Harriet Ann Jacobs Essay Example for Free

Harriet Ann Jacobs Essay In the autobiography, â€Å"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl†, it tells the story of a female slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs. Losing her mother and father at such a young age, she experienced firsthand the account of a slave life. She deliberates in great detail the humiliation, sacrifice, and struggle specific to female slaves of the late nineteenth century. Though she understood the risks involved in publishing an account of her life, she moved forward with the idea and published her story under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina to Delilah and Elijah. While growing up she enjoyed a relatively cheerful life until she was six years old when her parents died. After the death of her parents, Harriet and her younger brother John were left to be raised by their grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Molly was an older woman who was well respected in the slave community, as well as by the slave owners. She was never mistreated, and she frequently baked goods for the people in her community. Harriet Jacobs gained the knowledge for all of her educational essentials from her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow. She taught Harriet how to read, write, and sew which gave her advantage over the rest of the slaves. It also would attract some unwanted attention. Margaret would later on will Harriet to her twelve year old niece whose father would subject Harriet to aggressive and unrelenting sexual harassment. Dr. Flint sexually harassed and physically abused the teenaged Harriet for as long as she was a servant in his household. Afraid that one day Dr. Flint would make his antics reality, she began to have an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Tredwell, whom she later on beared two children for. Instead of discouraging Flint, she enraged him. He then sent Harriet away to a life of hard labor on a plantation he owned, threatening to break in her young children as field hands, seeing that they legally belonged to him. She soon ran away from the plantation and spent seven years hiding in a tiny attic crawl space in her grandmother’s house. During those seven years she put to use the skills that her first mistress had taught her, and watched over her children through a small chink in the roof. Being cramped in the attic for so long, left her permanently physically disabled. In 1842, Harriet was finally able to escape to the north, and found work as a nanny in the household of a prominent abolitionist writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis. She later on is reunited with her children in New York, and farther down the line her employer purchases her freedom from Dr. Flint. While reading this autobiography you acquire a feeling that is very unusual. Most slaves that you hear about usually have harsh lives and are extremely unhappy, but in this particular case it was the complete opposite. Harriet’s life wasn’t hard not one bit. She was never mistreated because her father’s mistress found her to be very appealing, and she didn’t have to do any hard labor. But, she also wasn’t allowed her freedom which is what she anxiously longed for. That particular entity is what places everything into perspective. At the end of the day whether she liked it or not, she was still a slave. She could not walk away from her situation, she could not undertake everything that she wanted to do, and she definitely could not enjoy her life to the fullest because she belonged to someone, and that someone was a jealous, aggressive man named Dr. Flint. Harriet Jacobs insisted on telling her story honestly and completely, determined to make white Americans aware of the sexual victimization that slave women commonly faced and to dramatize the fact that they often had no choice but to surrender their virtue. Jacobs knew that her contemporaries would see her not as a virtuous woman but as a fallen one, yet she published the story anyway. She wanted to bring light to a situation that slave women faced every day. She was an incredibly strong woman for doing so, and by directly confronting the cruel realities that plagued African American women in the late nineteenth century, Harriet’s work occupies a significant place in African American literary tradition.

Online School vs. Public School Essay

Sloan Consortium stated that, â€Å"More than one million students attended classes via the Internet in 2008. Of those million, around 200,000 were enrolled in full-time virtual schools, meaning they attend all of their classes online.† I have been doing Online Schooling for two years but before that I went to public school. Online schooling is a better choice than public schooling because you have more control, there is no drama, and you have more free time. I prefer online homeschooling because I can control my pace. I get to decide when I want to work and I don’t have to study all day, everyday like I normally would. The course schedule is also up to me; courses can be done one at a time or in groups. During my first year at an online school I did five courses at one time. It’s now my second year and I am doing one course at a time, which I definitely prefer. At Public schools, course schedules are picked for me and I would have no control. You also can’t control what is going on in your school environment. One of the best things about online school is that there is never any drama. I really hate gossiping, which is a big problem at public schools. Because I only interact with other kids from my school by way of the internet there is no pettiness between us. Kids my age fight over friends and boyfriends or girlfriends. There’s nothing to fight about when you live as far away from each other as we do. At normal schools though, you see everyone everyday. When your constantly with the same group of people, someone’s feelings are always getting hurt and there is constant arguments. Many of situations involve your â€Å"friends†. If your friends with someone you can’t be friends with anyone they don’t like, which can get very complicated. 3 When doing school online, you have much more free time. If I stay caught up, I’m able to do things after school and on the weekends. When I was in public school, I had far too much homework to do anything. Now I’m able to take a few days off for vacation or because I’m sick and not have to worry about falling far behind. While at public school all of my time was filled by homework, but now I’m able to spend hours after school with my horse or just relaxing. Some of my family has expressed concern about me not  interacting with children my age because I don’t go to public school. Because of online schooling, I’m able to hang out with my friends at our barn. Before I switched I never saw any of my friends outside of school because I never had the time. Online schooling is a much better choice than public schooling. The benefits of online school far outweigh those of public schooling. With Online schooling you have so many more choices, everything is up to you! There are many different schooling choices but online schooling has made my life easier and stress free. I definitely suggest that you look into online schooling as an alternative to public school. It may not be right for everyone, but it might be right for you.

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