizing on Victorian culture's sanctification of motherhood. Ironically, from her sexual "fall" comes her voice, an abolitionist voice the slave mother is depending on her white, Northern, female readers to find within themselves. It is crucial that her readers be positioned as "careless," unknowing female bodies, for Jacobs's strategy is to coerce daughterly readers into a fall from their innocence by taking them through the sexual fall of the representative slave girl, imagined in precisely the terms of Eve's fall from the Garden:
I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister .... The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky.... [The slave sister] drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink. (29)
Jacobs retells this Biblical myth in terms of race; the patriarch's two children play in Edenic innocence, but the white girl thrives in her protected garden while the black child is raped by the slaveholders, creatures Jacobs repeatedly links with serpents in the "plantation" of Victorian America. Notice how she represents the slave girl's encounters with sexual knowledge through oral metaphors. Doing so allows her to construct what Julia Stern calls a perverse human food chain, a feeding economy controlled by those who own land and black bodies.2 In the terms of a feeding economy, both land and black bodies are fertile, foodyielding and consumable.
This emphasis on the oral speaks directly to "the depth of degradation in that word, SLAVERY." To be forced to consume, to be consumed, is to be raped and silenced. The mouth...