The Credibility of Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs establishes her credibility by being a slave. She sees many torturous acts inflicted on her fellow slaves and speaks of them in the book “Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl”. A part from the book that epitomizes the value of a slave’s life is the end of chapter twenty, page 95. “As the light increased, I saw snake after snake crawling round us. I had been accustomed to the sight of snakes all my life, but these were larger than any I had ever seen…As evening approached, the number of snakes increased so much that we were continually obliged to thrash them with sticks to keep them from crawling over us.” This event doesn’t sound like anything a human being would ever go through. Its hard to pinpoint one event from the book and say it makes Jacobs credible. Too many haunting stories from the book are told with such descriptive language how can one not believe her? One cannot even begin to understand the horrors of a man eaten by rats before he was dead, a woman drowning herself to escape her master, and Jacobs living in a coffin-like “garret” for seven years. I do not doubt Jacobs credibility nor any of her personal narrative accounts of her fellow slaves lives.