Harriet Jacobs And Moody

The quest for freedom is a reoccurring theme throughout the lives of Harriet Jacobs and Anne Moody in their respective biographies Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Coming of Age in Mississippi. Both narrators’ families are trapped: Jacobs and her children by dehumanizing bonds of slavery and Anne and her family by institutional poverty in the rural South. The roles these women take on to free themselves from these burdens define their notions of freedom, as well as their later activism. Harriet Jacobs’ and Anne Moody’s respective desires to be maternal and fiscal protectors of their families defines their notion is freedom, which in turn effects their beliefs and actions in their respective reform movements. Throughout her time

From an early age, Mood is conscious of her family’s abject poverty, which drives her to take on domestic jobs to support them throughout her childhood and adolescence. Even though her employers such as Mrs. Burke can be condescending and cruel, she cannot give up this work as she is “faced with a sick mother, crying babies, an unemployed step-father…[she] knew [she] had to take that job, [she] had to help secure that plate of beans if nothing else” (Moody 1968, 121). Like Jacobs, Moody is forced to endure hardships to protect her “helpless” family. The repeated motif of food (the dismal meals that are all the family can afford) serves as reminder of the family’s degree of poverty and their struggle for sustainability. But while Jacobs and Moody have a similar desire to protect their families, Moody instead does so by taking on the role of a breadwinner, not a maternal figure. She values the practical outcomes of getting food on the table more so than the personal relationships with her family. Moody only accepts the union between Ray and her mother because he can provide housing for them, which would allow them too “have a place of their own…moving off white people’s places probably for good” (Moody 1968, 45). Moody sees living with Ray’s people not as an extension of new family, but as some degree of freedom from her family’s economic situation. She asserts that they are moving off “white people’s places,” showing a degree of independence from her white employers, demonstrating how Anne seeks fiscal independence from the system of poverty in which she lives. Her family life, in which she lives hand-to-mouth, causes her to equate freedom not with the capacity for personal relationships but with economic