Blog #6

While reading Jacob’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and Child’s “The Quadroons” this issues that the characters faced due to their race and culture really stood out to me.  In the story “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” Linda is caught in between the culture of slaves and of the African Americans that were free in the South.  She had fallen in love with a free African American and wanted to be married to him.  Although there were no laws against free African Americans marrying one another, she as a slave had no rights to be married unless their owners gave her permission.  Unfortunately for Linda, she was scolded and even “struck” for asking permission to be married to the man she loved.  Although free African Americans did not have many rights, they still had the right to love as they wanted.  Linda asks “why does the slave ever love? (p.772)” and then quotes Dr. Flint when he said “If you must have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves (p. 773)” allowing us to see that in the slaves culture they weren’t even allowed to love or marry who they wanted.

In “The Quadroons” I noticed the conflict between Xarifa and the society that she lived in.  Child’s writes that during “summer walks with her beautiful mother, her young cheek often mantled at the rude gaze of the young men, and her dark eye flashed fire, when some contemptuous epithet met her ear, as white ladies passed them by, in scornful pride and ill-concealed envy (120)”.   Child’s illustrates a young girl growing up in a home filled with love and that this little girl’s safe world was broken apart after being insulted in public.  Society didn’t accept Xarifa for the person she was, maybe it was because she was so beautiful or maybe it was because she was the child of a white southern man and an African American woman, but that day she experienced judgment and hatred towards her, which in turn created conflict between her and society.