Julia Schwartz

January 13, 2003

“He that is willing to be a slave, let him be a slave”

                The protagonists of John Edgar Wideman’s “Our Time” and Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” share more with each other than indiscretion alone. Robby Wideman is a prisoner, and Linda Brent is a slave. Prisoners are slaves, and slaves are prisoners. Linda and Robby are both slaves, and both are prisoners. The similarities between Linda and Robby run deep, deep as the wounds they have inflicted upon themselves in their conditions of despair. Linda is a slave to a master, and a prisoner to her way of life as a slave, and to her lack of hope in finding a better way of life, to her belief that “[she and her brother], as slave-children, without father or mother, could not expect to be happy” (Jacobs 470). Robby, the literal prisoner, is a slave to his weaknesses as a criminal and a drug addict, to the “chaos” he feels when he “[delves] deeply inside [himself]” (Wideman 738).

                Both Robby and Linda go through a period of moral decline. Robby goes through the period of his life where he steals, does drugs, and lies to his family; Linda sleeps with a white man she does not love and has his baby alone as a slave in revenge. Both do it because they feel, in a sense, that it is their only way to “sit high up” (Wideman 729) and “win the war[s] of [their lives]” (Jacobs 471).  John gets involved with the “wrong” people because he thinks they will elevate him; Linda has her baby with Mr. Sands because she thinks her ultimate weapon against Dr. Flint is to give herself over to another white man. Now, however, both regret doing what they did—regret “sinning against God and [themselves]” (Jacobs 493). 

They are paying the ultimate price now; the chains that encircle them will stick with them their entire lives, as any “lamp of hope” (Jacobs 488) they might have possessed was turned off and their “new vision… [for] a master plan” (Wideman 721) was destroyed. Robby is stuck in prison, and Linda is stuck alone in her life, a reticent mother, both left to rot by all who once cared for them when they were moving toward the light. Now, they can’t escape. They have dug themselves into holes too deep to get out of, that both they themselves and the societies they have been born into prohibit them from moving from. To Linda and Robby, “reality… [is] a constant insult to [their] world” (Wideman 707) of solitude and punishment.

Linda does take the added step to contemplate the comparison of herself as a slave to prisoners, determining that “the felon’s home in a penitentiary is preferable [to slavery]. He may repent, and turn from the error of his ways, and so find peace” (Jacobs 479). However, what of the sentence that the “felon” must complete as determined by law? Jacobs thinks that just because the felon is not legally bound to another man, he can change his way of life. Yet the felon is bound, bound to the prison cell he inhabits, bound to his jail time, bound to his label as a slave. He can break these bonds no more easily than Linda can break her bonds of servitude. To free themselves of their own prisons, each would have to secretly escape their hold, and would live the rest of their lives with the fear of being caught still fresh in their eyes. Linda sees the felon as fortunate, because he has the capacity to change his ways, but the irony here is that while Linda has committed an offensive action under her bonds, creating an “amoral” way of life for herself.

As they ruminate alone in their solitude, Linda and Robby reflect on the support they have had and lost: Robby once had the support of his “Mommy,” and Linda once had her grandmother. Robby’s mother was his support, his moral reminder, the one for whom he wanted not to break the law. Letting her down, admits Robby to John, was “the worst thing [he] did, the thing [he feels] most guilty behind” (Wideman 732). When Linda commits her own form of crime, that which hurts her the most is not the shame resulting from her act, but the “tears running down [her grandmother’s] furrowed cheeks, [that] scorched [her] like fire” (Jacobs 491). Linda’s grandmother is virtually her mother, since her mother played no role in her childhood; thus, both strive for nothing more than the forgiveness of their mothers, and, in failing to achieve this, they feel the maximum penalty for their wrongdoing.

                Both Linda and Robby have been proven to have two selves. For Linda, her view of her past is distorted by her knowledge. Robby’s view of himself and his past is clouded by John’s interpretation of him: all of Robby’s words are truly those of John, in his search for profit, just as Jacobs’ are those of Linda in her search for abolitionist sympathy from Northern white women. Neither is allowed to express his or her raw emotion in direct appeal because their narratives are a collection of carefully chosen words in hopes of the maximum effect on their readers, as they fail to realize the most earnest and honest words they could write are indeed those which stem directly out of their souls, not those they choose with their minds.

                Additionally, the memories of both are distorted by the simple fact alone that they are indeed memories. Memory distorts everything; for both John and Linda do, without a doubt, bring the experiences they have had after the event back into consideration, subconscious though it may be, and their memory is that: pictures, shaped by their imagination, converted into what they wish them to be by drawing on certain aspects of the memories that they have held onto in their minds, essentially creating their importance. Just as the incidents Jacobs writes about changed her, the time Robby has had to reflect on his own transgressions as he is imprisoned changed him. But in changing them, they have distorted their interpretation of these events.

                In the closing words of “Our Time,” Robby admits that there “be days [he] wished [he] was dead. Be days worser than that” (Wideman 744), and in this, he recognizes that painful fact which Jacobs admits to be true. “Dying is better than slavery” (Jacobs 495), says she. Coupling the two statements together, it could be surmised that slavery is what is worse than death for Robby, as well as for Linda. Robby is a slave, to the master of himself. He is a slave to the knowledge that he has wasted his potential as a person, to the knowledge that he could be out in the real world living a better life—just like Linda does.

Linda is a slave to herself, as well, on top of her bondage to Dr. Flint. She is a slave bound to Dr. Flint by “fair” trials of the law, but she allows herself to be a slave, and as Linda’s brother tells her, “’he that is willing to be a slave, let him be a slave’” (Jacobs 477). Slavery is an unchangeable physical condition, but a malleable mental one. Linda cannot escape the bonds to her master, but she can raise her own spirit. The adultery she commits she blames on her slavery, but she could be a slave with actions that match the morals she holds. The fact of her slavery does not require her to submit to those attempting to lower her to sub-human levels. If she does not accept the parameters laid upon her, they will cannot enchain her.

Robby has iron chains, just like Linda, and he also has the more painful chains of lost potential. As he sits alone in his cell all day long for years at a time, he weeps with the “chaos” he feels inside, the confusion of the “dope… [that is] king” (Wideman 744) over him, the chains he wants to shed with his heart but the chains that his body will not get rid of. This turmoil serves as a constant reminder to Robby of the potential that has been wasted as he sits alone in his cell: he could have been a success, like John, but instead, he got involved the “wrong people” and now has no way out.

                For both, worse than death is the knowledge that they could be better, but they aren’t. Robby could have been better, but he isn’t. Linda could have held on to her morals, but instead she “’sinned against God and [herself]’” (Jacobs 493) by having a child with Mr. Sands. She knows that all slaves do possess a “lamp of hope” (Jacobs 488), and she knows hers has gone out. At times, she feels that her lamp of hope has been extinguished because she is a slave, but she knows it wasn’t, and she admits this when she allows the true spirit of Harriet Jacobs break through the shield of Linda Brent in the most honest aspects of her piece, revealing that “[she] know[s she] did wrong” (Jacobs 490).

                Worse than death is not wanting to go on living for any reason, the complete lack of any desire to live, and the desire, for Linda, of the entirely unnatural want for her children to die to escape the wrath of slavery. This is, the ultimate irony: that the mothers of the slaves wish death upon their children for the sacrifice of avoiding slavery. This “peculiar sorrow” (Jacobs 468) is contrary to the morality everyone sees in life, and is symbolic of the dehumanization wreaked on the slaves of America. Linda feels that part of her problem arose because “the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible” (Jacobs 490). In “Our Time,” Wideman attributes much of Robby’s downfall to the conditions that he was subjected to as a “black boy in a white neighborhood.” These conditions of the black people being on the bottom of society, at the mercy of the “white people,” go directly back to the time of slavery—that which Linda is living through. Hence, Linda and Robby cite the same source of their similar sufferings.

Worse than death is breaking the resolve “never to be conquered” (Jacobs 471); worse than death is being “willing to be a slave” (Jacobs 477). By giving herself over to Mr. Sands, Linda has allowed herself to be conquered and assumes the meek role of the slave, submitting to the every whim of the white man, right down to adultery. Worse than death is Robby and Linda allowing their fears to “eat [them] up and then [going] out and [doing] something crazy” (Wideman 716), like stealing from one’s family or killing a man. Worse than death is the fact that there is indeed something worse than death, for life is the one thing that should take precedence over all other matters.

                In their lives which they see as dim with despair and hopelessness, Robby and Linda allow themselves to be taken over by regret and sorrow; they allow their oppressors to beat them. Robby and Linda are slaves and prisoners not because of the restrictions others have placed on them, but because of those they have placed upon themselves. As they live through their lives days at a time, they struggle with their desire to die, for they view the position they are presently in as “worse than death.” In allowing themselves to succumb to their doubts, Linda and Robby allow themselves to be slaves, and by sinking to their lowest levels, they have blocked their road of return to the lives they wish they had, and they have found what is truly “worse than death.”