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2 Colored Carpenters and White Gentlemen Harriet Jacobs’s Pedagogy of Citizenship After the alarm caused by Nat Turner’s insurrection had subsided, the slaveholders came to the conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters. —Harriet Jacobs Harriet Jacobs’s narrative is a fascinating example of the coincidence of cross-racial relationships and incidents of rebellion . Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl contests the manifestations of cross-racial sexual violence that contaminate all unions, personal and national. In fact, cross-racial sexual violence in the United States served to demarcate the boundaries of the nation as white space, the cause for Jacobs’s protest. This white space emerged not only because AngloAmerican men had exclusive claims to property (both real and chattel) in the nation, but also because the mandate that slavery followed the condition of the mother served two purposes: not only were the offspring of cross-racial sexual encounters denied any inheritance from their white fathers, but those children’s status as chattels also increased the value of the white father’s property. The definition of freedom that the American Revolution generated not only made the legal and geographic contours of the nation into white space; it also indirectly justified white men’s “right” to sexual coercion and, in its insistence on the right of white men to expand their property, equated enslavement with immobility and the denial of self-sovereignty. Therefore, the white space of property and privilege that white men could claim, the place Jacobs endeavors to escape, enabled violent forms of amalgamation. This white space was literally the real estate upon which white men were entitled to use their slaves—their chattel property —to reproduce their own wealth. These privileges of nationhood, 29 Colored Carpenters and White Gentlemen which emerged from the American Revolution, shape Jacobs’s representation of Dr. Flint, who repeatedly tries to restrict her movement and contain her so he can exercise his “right” to his property—her body. Yet another form of amalgamation, and of rebellion, comes through in Jacobs’s writing. In her own role as a rebellious slave, Jacobs protests the laws of the Anglo-American nation and the conditions of the white space to which Dr. Flint confines her. She escapes the sexual violence of white space, finding room to maneuver by taking two lovers of her own choice. Although her story ends “with freedom, not in the usual way, with marriage ,” she repeatedly invokes stories of heterosexual romance to illustrate her own personal form of rebellion. Whereas the expansion of rights that constituted the American Revolution relied on the development of a sovereign—and homogenous— emergent nation that functioned through conquest and masculine power, the expansion of rights to which Jacobs aspires coincides with a concept of black nationalism that Robert Levine has identified as simultaneously transnational. Although, before her escape and for the balance of her narrative, Jacobs is confined to smaller and smaller spaces, she repeatedly envisions other spaces of freedom, from Florida to the North. Levine’s work on Douglass, Martin Delany, and Whittier teases out the complexities of black nationalism within the emigration debates that were particularly vigorous in the 1850s; in this context, the very idea of emigration had many layers. Emigrationist thought, more specifically, did not have to entail moving to Haiti or Africa; rather, it could be participation in a school of thought that challenged certain aspects of the United States—of what I would call its limits and boundaries as a white space of nationhood. Thus imagining spaces outside of her restricted location enables her to critique the United States. Keeping in mind that Jacobs began writing Incidents in the 1850s, the expansionist and emigrationist ideas of the black periodical press were available to her. Therefore, references to faraway places disrupt the white space of amalgamation that constitutes the United States. The distinctiveness of Jacobs’s more transnational family history provides a glimpse of racial cosmopolitanism that vastly improves upon a restrictive Anglo-American model of nation. On the first page of Incidents, Jacobs projects a migratory idea of freedom that is connected to a similarly provisional idea of citizenship. She introduces her grandmother through a family history of interracial love and manumission: “I had also a great treasure in my maternal grandmother, who was a remarkable woman in many respects. She was the daughter of a planter in South Carolina, who, at...

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