If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

Death is better than slavery.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
Harriet Ann Jacobs