Monday, November 12, 2007
Free at Last? (Post 25)
The question posed is how Linda achieved her freedom. For starters, I would like to pose another question. Did Linda ever really attain freedom? On a surface level, one could say that yes, Linda was technically a free woman living in the north, mostly due to her lucky escape to New York. Even though she disdained the subversive methods with which she arrived at this state of being, she was technically free. However, I would have to argue that once someone has been owned, they can never truly be free. This is due to several causes. Cause one is that they have had valuable time in their life forcefully taken away from them, and therefore the owner will always have that. That is not something that can be returned or forgiven on either part. Cause 2 is that while she may have attained a technical freedom, I do not believe that her owners would ever fully recognize the existence of such a state.
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Nick-
You raise some interesting points in your blog about Linda’s (Harriet Jacobs) freedom. I had not thought about how free somebody really could become after they had already been enslaved for such a long time. That perspective is somewhat addressed by Jacobs when she discusses how horrible it feels to finally gave gained her freedom. She realizes that even though New York is a free state, it is not really free. She gets quite upset that she has to have a bill. Although she does acknowledge at the end that is does feel good to finally have received her freedom. She can stop worrying about being chases down and caught by slave traders. However, for my blog I answered the questions based strictly off of facts that the author gave the audience. She got her freedom when the second Mrs. Bruce had somebody negotiate her freedom for her actual owners. The price that was paid for her was $300.
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