Reading a Slave Narrative for Its Argument

The idea

A slave narrative is an argument in the shape of a life, and four questions find the argument. First, what does the passage claim slavery does to people, since the strongest narratives argue that the institution damages the enslaver as well, which is exactly the claim the board's sample passage makes about a mistress whose lamblike disposition gave way to tiger-like fierceness. Second, what stands for freedom in the passage: literacy, a fight, a journey, a name, or the ability to protect a child. Third, who the passage is addressed to, since these books were written for northern white readers who had to be persuaded that the writer was fully human before they could be persuaded of anything else. Fourth, what the passage withholds, since Jacobs writes around her own sexual coercion in language a nineteenth-century audience would accept, and the reticence is evidence rather than absence.