Life & Wisdom Quote by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Jacobs doesn’t ask you to pity the enslaved; she dares you to test the system the way the system tests people: by performance. “Call yourself a negro trader” is a brutal instruction because it exposes how slavery runs on social permission. Put on the right identity - not the identity of the victim, but the identity of the buyer - and the plantation drops the mask. The real horror, she implies, isn’t hidden in some back room. It’s public, routine, and activated by money.

The intent is tactical. Jacobs is writing into a culture where Northern readers could keep slavery at arm’s length, soothed by euphemism, distance, and the comforting fiction that “good masters” moderated the worst impulses. She punctures that with a kind of field experiment: the moment you arrive as commerce rather than conscience, you become safe to confide in. You will “see and hear” what polite society pretends not to know because complicity has its own etiquette.

The subtext is also a rebuke to the reader’s moral imagination. “Things that will seem to you impossible” anticipates disbelief - the reflex to doubt testimony when it offends one’s worldview. Jacobs preempts skepticism by explaining why evidence is scarce: cruelty is concealed from outsiders, not from insiders. Her final phrase, “human beings with immortal souls,” leverages the era’s Christian vocabulary to sharpen the charge. Slavery isn’t merely an economic crime; it is a theological insult, a machine designed to train people to treat souls as inventory.