Outraged or just simply justified?

In Harriet Jacobs, I feel it wasn't so much an "outraged mother" as a determined and persisitent mother. She was doing everything she could to ensure her children of the one thing she hadn't had--freedom. Jacobs certainly had every right to feel outraged given her situation of having two children who, literally, she had no rights to. I'm sure most mothers today can't imagine living every day with the fear that their child might be sold and they would never see them again. This certainly seems a justifiable reason for outrage.

Jacob's use of maternal figures seems to relate closely with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall. Ruth Hall 's distress and desparation of her situation almost seemed more real to me than Jacobs. This may simply be due to the sentimentality of her novel and using the medium of fiction, she may better have been able to convey this sentiment. Ruth Hall's descriptions and word choice made me, as a reader, feel more for her than for Jacobs. And yet, I still feel it was the idea of the mother in a situation in which she might lose her children which draws in the reader--especially female readers.

I also feel that Twain, as a non-Black writer was highly effective in portraying Jacobs' ideas about motherhood during these slave times. Twain's portrayal of Roxy, although slightly humerous at time, does confirm the desparation and unexplainable lenghths which slave mothers were driven in order to protect and provide for their children. While many find Roxy's actions deplorable and less than forgivable, they must remember that it was the institution of slavery which drove both Jacobs and Roxy to such deceitful lengths.