"I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening": writing and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.(Critical essay)

At a point near the center of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent reports that she has occupied her self-designated "Loophole of Retreat," and sits nearly suffocating in the dark hideaway. She survives in her garret by crawling, crouching, or reclining, unable to stand up, relating that, "the air was stifling; the darkness total ... there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep." (1) The only palpable comfort upon first occupying the loophole comes in the form of having the good luck to find a gimlet, a sharp tool with which she can pierce the wall facing toward the direction of her children's voices. Hoping that she will be able to watch her children play through the small puncture-hole she makes, she instead is overcome with dread when the first person she sees in the street is Dr. Flint. Jacobs describes the deflated hopes of a slave mother, wishing from the space of her immurement to catch sight of her children but seeing instead her persecutor and would-be seducer. The scene proves perspicacious given that the small view offered her is caused by the tool's function of piercing. My purview here is to show how the gimlet punch marks the material and symbolic initiation of a specific act of writing--that is, the act of writing that gears its purpose powerfully toward the reader. During her seven years in hiding, Linda, partly because of the perspective she creates by way of punching a gimlet hole, begins writing and strategizing her writing toward social and political aims. In other words, she begins to write for reasons of abolition and liberation for herself, her family, and her community.

It has become a commonplace in the criticism of Jacobs's Incidents to assert that the text offers an account of the condition of slavery that counters or complements Frederick Douglass's Narrative. (2) One major difference between the two writers is found in the way each develops the critically heralded scenes of learning to read and write. I concentrate here on scenes of writing: for Douglass, of course, the scene of writing takes on enormous import as he develops into a male adult attempting to gain his freedom, though he learns to write surreptitiously, while Linda learns to write overtly, taught early in life by her white mistress. For Linda, learning to write might afford more options in her maneuvering through the white network of power plays, but at the same time, problematically, it renders her more susceptible to Dr. Flint's harassment and pursuit. Linda Brent must confront progressively throughout the story the execrable slaveholder and personal vilifier, Dr. Flint, specifically in tandem with the act of writing. In his early attentions to her, Dr. Flint writes more than he speaks, and Linda must, additionally, beware the jealousy that might result if he finds her "exchang[ing] letters with another man" (40). In fact, her resistance to Flint must occur despite her knowledge of writing, rather than because of it. Linda reports that "I could write, though he had failed to make me read his letters" (40). Hence, her early knowledge of writing arguably brings disadvantages that counter, to some extent, the advantages that she gleans from her skill. After the act of the gimlet punch, however, her knowledge of writing enables her to participate more fully in the causes of liberation.

As a slave, she owns--because of her ability to write--a weapon used by the slave culture to maintain oppression. As with any dangerous weapon, it can manifest as a further instrument of her oppression or, with careful signifying, as a way to turn dominance against itself. It is not the scene of learning to write initially but the scene in which Linda makes use of writing as an instrument of agency and power toward liberation that I target as the quintessential victory in Incidents. The problem of claiming one's own writing is the major obstacle Linda overcomes, and in so overcoming it she claims and authorizes herself, using her writing for the good of freedom. The most direct concern of this essay is to show how Linda can figure the appropriation of signification to herself, primarily through the scene of punching a gimlet hole. This punching of the hole marks the inception of this process, which thenceforward develops through an epistolary exchange which maximizes her newfound sense of power over Dr. Flint. After underscoring the gimlet scene, I extend my discussion to detail her growing ability to manipulate Flint by controlling the letters she writes to him. (3) Eventually, as a result of the symbolic gimlet punch and the subsequent praxis involved in writing the letters, she gains a voice so powerful that she can speak not only for herself but for her family and community as a whole, developing a rhetoric linked with community needs, in the first-person plural voice that argues with ineluctable persuasion toward liberty and abolition.

Linda Brent enters into a white patriarchal system of signification specific to the institution of slavery, full of disparities and contradictions. Black writers experience a necessarily vexed and powerful relationship with the signifier, as Henry Louis Gates describes in his discussion of Ishmael Reed: Gates discerns the circumstance of the African American writer who involves himself or herself in "the process of willing-into-being a rhetorical structure, a literary language, replete with its own figures and tropes, but one that allows the black writer to posit a structure of feeling that simultaneously critiques both the metaphysical presuppositions inherent in Western ideas and forms of writing and the metaphorical system in which the 'blackness' of the writer and his experience have been valorized as a 'natural' absence" (Blackness, 297). Harriet Jacobs, through the character of Linda, must vector the literary language that critiques the supposed "natural" absence of blackness, even as she must locate the text that situates her story from her own point of view. Jacobs shows her protagonist coming to terms--and largely on her own terms--with the writtenness of her art as she becomes progressively the instigator of letter exchanges later in the narrative.

An early instance of the vexed side of the relationship with language occurs when Linda tries to determine how to name her daughter, and her daughter's white father, Mr. Sands, offers his name, but Linda declines for fear of Dr. Flint's retribution. Linda finally decides to accept the last name of her father's former mistress, which she adds to the surname of her father, who had been named after his (white) father. (4) "I loved my father," she says, "but it mortified me to be obliged to bestow his name on my children" (78). The circumstances presented here--even the simple fact that one might be faced with having to choose one's last name--demonstrate the difficulty of establishing authorization for one's own name if one is a slave, within dominating patriarchal language.

Such inequalities in the signifier-to-signified correspondence are engraved into law by slaveholding culture, so as to try to ensure against debacle, but in the antebellum South the discrepancies in language systems eventually resulted in chaos. Because of the engraving of inequities, the slave finds herself, of course, on the outside of litigation and economics systems, in an adversarial relationship with legal and financial significations that perpetuate flagrant imprecision and lassitude in the terms of language. The complications of negating the signifying relationship mount with the complications of interactions, and showing such complications is a forte of Jacobs, who suits her tone, as do many black writers, to exposing the inequities of a signifying economy. When I speak of the inequities of the discourse of slaveholding culture, I refer to entrenched power positionings in antebellum nineteenth-century society that have oppressed slaves. The "signifyin'" that slaves, including Jacobs, use deflects the inequities by reforming power positionings through language.

Jacobs recounts a particularly complicated situation in which her grandmother's mistress borrows three hundred dollars from her grandmother. When her mistress dies, the still unrepaid money is not returned by the executor, Dr. Flint, because "he said the estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with that money" (11). Several levels of disrupted signification operate in the economic and legal dealings described by Jacobs. First, money is borrowed from "property," an impossibility in terms, and then the object (candelabra) cannot equal its worth (three hundred dollars) because the estate has dissolved. In addition, a promise--a specialized form of signification, in which a present signifier attaches to a future signified--had been made by the mistress to the grandmother, and that form is disrupted, too, at least by the executor Flint, who decides to sell Aunt Marthy. In this case, though, the violence done to the signifying relationship proves too extreme even for others of the slaveholding community. When Aunt Marthy is put up on the auction block, Edenton rises up, and through a series of inactions and illiteracies, restores, partially, the signifying ...