Incidents Blog Post 2

In this blog post I am going to talk about the laws/rules of the time period Harriet Jacobs lived in. Many of the laws mentioned in the book appeared very bizarre to me. Many of those laws were directed towards slavery and the responsibilities of slaves. The law which really struck me was the law that Jacobs states in the following quote: "She had forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the father of her child."(Jacobs 12) The law is very strange to me living in the time period we're in. We now have certain rights which cannot be taken away from us by the government or anyone else. One of these rights is the freedom of speech; which is exactly the one that is violated in the law stated by Jacobs. This law was put in place to stop slaves (specially women) from speaking of their master's( the men) injustice. Overall, this specific law gave white men no fear of having their way with their slaves; knowing that the poor victim could not speak about the act of injustice.