CHALLENGES FACED BY LINDA BRENT IN INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

CHALLENGES FACED BY LINDA BRENT IN INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
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Slavery, for most of its experience, always bore cruelty. For Linda, she got the voice to write about her experience and subjected it to the court of public opinion. Today we can draw lessons from her experience. Linda Brent, having lost her parents and her owner Margaret Horniblow, she by default, remained under the Slavery of James Norcom. In 1829, we saw a teenage girl, Linda, fall in love with a free black carpenter who wanted to marry her. Instead of letting the teenage girl share her own life, James threatens her with isolation while increasing his advances. Linda is denied her right to association and relationships and even threatened with what the author refers to as the isolation of concubinage.[Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York City: Penguin Books, 2000), p.16)] [Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York City: Penguin Books, 2000), p.16)]
Linda faced the challenge of a relationship dilemma. She was to either succumb to the sexual advances or choose another man. She gets entangled with another man as a strategy to escape her master’s sexual advances. Linda, as a young black African woman, she was powerless in resisting the obscene and sexual advances from her white, middle-aged master. Since there were younger men in the setup like James' son and Samuel Tredwell, Harriet faced a dilemma. As she suffers the forceful advances of her master, Linda has the attention and sympathy of Tredwell, and she decides to get involved with Tredwell as a means to escape the progress from a fifty-two-year-old Mr. Norcom. Linda's involvement with Sands is the strategy she used to avoid forceful sexual entanglement with her boss since she thought by choosing another man, it would disgust Mr. Flint. When Linda is overwhelmed by Dr. Flint's advances, she decides to select the young lawyer, Sands, who she goes ahead to get pregnant. One might wonder how this is a solution, but it was Jacobs's only way out. Not wanting to entangle herself with her master, Linda gives in to the advances of Mr. Tredwell. She takes that critical step with the hope that it would keep her master, whom she does not like away, and hopefully, Mr. Tredwell would buy her freedom from her master once they are together. Linda's decision causes her grandmother pain and is ashamed and guilty for her action. In her autobiography, she shows remorse for her response, saying, "My self-respect was gone! I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave”. However, Linda tries not to be too hard on herself, acknowledging that at her situation, there was a likelihood that her judgment was blurred and herself powerless. About her regretted the decision, she writes, "I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others" Linda feels confident when later her master approaches her with sexual advances telling him that she was carrying another man's baby. However, surprisingly her master is still on her case. Even after giving birth to her son, Joseph, Dr. Flint refuses to sell Linda since her son's father had asked her master to trade her freedom.[Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York City: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 100)]
Linda is faced with the challenge of either accepting to be Mr. Flint's concubine to get her children's freedom. In Incidents, Linda is describing the Slavery in the South as “the cage of obscene birds," Linda finds herself trapped in this cage of obscene birds as outplayed by Norcom’s condition for her freedom together with her children. Norcom, who is also known as Mr. Flint, offers to procure Linda and her children a cottage where they would be free and have light duties. As much as Linda's most significant worry is her children's safety and the undeniable fact that they would live in Slavery just like her, she refuses to accept Flints offer. For Linda, her Christian principles mattered, and she could not enter into that snare not only because she had suffered betrayal in the hands of the whites before but mostly because it was against her piety. Linda spent several days and nights in a swamp full of snakes and another seven y...