Parenting & Family Quote by Harriet Ann Jacobs

A small, almost domestic sentence that quietly stages the machinery of slavery. Jacobs opens with the mildness of “accustomed” and “indulgences,” language that sounds like childhood privilege, then snaps it into place with the hard grammar of ownership: “Dr. Flint’s family,” “children of my mistress.” The effect is deliberate. She’s not romanticizing early life; she’s showing how the institution can masquerade as ordinary household routine, especially to readers primed to imagine the plantation as a quaint, paternal space.

The subtext sits in the word “share.” Jacobs did not possess indulgences; she was permitted access to them, on someone else’s timetable, at someone else’s pleasure. By placing herself alongside the mistress’s children, she exposes a particular cruelty: intimacy without equality. Enslaved children often grew up near white children, sometimes dressed similarly, sometimes playing in the same rooms, creating the illusion of familial closeness. Jacobs signals how that closeness functions as control, a way to naturalize hierarchy before it needs to be enforced openly.

Context matters: in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs is writing to Northern women who might recognize the texture of a household more readily than the economics of bondage. She begins in the nursery, not the field, because she’s building a case that slavery is not just labor exploitation but a daily training in dispossession, carried out through “indulgences” that can be granted, withdrawn, and used to discipline. The sentence is a quiet setup for the betrayal to come: childhood “privileges” are the soft preface to adult vulnerability.