Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 1

That the book is nonfiction is very important to completely convey the point Harriet Jacobs was making. Were it fiction, the reader could read it and say, "Oh, that's horrible," but have a clear conscience knowing that the atrocities happened only to the character, not a real person. As a true personal narrative, the reader loses the comfortable cushion of an imaginary world. He or she must face that a real person is telling them what happened. It also assigns a face to the occurrences in the book. Today, the average person can look back at the antebellum south and see something bad happening to a large, nameless mass. Individualizing a crime allows it to dig into those not directly involved and feel sympathy. The personal connection humanizes those who would otherwise be lost in a seemingly distant system.

Using the original language of Harriet Jacobs is extremely important. The reader can't hide behind frilled-up words and stories and still feel that jab needed to really induce sympathy. To clean it up would make milder the evils of slavery, when the purpose of the narrative was to expose them. There is also another important aspect of not changing Jacobs's words. Gloria Anzaldua wrote that you must use your native tongue to tell your stories in How to Tame a Wild Tongue because "[L]anguage is bound up inextricably with ethnic personal identity." Changing Jacobs's words would only rub out some of her personal identity, which is so crucial to a personal narrative.