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As the months passed on, my boy improved in health ... I loved to watch his infant slumbers; but always there was a daik cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy ...Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 62
In the above epigraph, Harriet Jacobs recalls the conflicted emotions she experienced at the birth of her first child, Ben. As an enslaved mother, Jacobs feels joy, but also sorrow, when gazing at her son because she knows the hardships and suffering that he will endure growing up in slavery. Although Jacobs does not entertain thoughts of killing her son, her anguish is such that she does think that it would have been better if Ben had died in infancy. Five years prior to the publication of Incidents, in 1856, Margaret Garner, an escaped slave woman threatened with return to captivity, and believing like Jacobs, that death is better than slavery, moved beyond thought to deed and committed the act of infanticide on her three-year-old baby girl.1 This true story became the basis for Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved (1987) in which Sethe, a fugitive slave woman, murders her baby daughter, who returns from the dead, first as a ghost, and then in the flesh, to haunt her mother.
In his essay "Ghost of Liberalism: Morrison's Beloved and the Moynihan Report," James Berger (1996) writes that the story of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin "provides the closest parallel in literature to Sethe's story in Beloved" (p. 42OnI). In Stowe's novel, Cassy poisons her twoweek old son because she cannot bear to have another child sold away from her. While Cassy does commit an act of infanticide, her child murder is, as Mark Reinhardt (2002) notes, "unconfrontational, covert, [and] hidden behind the veil of domesticity" (p. 8). Therefore, it differs from Sethe' s very public and violent act. This author will argue that the distinction of being the closest parallel to Sethe' s story does not belong to Cassy in Uncle...