Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This story was one of the saddest stories I have ever experienced. Through the bonds of slavery, an innocent woman lived in fear for nearly half of her life. The cruelty of the slave owners baffles me. As the story of Linda is told the reader sees that the experiences of being a female slave are almost worse than that of a male slave. The females were not required to do manual labor in the fields, but they were forced to endure the perversity of their masters and the immorality of the society they live in. One thing Jacob’s spends a lot of time discussing is religion. Through religion she points out the immorality and contradictory actions made by the slave owners. Mrs. Flint’s actions stand out the most, especially when she tells Sally that she is grateful that Benny was bitten by a dog and that she cannot wait for the same to happen to his mother so she can receive the punishment she rightly deserves.

I am astonished at the savage treatment of female slaves. Almost every story is about the difficulty of working in the fields and being a black man; yet the women were almost treated worse. Although this treatment wasn’t usually physical, it was emotional, something that impacts the lives of women even greater. The perseverance shown by this brave woman is astounding. To be able to push through sexual tension and to be ripped from those you love is no easy feat and is unbelievable that women were able to withstand this and continue to go on every day never hesitating to move forward. The religious references serve as a wake-up call to the reader and just gives the reader one more example of the bias towards slaves. The fact that a man can call himself a Christian yet treat human beings with such cruelty is a sin in itself.