Washington vs Jacobs: Censorship and Differing Narratives

 While Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are both autobiographies that talk about their experiences with slavery and the impact that slavery left behind on them, they differ in meaningful ways. Both Washington and Jacobs diminish their experiences with being a slave, but they also had very different experiences. Washington was not in slavery for much of his life, as the civil war freed him early on, while Jacobs was a slave in the south for many years, and when her book was published, slavery had yet to be abolished.

Aside from the timeline differing, Harriet Jacobs experienced a much different treatment from her master on the account of her being a girl in slavery. Washington’s accounts do not discuss any sort of sexual interest or advances made by any of the white people on his plantation, while in Jacobs’ story, this plays a major role. Since the attention from her master led to her kids and eventual escape from slavery into the North, the discussion of sexual abuse is a central theme in Jacobs’ story. She also chooses to describe this experience as a slave rather than the labor and abuses she likely dealt with under Mister Flint. This was likely because of her intended audience being Northern white women, who might sympathize and relate with her sexual trauma more. Washington was more descriptive in what kind of labor he was made to do as a slave, as well as his living conditions, as he likely didn’t experience this kind of harassment. 

However, both Jacobs and Washington hid or avoided some of their experiences as slaves in the south in order to make their book more palatable for their white audiences. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs presents mistakes and things that she believes will make her Northern white audience condemn her with heavy censoring and profuse apologies and explanations. For example, when Jacobs has gotten pregnant in order to avoid the attention of Mr. Flint, she spends 2 pages skirting around the topic and providing explanations to the reader as to why she did what she did. Similarly, in Up from Slavery, Washington declares that, “The most trying ordeal that I was forced to endure as a slave boy, however, was the wearing of a flax shirt,” (Washington, 7). I think that this is highly debatable, and that, while wearing a flax shirt was probably extremely uncomfortable, it was probably not the worst of what he had to deal with while in slavery. In both of these situations, Washington and Jacobs both seem very hesitant of offending their white audiences, choosing to downplay their situation or explain their choices and plead forgiveness to the reader. 

Both examples of Black autobiography written by Jacobs and Washington are important to understanding what happened to slaves during slavery, as well as how the public would have taken such accounts at the time. Based on the audience they are trying to reach and the motivations and the stories they are trying to tell. Both stories have been edited to reflect the audience’s perspective which helps us to understand what was considered “acceptable” in the public eye at the time. Their differences and similarities within their autobiographies help us to understand more about Black literature in the mid 1800’s and early 1900’s, as well as the messages conveyed through the writers’ choices and framing.