The slaves felt the effects in terms of suffering, but the slave owners were also affected in terms of becoming brutal and harsh themselves. Two ways that this frequently worked itself out was in physical violence toward the slave and also in sexual violence. We see that as somewhat the focus here.

She is owned by Doctor Flint (whose real name was Dr. James Norcom, Sr.), who wants to have sex with her. He wants to have some kind of affair with her, and she doesn't want to. The conflict and tension in this story is her trying to figure out how to avoid giving into him, and him trying to figure out how to coerce her into accepting his advances.

"To this I added the surname of my father, who had himself no legal right to it; for my grandfather on the paternal side was a white gentleman. What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!"

There was frequent liaisons especially between the white men and the black women because that was the way that power flowed. As a result, there was a lot of mixing of the races. Now the south was being led into anti-miscegenation. Have you heard that term before? What were the anti-miscegenation laws? It was basically laws that white people and black people could get married. These laws came about in the 1960s. It became legal to marry someone of the opposite sex whatever race that they belong to. They no longer had to be your cousin!

If you get married in Mississippi and move to California, are you still cousins? She points back to the old fact that this has been going on for a long time. This was one of the elements of abuse in the system, that this is a system where you do not have the right to say no.

She hid away and was bitten by insects all the time, but nevertheless that was better than the alternative when she finally bled. She went off to New York, and Mrs. Bruce pays for her freedom. Flint is dead and has left a distressed family.
 

"I remembered how you defrauded my grandmother of the hard earnings she had loaned; how he had tried to cheat her out of the freedom her mistress had promised her, and how he had persecuted her children; and I thought to myself that she was a better Christian than I was, if she could entirely forgive him. I cannot say, with truth, that the news of my old master's death softened my feelings toward him. There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury. The man was odious to me while he lived and his memory is odious now."

She didn't like him when he was alive, and she doesn't like him any better now that he's dead. Finally, Mrs. Bruce works out a deal where she buys Harriet Jacobs and then sets her free. What was the reaction of Harriet Jacobs to that? She appreciated the fact that she was officially free, but she resented the fact that the freedom came through a bill of sale which signifies that she was property. From now on, she will be free and cannot be taken back south to be a slave. Of course, whenever you went in the United States, technically you were liable to be taken back. A runaway slave that wanted to remain free would have to get to Canada if they wanted to be free and not have to worry about being brought back.