Named source · 1861

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Quotes by Harriet A. Jacobs: Context & Meanings

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Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.

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“Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”

Harriet A. Jacobs

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Jacobs deliberately closes her narrative by centering legal freedom for herself and her children instead of the conventional marriage ending expected of many nineteenth-century narratives.

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XLI, “Free At Last,” Project Gutenberg #11030. Jacobs tells the reader that her story ends with freedom rather than marriage, then explains that she and her children are free while her hope for a home of her own remains unrealized. This is autobiographical testimony from the history of U.S. slavery.

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